To Market, to Market

A two week summary...

Came down to Market on May 13 to find all kinds of arcane symbols on the sidewalk. Apparently, the city is finally going to start their Park Blocks renovation. They've been promising (threatening?) for a couple of years now, had actually said they'd do the work in March, while were closed, but apparently couldn't line up a contractor. So now they're planning for the end of July. I'll miss at least one of the weekends, as I'll be at Anacortes the first weekend of August, but I'll definitely be living in a construction zone for a bit. My booth is the square immediately to the right of the manhole cover, so is outside the affected perimeter, but it's still gonna be a bother, as people won't be able to access me from the Oak Street side. Could be worse; Danny's booth is going to be torn up entirely, and I think Brandy will be affected too. Not entirely sure what they're doing, taking out the curbs and fancying up the intersections. Time will tell what effect it will have.

I always start my Saturday with an Instagram post; this week, I featured all the mother and child patterns, of which there are surprisingly many: hen and chicks, mama and baby rabbit, robin and nestlings, doe and fawn. Only the doe and fawn casserole sold, as did the replacement bear I set out.

Had a bunch of kids with dads and grandparents, looking for Mothers Day presents, including my first sale of the day, a tiger tall mug to a sweet little girl.

Had a nice visit from a young woman from Utah. Erin had just finished her BFA in Ceramics, came across my work online and emailed to ask if I'd be at Market when she was in town. As it happened, I was back from Wisconsin in time, we had a good chat, and I wound up shipping a casserole back to Logan for her.

Was all-in-all, an okay day, made $600 in sales. A little on the warm side, though we still have good shade and a nice breeze under our magnolia tree.

Mothers Day Sunday, Maude Kerns Art Center had an art event, including an open house at Club Mud. I took down a few boxes of pots, and volunteered my Square and phone for check-out, so spent the day chatting with browsers and the other potters there to work or demo. It was brutally hot outside, so there wasn't a lot of traffic either in the Art Center itself or in our studio. I stepped over to Maude's in mid-afternoon to see who was there, got a hug and a nice talk with cartoonist Jan Eliot, spent some time talking shop with paper clay artist Rogene Manas, which ended with her giving me a sample of paper clay, and me bringing her a spare hand-made paintbrush.

Best of all, I picked up this treasure in the back gallery, a little pastel drawing of a bunny on corrugated cardboard that used the structure of the board as part of the image. Sharon Kaplan is the artist, and she came up to the refreshments table to find me proudly showing it off to everyone I knew, and a few total strangers. Hey, we gotta help promote each other's work, right?

Weather was much friendlier this last Saturday, and Market was fairly busy. Sold a Tyrannosaur bank to a woman who's starring in Very Little Theatre's production of Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, which apparently had a T. Rex and a Woolly Mammoth on stage in the first act? Had a nice chat with a mother, son and daughter-in-law from Minnesota, which resulted in my reverting to my native accent for the rest of the day, reinforced by a family from Racine a little later. The Minnesota crew bought some of my most obscure tall mug patterns: walrus, platypus and praying mantis; Wisconsin, not so much.

Sold not one, but two French Butter Dishes late in the afternoon. They seem to come in and out of fashion; the one customer had looked for them all over Market, and I was the only one who had them. She'd no sooner left with hers than another customer came up and bought the replacement.

Best moment of the day was after closing. I was already packing up when a family stopped by. Normally, I'd be grumpy at this point, but I was packing the back shelves, so they weren't in my way, and they were kinda adorable. Asian of some flavor, Dad with a tiny black bristle-haired baby strapped to his chest, Mom with older brother, maybe 4?, showing him the animals. I took down the elephant bank so he could stick his finger in the trunk--too shy, Dad had to, and I did my elephant impression--so then he had to as well. Mom tried to interest him in the other banks, but he kept coming back to the elephant. Eventually, she bought a Siamese catfood dish for herself--they'd broken one last week--and the elephant bank for him. They'd not known about Market, had just happened across it, were very impressed. I asked what language they'd been speaking while looking at the work, and Dad replied, Burmese.

So cool.

Speaking of construction zones

We've been living in one for a week now, getting new siding on our house. They dropped supplies last Monday, began tearing off the old shingles Wednesday. I've been parking the van at the Lutheran Church lot up the street (with their permission), the car in the neighbor's drive.

Tear down went fairly smoothly, very little dry rot to fix. I had to dash around the inside a couple of times, rescuing artwork and pots before they vibrated off their hooks or shelves, and I did lose a one-inch kiln post that fell off the shelf and broke, but otherwise all survived. The phone went out briefly on Thursday; turned out hammering in the shingle nails vibrated the power block out of its outlet. Similar problem yesterday, when the microwave and freezer failed. The Ground Fault Interrupter plug on the same circuit the bathroom kept popping, and junior installer, working the weekend, assumed he'd hit it with a nail. He took down some siding, tore open the wall and found the wire, but not the damage. He disconnected the plug, which made the microwave and work again. Senior installer, who did electrical work in the air force, brought in his kit and eventually determined that the ground wire had worked loose of the socket. Vibration again.

Some progress pictures:



It's starting to come together.