Silverton day 2: Tasking

[offcntr]

Linda the quilter next booth down from me has brought her spinning wheel to the show. Lindsay, a garden artist across the the way has brought an angle shears. Between customers--and she has many--she's cutting out flower petals and leaves from copper sheet. I'm a little envious, but not a lot.

While it would be nice to accomplish something during the slow bits of the fair, I know I'd do terribly. Frankly, I don't multitask well. I'd either never get anything done, or get so wrapped up in my work that I'd completely miss any customers that walk in. That's also why I daren't read at shows: I get so focused on the book that you could dismantle my booth around me and I wouldn't even notice.

So I people watch, play with the bears, make mental notes (or paper notes. As has already been established, my memory isn't a reliable thing) of upcoming projects, consider changes to my booth display. This afternoon, I think I've got a solution to my grid panel/plate display wind wobble problem. I've have to try it out next month at Corvallis Fall Festival.

Half an hour before closing, I'm watching volunteers take down the electrical cable from where it's secured 20 feet up a big fir trunk. As is traditional, the one at the top of the ladder is the youngest member of the crew, barely in his teens, and I flash back to a Best of the Northwest Spring show, in an old airplane hangar at Magnuson Park in Seattle.

We'd had a heavy rainstorm the night of load-in, and came in the next morning to discover that the roof had sprung some new leaks (one of them directly over the fiber art booth next door). Fearless teenage boys patrolled the aisles on a fully extended scissor lift, suspending chutes of plastic drop cloth high above the booths, catching and diverting the leaks into a complex hanging aqueduct system that eventually dumped the rain over a back corner floor drain. My heart was in my mouth the entire time, but they threaded the aisles perfectly, didn't bump a single display.

Weather continues gorgeous, and we see a lot of folks in Sunday clothes. Sales are a little over half of yesterday, though, so this looks like my lowest numbers so far this summer. Still, it's a lovely site, a well-run sale, and they treat the vendors very well. Jury permitting, I'll be back next year.