what I'm doing this week

Every year we have participated in this open house and it has been very many, I have arrived for set-up with no idea of how I wanted to set things up. I have my shelving units and I get to use one of the tables but other than that I am at a loss as to how to best set it up and what to put where and I am indecisive, probably leaning on the others too much, and it takes me far too long.

I'm not going to do that this year. This year I'm setting it all up in advance in the gutted part of the shop. Basically I'll set it up like it was last year, that worked really well I think, but this year I'm going to know before I get there how I want the stands set up...where exactly the shelves will be and what I am going to put on them and on the board for the hanging pieces and what goes on the table and where. 

I'm much further along than this picture suggests

Unfortunately, I don't have the little 'two drawer and a cubby' cabinet anymore it being a victim of the flooded house. Last year was the first time to use that and it was so convenient, so of course... Now I just have to dig around in all the boxes here at the house and over at the shop to find the stuff that was in those drawers and cubby.

We met our friends Dick and Kathy, at whose glass blowing studio the open house is at, when they came by to visit our studio one day. They had retired and decided they wanted to take up glass blowing and were visiting the different glass artists' studios.

I used to tell people that Dick and Kathy dragged us kicking and screaming out of our cave and into the light. It was their support and friendship to a certain degree, along with our local gallery, that started getting our pate de verre work noticed. They weren't just some glassblowers trying to get it out there, Dick, an ex-neurosurgeon and Kathy, his ex-surgical assistant, were big supporters of the art community, knew the gallery owners and artists and entertained and put up visiting artists at their home and have an amazing art collection and not just glass. I say dragged us out of our cave because we basically shunned the art community, busy running our etched glass studio and raising our kids, we didn't go to openings or galleries in general, didn't really know any other artists beyond a handful of other etched or stained glass artists. A few years after they started their studio, they invited a handful of local glass artists to set up with them for their annual open house. During our SOFA/delusions of grandeur years, we didn't participate because everything we had was at one gallery or another. But then the economy crashed in '08.

The first 5 or 6 years we got pretty good crowds. Dick and Kathy were still very active in the art scene and what we all were doing was pretty new and unique and we were basically the only event that weekend. As the years have passed more and more events have been scheduled for the same weekend and Dick and Kathy became less active in the art world as other parts of life needed tending to. The crowds have diminished over the years and we've added a second weekend with other craft mediums, not just glass, to try and draw in a more diverse crowd. Sometimes we, personally, sell stuff and sometimes we don't which is OK. It's about selling some stuff, but it's also about spending time with friends we don't see very often now that we moved out of the city and if it weren't for that, I might have passed on participating this year even though we committed ourselves before the house flooded.