another dismal weekend in more ways than one

As predicted, as expected, the weekend was cold and wet on Saturday and just plain cold on Sunday, overcast both days. You know, the kind of days when you stay in warm and comfy with a good book or catching up on whatever TV series you are watching with a hot beverage. And so people did. Of course, our attendance is always low, those who come out usually come on the first weekend. A few sales were made though not by us. I thought we had two good possibles, the husband of each couple was willing if they had gotten even a little encouragement from their wives, which they did not get.

We used to get big crowds but now attendance is one of our big problems for several reasons. For one, the glass blowing studio is in an inner city neighborhood that has become gentrified over the years and so there is almost no street parking and the parking area for the studio is fairly small. Another problem is that as a small group of artists, we don't have an advertising budget and so we send out notices to our personal mailing lists or create a FB page or put notices up in things that don't have a fee. So far, none of the people on my admittedly very small email list have shown up. Another problem is that over the years more and more events began happening on every weekend in December from neighborhood events to a large art community that has grown up in an old warehouse district (and not that far from us) that draws a huge crowd as well as many smaller art/craft open houses and shows which was not the case when we first started doing this. Add to that that our glassblower friends are no longer active in the larger art and gallery community and so our visibility has shrunk to almost zero.

One of our participants puts on an art/craft show/sale on the second Saturday so I went over to check it out and am planning to participate next year (we'll do both if our friends are up for another go at it next year, me in one place, Marc in the other). They had more traffic but the price point of the goods on offer was lower so I'll have to do some thinking about what I can produce that might actually get bought (like note cards printed with my little drawings for one). I have some ideas and some plans for this next year. Now that we officially retired last year around this time and the house repairs/remodels were finally finished last October, I plan to build up an inventory, approach one or two galleries, rejoin the Glass Art Society, and work on increasing my visibility as well as playing with this new (for me) technique and doing more little drawings. I have to be careful though and remember why I make this stuff in the first place. The last time I tried to be economically viable it just led to unhappiness.

The question I got the most over the last two weekends...is this glass?...mostly referring to the feathers on sand pieces.

Here's a pic of our display (bigger version if you click on it).

We have one more weekend adding the Handweavers Association. The wood turner and the ceramicist set up last Sunday morning after doing the Saturday market that our other participant puts on. The jeweler did not since he sold all but 5 pieces at the same show. We are hoping that the handweavers will bring in a new crowd. I'm not expecting any sales this next weekend either but that's OK. I got to spend time with friends that I only see once a year since we moved out of the city.