over for another year

We sold nothing but snowflakes after the first two days. I'm disappointed that none of the feathers sold even though they got a lot of attention. I surely thought I would sell one or two. No matter, this was still our best open house ever if not in number of items sold, in total sales amount due to the sale of the heron box whose proper title is River Stories: The Blue Heron and in fact I still have to print out the little story and mount it and send it to the collector who bought it.

These open house weekends have periods when there are a decent amount of people coming in interspersed with periods where no one is there. Our friend Gene, the fused and stained glass artist, brought two silly card games...Spot-it and Moose in the House...which we would play during the slow periods. Late in the afternoon last Saturday Gene and Marc and I were playing Spot-it, a deck of round cards with pictures in which every card has one match to every other card. 

There are several ways you can play with these cards but we mostly played the version where each player starts with one card with the goal being to end up with the least amount of cards in your stack. The rest of the cards are in a stack and players call out a match when they see it and snatch the top card up and put it on the appropriate opposing player's stack. Anyway, it's fast and it's silly and competitive and Gene and I at least were laughing so much, each of us determined to beat the other, and so loud during this one game (I won) and when we finished and looked up everyone else had gathered around to see what all the unrestrained laughter was about.

On Sunday friends Bill and Larry came by and Larry told us a story we had not heard before. Bill and Larry were my very first commission job, a window with a victorian style mandala straight out of one of the Dover design books when I was just starting out with my etched glass business after my divorce from the rat bastard and I had moved back in with my parents, before even I met Marc. At this time in their lives my parents were upper middle class and had built a Mexican villa type house after they sold the house us kids grew up in, a three sided stucco around a courtyard in the back and wrought iron gates across the front of the small entry/front door. The front door opened onto a large dining room with the stairs to the second floor bedrooms and activity room, my dad's study/library and kitchen and garage in the left wing and the living room and master suite in the right wing of the house, Saltillo tile floors and oriental rugs.

I had acquired a small air compressor and a gravity feed sand pot and I would do the blasting in the yard off the garage. I had done some simple little surface etchings and framed them for hanging in a window and I was at a small art and craft show in Galveston which is where they saw me. I had just turned 25 in the spring (so this would have been 1975) and their window was fairly large and odd shaped and so they had to get the glass cut and bring it to me to etch (I assume they came and got it and had it installed after I was done because I had no way to get it back to them in Galveston where they lived). So Larry is telling me the story of how we met the way they remember it...here was this young girl barefoot with a rope for a belt (I think it was actually a narrow rainbow striped sash on my bell bottoms being the hippie chick I was but yeah I was probably barefoot but a rope is how they remember it) trying to make a few bucks and maybe even homeless (an image of the poor little match girl comes to mind) so they commissioned me to do this window for them. Larry says they were a little surprised when they turned into this upscale neighborhood with big houses on big lots to bring me the glass and when they drove up to my parent's house they were a little flummoxed thinking I must be the daughter of one of the servants or something and should they go around to the back of the house to knock but the gate to the back was closed so the front door was the only option. So they rang the bell and this elegant woman wearing a long pink chiffon and feathery peignoir answered and they very timidly asked for me. Oh, that's my daughter, she says, she's gone to the grocery store but will be right back, and she invited them in to wait in my dad's study. They were so astounded, he said, their eyes were like saucers. I arrived soon after and we conducted our business and they left and as life would have it our paths continued to cross and we have become friends even though we don't see them very often but this was the first time they have told me the story of how we met from their perspective.

Of course, Larry told it a lot better and a lot funnier. They moved to Houston at some point and through the years Larry tried his hand at painting but abandoned it when he couldn't get any commercial success and Bill is an artist in his own right and still creates the most gorgeous delicate metalwork sculptures though he doesn't have any representation currently. He's supposed to send me some images and when he does I'll post them.

Anyway here are the other artists sans one who only did the first weekend and I didn't take pictures til this last weekend.

Kathy Poeppel and Dick Moiel, blown glass and our hosts:

Gene Hester, fused glass:

Bob Straight, fused glass, wood turning, metalwork:

Eric DePan, blown glass:

Liz Conces, fused glass:

V. Chin, ceramics:

Leslie Ravey, wood and leather work:

    

Handweavers of Houston, woven and dyed fabric:

and of course, us, cast glass: