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:
