Another Day, Another Festival

I am getting ready to drive South, down to Manchester, Vermont for the Southern Vermont Art and Craft Festival this weekend. Tomorrow is setup day, the festival opens Friday. See you there?!


Sometimes little things make me feel quite clever, and I would like to share this one with you. Several weeks ago I had a hankering for waffles. I think those berries brought it on. In a handy moment, I made an extra large batch and stuck the extras in the freezer. Now I can just pop a few in the toaster and violà! Breakfast in a flash!


I do realize that other people thought of this way ahead of me. But my own waffles are so much tastier, and quite probably healthier. So I do feel clever.

#200

Sign seen on my drive home from Syracuse this past weekend:


A message I fully support. Now if only I could remember to make it over to the farmer's market...!

New Taste of Stowe - Part II

I made it to the field about 10am on Thursday, in time for the exhibitor check in. It was really great to finally meet in person and put faces to all those names I have been seeing over the past several months at this job. Not so great were the heavy rainclouds that hung persistently about and periodically dropped buckets of rain on our heads and on the festival field and all the gravel (subsequently mud) roads throughout. It was a fairly dismal day, made exciting by events but with an ever-present fear that this might just be the weekend's forecast.




Imagine our feelings of relief when 6am the following morning brought bright blue skys and mountains glistening from the overnight thunderstorm. Friday was a gorgeous day. We finished the set up and the public began to arrive as soon as the gates were open. It was not a mad crowd, that would have been an unusual - although certainly acceptable - turn of events for a Friday morning. But it was satisfactory. This was our first festival of the season, but some of the exhibitors reported that at other festivals, attendance has been down by some 20-50%. We had significantly better results than those, but the current economic situation was apparent. Interesting how that works.


I spent most of Friday touring the tents, meeting and chatting with exhibitors. There are some really wonderful people who attend this show - I am looking forward to seeing several of them again in Manchester, VT next weekend!



Saturday, I had to make a trip to Syracuse, New York to visit another festival - it was a big weekend!

New Taste of Stowe Arts Festival!

This weekend all the work of the last seven months starts to pay off - our first Art Festival of the Season! If you are local, please do come by, there are some really amazing artists and artisans selling their work, and the food is going to be simply incredible. The show is in Stowe, Vermont, a top-quality resort town for those unfamiliar with the area, and several of said resorts will be attending the show, offering spa treatments and gourmet menu samples. If you are in the area, you can visit craftproducers.com for details.

We are so hoping for these crazy thunderstorms to pass on by!

'Round and About

I saw this in the park a couple days ago and it made me smile.

Best wishes for the weekend!

A Playful Pup

Acrylic on 2x2" stretched canvas.

Treasure hunt

In perusing around blogland, it seems that many people are on a search for one particular piece of furniture - that perfect piece that has all the individual aspects of design and function personal to the searcher. I am always looking for something, and I have to admit that it changes often. Perhaps I am still defining my taste (in which case I probably should really think carefully about some of the big purchases I am ever so tempted to make!). I love the idea of having a single item that is the epitome of perfection and being able to search around the world for it if necessary. Wouldn't the feeling be incredible when it was actually found?

Truth is, I don't have that kind of patience. Either that or I have incredible luck. I decided to search for a loom and found one almost immediately. And the same with the letterpress. Craigslist and I get along well. But that dear friend has not come through for me (immediately) on my newest quest: the Perfect Buffet.

My perfect buffet actually comes in a few different completely different shapes and sizes. First is what I am going to call 1950s Dutch, although I actually haven't the slightest idea if that is correct:


Its a beaut. Its actually $6800 worth of beauty, which I am sure it is completely worth, but which is also so out of my price range.

Buffet #2 would be thrilling to find. It is inspired by the one in the background in this amazing apartment. What got me with that one is the old wood - do you think I could find an antique workbench hidden and forgotten in the back of someone's barn? That would be ideal.


These are a couple I found on Overstock.com, nice but missing... something...

Summer Wealth

Tuesday afternoon I made a stop at the Charlotte Berry Farm, a truly wonderful place. This was my first visit, my first berry farm experience ever actually. I will go back.


I felt so rich coming home with my boxes of fruit, so glistening and ripe and such amazing colors.


All that was not eaten up that evening went into the freezer for smoothy making and waffle toppings. I'm not going to say they will last until this winter, because most likely they will not. We tested the frozen fruit smoothies this evening, and I must say, they were amazing.


What do you put in your smoothies? I used a random mixture of the strawberries, blackraspberries and blueberries, some plain yoghurt and a bit of orange juice. They were so creamy and a particularly incredible shade of red-purple.


I do believe another round of berry-picking must happen sooner rather than later!

Patriotic?

I am not sure what exactly I was going for with this one, it ended up looking quite patriotic, or something to that effect. So be it. I like profiles.

Recent Paintings

I am going to show these one at a time over the next few days. They are all acrylic on 2x2" canvas, and all are or will be available in my shop. Have a great week!

Its been a Big Week

Wow, ok, where to start? As claimed in my last post, I did indeed get a slew of miniature paintings painted - fun! Also some other projects with which I am quite pleased. But those didn't happen so much on the weekend as on the days I had to stay home from work due to an unhappy run-in with an ill tempered zebra mussel resulting in a late night trip to the emergency room.


Not so much fun.

The new paintings are going in the shop, and I will share pictures of them here over the next few days, but first I want to show you the other things I made.


Ever since I made the abstract cover for my quilt book, I have been wanting to create some fabric flags or banners. I had patchwork ideas like the quilt book cover in mind, but I also wanted to incorporate some text, simple words or phrases. Turns out the awesome wooden type I found works quite as stamps! I brushed them with india ink and stamped words onto the fabric. They are watersafe and I really like how the letters are a little wonky.


The words I could create were somewhat limited by the fact that I neglected to get a letter "R". Oops!

I stamped the letters onto colorful cotton and stitched them onto a natural linen backing. There is a channel at the top for hanging.


I would like to try a few more of these, but I also know how my brain works and instead of mass production, it is quite likely I will move on to something else new... !

(These hangings will be in the shop shortly as well)