Craft Show

Well, we survived the craft show with our marriage and presumed partnership intact.

Our (my) first little snafu involved my prints. I made a sincere effort to find a local, green printer, but by the time the first one finally got back to me on how much the prints would cost (!!!!!!), and I said, no, I had no time to find another, since they all wanted several days lead time and my paintings weren't even all done yet. I really didn't want to use Walmart (we don't even shop there!), but since we had used them before (by mail), and the prints didn't look half bad, I figured they would do in a pinch until I found somewhere better. I got all my jpeg scans cropped to perfection and sent them off on Thursday night to pick up Friday after work. There was no time to go at lunch, because we had to traipse over to the craft show to drop all our big stuff of so that the morning would be hopefully less stressful.

Since I had an event to attend at 6, I went straight to their photo counter after work and picked up my prints. I was mortified. They looked awful. Everything was pink, even the pure white on my digital piece, so there was no arguing over monitor color differences and the like. In addition, they were cropped to oblivion. The border I had added to one print to help accommodate the overlap on the frame was chopped off on one side and only barely remaining on the other. I called my husband and told him they were unusable.

Keep the Drive Alive

This week, it has been really difficult for me to keep going on everything. School has got me down, work is really busy, and I wanted to put more pieces in the craft fair than I have time for!

I started this one last night. I saw a quote on Pinterest and tracked it down to its source, a gentleman by the name of Kobi Yamada who wrote a book called She. I might have to order it! A couple of bloggers have posted the entire text, but I think the book would make a really sweet gift.

My husband has heard his share of whining, but hopefully I'm over it now. I have this one almost complete; it only needs the author's name to be cut out and the whole thing to be glued down. Then I am starting one on the Mark Twain quote about going out on a limb.

Our preparations for the business side of the craft show are coming along as well. We have a credit card reader and I bought a file box to store our things. We should be able to nail down plans for a display in the next day or two, then Friday we will get set up! It's coming along, but we have been so worried about having lots of pieces that we haven't given a ton of thought to the logistics side of things. It'll work out - it always does!

Getting Ready

This past week I have finished several projects, including my compass piece. I love this one because it is a dream in a painting - or several. I used vintage maps of Greece, Australia, and Italy, which all top my list of places to see.

My husband finally finished a couple of his pieces. The problem with his work is that cutting the stencils takes so long that you can be 90% done with everything and still have little to show for it. He got out the spray paint and finished a couple so we were pretty excited!

This week I plan to start looking at the logistics of the booth: taking money, how we'll display, creating a "who we are" sheet, etc. Also possibly business cards. I already got a couple of items listed in my shop, so there was a little progress. I'm not super happy with my scans, but we purchased Photoshop over the weekend, so maybe I can tweak the colors to better represent what they look like in person.

A Direction, or Three

If I was lacking direction before, now I'm a fueled up engine with a bad sticker - I have lots of places to go, and lots of fuel and drive to get there, but I'm not certified yet. My real job has taken an emotional backseat to my ambitions, and finishing school is so close, yet so far. The good part is, I have lots of time to prepare, the bad part is, I want to start now!

The husband and I bet on ourselves in February and signed up for a craft fair with no crafts to speak of. We are deadline people, so we figured, we got this. I'm pretty sure it's been a month since then, and he's done lots of practicing, while I've done lots of procrastinating (and, to be fair, lots of school assignments as well). I now have one completed mixed-media (at right), one digital piece, and two half-ish-completed pieces. I decided to aim low, for five total pieces, and we plan to make prints of all our work. I may end up with several more than that, but I was intimidated by planning for a large number. My partner, on the other hand, does not share my low aspirations and chose a big round ten for his goal.

It's interesting how expressing our pent-up creativity can improve our moods and bond us together over this shared leap of faith. We don't have much idea what we're doing and view the whole thing as a learning experience. The people who attend this thing may honestly hate our work. My partner's work has a low level of appeal to old ladies, who we are afraid make up the biggest demographic for this type of show.

Recently I started listening to the audiobook Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion by Gary Vaynerchuk. I am inspired. I haven't even finished the seventh chapter, and I'm already imagining myself with a following and a successful enterprise. I need to start blogging more, and get some pieces finished so that a store can be forthcoming. This is my current direction. The rest will come later.

Work Like a Dog

Well, we're three weeks into the new year. I haven't come to any conclusions about where I am at or where I'm going, so there's that. If anything, I've become somewhat more confused about the whole thing, but I will do my best to work through it in the coming months, one way or another.

I finished Wanderlust. Not the same book the new movie is about, but one I read about in Elle and tried  for a long time to find used even though it's quite new and finally gave up and purchased from Amazon. I loved it for the first 15/16ths of the book (yes, I'm that specific), but by the time the tying-up rolled around, I was more sick of her antics than I imagine the people in her life were. While in the beginning I loved her free spirit, she finally struck me as a user, immature and self-serving. I didn't admire the way she handled herself, and I hope next time I can find another travel writer that at least professes to bring more to the lives of others than a girl to pine after once she inevitably leaves them. I can only hope that we're witnessing a growing-up type of transformation from the person she is in most of the book to the person I hope she realizes she wants to be - otherwise, the whole thing seems pointless to me.

Speaking of writing (and growing up), I began my "memoir". Okay, I'll quit it with the downsizing of myself and ambitions and remove the quotes. Memoir. I told my husband that I'm afraid this will end up being more of an essay than a book. I'm so used to trying to control my long-windedness that I end up wrapping up every story quickly, feeling that I am losing grasp of the imagined reader's interest and trying their waning patience with my droning on and on. My plan is to get the main ideas down, whether in ten pages or fifty, go back and organize, then try to flesh out the malnourished parts.