"The chief source of art is man's pleasure in his daily work, which expresses itself and is embodied in that art itself."
William Morris (1834-1896)

Saturday, March 27, 2010

Winter Park Sidewalk Art Show 2010

We're home!

Here's what happened....
First we celebrated my parents 50th anniversary early.
then we ambled over to Winter Park to set up for the March 19-21 show.

Downtown on the park:
and setup in front of the railroad tracks:



There were over 200 exhibitors. Most were unbelievably excellent... very high quality... lots of prize money for individual artwork attracted those artists who make one of a kind pieces. We were in good company. Unfortunately we had a torrential downpour on Sunday so by the time we left... we were running.......to the Shenandoah Valley in West Virginia to visit some friends .........











We followed the Skyline Drive through the National Park..........













until it started to snow half way through the drive.

It was good to get home........


Friday, March 12, 2010

Winter Park, Florida

We leave early early on Sunday to drive two days down to Florida. With day light savings time in tow, we hope to drive through the heavy rains they are predicting for the Atlantic states and on down to the Sunshine state. We have two purposes. The first will be to celebrate Cherie's parents 50th wedding anniversary (a second marriage for her dad) and the second is to participate in the 51st annual Winter Park Sidewalk Art Festival. The name is deceiving...... this is a difficult show to be juried into and boasts having a crowd of 350,000 viewing 225 artists. So now you know why the artist's pick of the last kiln was Palm Trees! If you are anywhere near the area, come on by and see us in booth #211 in the Park.


 And here is the gift I made for my parents:

Monday, March 8, 2010

Firing 3/5/10

When we returned from the Baltimore ACC show a week ago, we just unloaded everything into the shop.
Packing up at a show's end is always a fast moving event during which some boxes get better packed than others. Back at the ranch, we often unpack everything to look at the inventory before deciding what we need to make next. This time I unpacked and repacked the same day, removing orders, filling gaps with other pieces from our stock and then labeling each box. We did this because sooner than soon we will be traveling to another show. It is worth the effort to pack correctly at home rather than try to organize directly from the boxes at a show.

We also had a couple of orders we didn't get finished before Baltimore and so the first day in the studio
Steve glazed those pots to fire on Sunday.
You can see it wasn't a large firing... just enough to get a couple of special pots out.