Roycroft Summer Show

This past weekend had us showing our work at the Roycroft Summer Show. For those of you familiar with the Arts & Crafts Movement, you will recognize the name of the famous printmaker, Elbert Hubbard whose enthusiasm for the ideals of the movement led him to establish the Roycroft Campus in 1895 - 1938. The campus is located in East Aurora, NY just south and east of Buffalo, NY. This whole area is very rich in evidence of the Arts & Crafts Movement. In Buffalo there are numerous Frank Lloyd Wright houses including the Darwin Martin House and Graycliff. There is an informative website you can access for more information: http://www.wrightnowinbuffalo.com/whattodo/arts_crafts.asp

We like to go to this show because most customers know the context within which we are working. It is a small show though so you should plan to include it within a trip to explore the area. They have a winter show as well which we do not attend because of the weather factor. It is a seven hour drive for us straight west.
We put our tent up in a 10' x 10' space in the parking lot at Roycroft. Saturday was beautiful weather and Sunday it rained. The loyalty of the customers though always pulls us through.
Here are a few photos of the show. You can see the buildings in the background.




This last photo shows part of the Roycroft Inn which is fabulous. The photo doesn't do it justice. It has been refurbished and shows the beauty of the Arts & Crafts style at its zenith. A wonderful place to stay... like the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, NC, you are surrounded by original testimonials.

Crafts at Rhinebeck, NY

Here is what our 10' x 10' setup looks like...for those of you who have never seen us at a show.
We are scheduled to do seven fairs this year though we are wait listed for another four shows.
All the shows we participate in are juried fine crafts shows. This means that we apply for the shows we think we will sell well at and they decide whether or not to invite us based on digital photos of our work. Usually we required to submit 4-5 images sometimes along with a booth photo all online. There is a fee for each application and if accepted, a fee for the basic space we contract for... 10' x 10' in this case. It is competitive and now even more so because galleries are feeling the economic pinch and not ordering as much quantity of work.
Crafts at Rhinebeck was a local show for us, a real treat. It is just across the Hudson River from Kingston which is just south of Saugerties. The show is on the Dutchess County Fairgrounds in 4-5 of the buildings. It takes us about 40-45 minutes to get there which means we get to come home at night, a real plus. This year we decided to jury for it not only because it is a local show but also because it is a great way to advertise our participation in the Saugerties Artists Tour August 8 & 9.
The original American Craft Council show was held in Rhinebeck back in the 60's. That show became the current Baltimore ACC show in February.

Next weekend we'll go to East Aurora, NY for the summer show on the Roycroft Campus.

Choices

We'll be going to our first summer art fair this coming weekend. We'll start off close to home with the Rhinebeck Crafts Fair at the Dutchess County Fairgrounds just across the Hudson River from us. Since it is a two day show with setup on Friday, we'll pack pots on Thursday and load up the van Friday morning before going over to set up.
But what pots go and what pots don't?? That's the question.

mountain laurels

The mountain laurels are in full bloom now. Here are a couple of photos and the small floral piece I am offering this year that they inspired. It was difficult to do them justice...

Kiln firing 6/7/09

We have had two firings in the last week. Most of the space in the firings has been used for tiles for our floor. We are refiring some that didn't meet our standards, so we can finish laying the major part of the floor. By spraying a little more glaze onto the surface of the tiles, the glaze on most evened out. So the firings have been mostly tile and a few pots. We have two electric kilns which we use for either the first, lower bisque firing or the second, higher glaze firing. The first firing is done to facilitate handling the pots while glazing them. Since the pots are quite fragile before the bisque firing, we usually try to at least complete that part of the process asap. Then they can sit on our studio shelves until we are ready to do a couple of glaze firings. If we are working towards completing some special or many pieces before a certain date, we might just bisque pots as soon as we have enough to fill a kiln and continue making pots, accumulating them for a while. Then we will set aside a week to glaze and fire a lot of pots at once.

Tiling the Living Room Floor

We will be traveling a lot from the end of June through August to our retail shows. If we were to start tiling our living room this year, it had to be started now. We've been making the tile for several years, fitting it in between our making pots. It isn't our focus so we are not set up for production of tiles. However, we thought we could try to do the edging on the living room floor since we had to redo the floor anyway. When we had professionals put in the hardwood floor several years ago, we decided to leave an L shape around the wood stove and the east windows unfinished for our tile. It is impossible to have orchids by the windows which need spraying every morning and a wood floor. Here are a few snapshots of Steve laying the tile. They have our Arts & Crafts green glaze on them. It will probably take us all summer into fall off and on to complete this project including making special shaped tiles to fit a lot of areas and the grouting and sealing. Hopefully we will finish before our frost date in October when the plants come back inside! In the meantime, the interior of the house will be topsy turvy for a while.

Kiln firing 5/25/09

We just unloaded a kiln firing and wanted to share some photos.

Here's Steve glazing some pots before they are fired and then unloading the finished pieces. Glazing usually takes us two sometimes three days, depending on the detail of the pieces.

The firing is done overnight. Steve usually gets up 3-4 times during the night to check on its progress even though it is in a programmable kiln.

Most of the pots in the kiln were for our upcoming retail shows but a few were orders.