First Day at the Chico Bah Humbug Festival of Crafts for 2014

For the 35th time we are selling our work at the Bah! Humbug Festival of Crafts in Chico. This year it is located in the building at 355 East 20th Street just off of Park. If you are coming from downtown out Park towards the fairgrounds, take a left on 20th and the fair is about a block on the right. There are signs out front and parking adjacent and on the street. There are a few more vendors than last year's Bah! Humbug at the Senator Theater and the building is warmer and much bigger. We had a good first day as a number of our Chico customers came to see us and some bought pieces of our work. Most of the work in the collage to the left is new and most of it we still have but we expect to sell many of these pieces at the show. We will be there starting at 10am each day, til 7 most days except Sunday we close at 5 and Christmas Eve at 3 or 4.

Getting Ready for The Davis Art Center Holiday Fair

 We wish we had more time to work getting ready for the Davis Art Center's Holiday Fair but we've been pretty productive in the time that we have had. For several years the Sacramento Art Festival was at the beginning of October which gave us a couple of months to work before the Davis show but for the last couple of years (and next year too) the Sacramento show has been the first week in November cutting our work time in half. For the first time in 37 years though we didn't do a show on Thanksgiving weekend so that relaxed us and gave us additional time to create jewels. We will have a good selection at Davis and look forward to a good show and a good time visiting with friends and customers.

After Davis we will have 8 days to work getting ready for our annual visit to the Bah! Humbug Festival of Crafts in Chico and that will be all she wrote for creating jewelry for the year 2014. As I do every year about this time I am starting to sketch and think about what I want to create in the world of jewelry during the next year. I always look forward to the 4 1/2 months of no shows after Christmas to take the time to play and be more creative and come up with new ideas as well as build stock of popular types of jewel items for our May shows.  

As well as making jewelry we are planning other interesting things to do with our semi-retired selves next year, going to more theatrical plays and live concerts, taking train trips, going to Hawaii and playing around at home here on the Mendocino coast. Our move to Ft. Bragg at the beginning of the year has worked out excellently and we enjoy our new home and location very much. It's unusual for this time of year, so many plants are starting to bloom again, thinking that it must be spring, we've not had any temperatures that have even come close to freezing. Flocks of robins and other small birds are present in our neighborhood in amazing numbers, it sounds as if we live in an aviary when we walk outside. And the good rains are a blessing, triple the amount of rainfall that we had experienced last year at this time. Life is good.

Mixed Metal Jewels in Sacramento

Our yearly jaunt to the Sacramento Art Festival is almost upon us and we are busy finishing jewels getting ready for the trip and the sale.
Weather is incredibly beautiful here on the Mendocino coast so sometimes it's hard to stay inside. October is often one of the most pleasing months here weather wise. We are happy though that we have been getting some rain and are actually ahead in rainfall totals from last year, that's a good thing. It's been interesting watching brown and dried up looking lawns get green really fast with the gift of water.

We're still enjoying making jewelry and are certainly enjoying doing so many fewer shows, down to 6 out of town shows and for the first time in 37 years we are not doing a show on Thanksgiving weekend. I organized the show that we did for about 30 of those years, here in Mendocino and before that up in Nevada City. I make jewelry about 24 hours a week and Carlie a little less than that. Next year I plan to cut back a little more to 20 hours a week.

We had a wonderfully relaxing trip to the southern Oregon coast a few weeks ago and I'll be putting some pictures of the trip up on my photo blog in the not too distant future. Hope to see you at the Sacramento show, it is truly the highest quality art show that happens in the Sacramento area.

After Kings Mountain

I thought I would get this collage of jewelry images posted sooner than now but that proved not to be true. These are all pieces that we displayed for the first time at the recent Kings Mountain Art Fair on Labor Day Weekend. About half of them were purchased there and have found new homes. The show was very successful for us , it is certainly now our best fair each year, and last year, it's 50th anniversary turned out to be our best show in the over 45 years we have been doing fairs. It's encouraging that we can still break those kinds of records.

Back when we started doing fairs, we were living in Berkeley at the time, I was wholesaling jewels to shops all over the bay area and sometimes in southern California, I really didn't know what a craft fair was, but one day a friend mentioned that there was a craft fair the coming weekend in Live Oak Park in north Berkeley. I went and checked it out on Saturday and met a ceramic pipe maker who agreed to share his space with me on Sunday. I returned then and, not having a display of any kind, just spread an Indian bedspread out on the ground and put out what jewelry I had. I think I sold $3-$400 dollars of work that afternoon, which doesn't sound like very much now, but, at the time, was a significant sum to me. The next week I started checking out other fairs in the bay area and heard about the Kings Mountain Fair, applied and got accepted. My display the first time I did the Kings Mountain fair was an old piece of plywood I found out in the redwood forest there, set up on rocks, making it about a foot high, and then covered with the same Indian bedspread from Berkeley. Well, the experience I had there changed the direction of my life and here I am, still making a living selling my work at art fairs. I don't remember actually how much money I made then but I do remember basically selling just about every single piece that I displayed (this was before Carlie became a creator of jewelry). I also remember that the most expensive piece I had at the time was less than $50. As our jewelry making and selling career gradually winds down, Kings Mountain will be the last show that we let go of I expect. Not only because of the money making, although that's important, but because of the other aspects of our experience there, seeing artist friends that we only get to see once a year, getting to spend a wonderful weekend up in that beautiful redwood forest and the first rate job that the fair organizers and volunteers do to make the weekend fun, easy and successful.

Mixed Metal Jewelry

It's actually fairly amazing that I still like making jewelry after having done it for almost 5 decades.
Part of the enjoyment is the game like play that I make it, always searching for new ideas, tricks, variations, techniques and so forth. I saw early on that if I didn't make it into something that was enjoyable in an ongoing way that I would not be able to do it for a long time. Also continuing to make different forms lets longtime customers find something to acquire that is different from the pieces that they have already purchased. Such a high percentage of our sales at shows are to people that have bought before.

I am certainly enjoying being semi retired, it is very relaxing. Only 4 more fairs for the rest of the year. That's a big change for us.

I still have another picture collage I'm working on of our most recent work just finished in the last few days. I'll get it posted in a few days, some interesting pieces.

Home Making MIxed Metal Jewels

Our two spring fairs are done and were both very successful for us as well as pleasant and easy. A big thank you to both Chico and Los Altos. We've taken some time off from making jewelry as I was getting ready for one of my book sales in Caspar as well as organizing the annual flea market at the community center there. All went well but I'm glad my life is a little simpler now. We started working in the jewelry studio again tonight and will be focusing on making jewels in the upcoming weeks before our two summer shows in Mendocino in July. I hope to be making bracelets soon as I have a number of people interested in them. You might think that I'm in charge of what I make but that's not exactly the way it is for me. I sit down at my bench and it sort of happens to me as much as me deciding what to make. So far this year it has been mostly pendants with a few rings but I think I feel bracelets coming. I've found that if I try to force things to happen the work doesn't go as well. If I just sit down and let my hands start making what they want I find that I make better pieces, I'm happier, I'm healthier and I make more money. Well, that seems like a winning combination of factors to me. It's also true that I can always sit down and make beautiful jewels that sell well but I'm not always creative, which is trying new things and jumping into new and uncharted territory. Creativity is not something I can turn off and on with a switch, I can only try to be ready for it when it comes and practice certain things that help it arrive. When it comes it's kind of electric and exciting and ignites my passion and sometimes leads me into really interesting new areas of work.

Mixed Metal Jewels from our New Studio

It took us longer than anticipated to get our new studio workshop set up and running in our new house in Ft. Bragg. It's been so long since we had moved that we forgot what a substantial effort was required to do it. Now we are comfortably working in the studio and enjoying our new living place and being in town for a change.
Our spring show schedule has a very big change in that we are taking a year off from the Whole Earth Festival this year after having participated for the last 37 years consecutively. We enjoy Whole Earth and usually do well there but it's a very energy intensive event to do, so, after all the work of the move and setting up the new studio we decided to take a vacation from it for this year. We will be back in Davis at the art center holiday fair in December and in Sacramento in November. More details coming on our show schedule page.

We've been walking a lot in Ft. Bragg and have been exploring the alleys of which there are many. I've been taking pictures of things I find interesting and have posted some on my picture blog at www.floweringpixels.blogspot.com Another nice thing about having a larger space in this house is that I have a permanent space set up for taking jewelry pictures so I hope to post more of those in the near future.

In Our New Home

 I haven't posted in a while because after living in the same house in Caspar for 17 years, we have moved about 10 miles north into the coastal town of Ft. Bragg. Quite a change in some ways but mostly ones that we like. We have a lot more space in the new house, so if I can resist the temptation to fill it up with stuff, it's good. I was amazed at how much stuff I had collected in 17 years in the Caspar house. WOW. And I had to move it all. Thinning out though, as part of the process, 20 boxes of stuff have gone to the thrift store or the dump. We like being able to

walk to things we had to drive to before, the post office, hardware store, yoga class, food stores, movie theater AND the ocean. I took these pictures today at glass beach which is about a 12 minute walk. It was so pleasant sitting in the sun. A harbor seal crawled out of the ocean to the rocks just to the right of Carlie and a giant V of 60 or so geese flew by overhead while we were there. Crabs, sea gulls, cormorants in abundance of course. I got our new jewelry studio set up and functioning

a few days ago and we are starting the process of making new mixed metal jewels. I'll be posting pictures of some of them soon. We don't start doing art shows until May this year so have a little time to play and be creative. We'll see what comes from our hands and minds. I'm excited also because I have a very large room upstairs that I'm setting up for a drawing/painting/collage work studio as well as a book sorting/working room for that side of my life. Will post our upcoming show schedule soon.