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.