salmon street studio tshirt! yay!

salmon street studio tshirt! yay!
Originally uploaded by circaceramics

Quickie post!

We just got this t shirt I ordered on the sly from Salmon Street Studios over on Etsy (yep, fellow Etsians!) - Love it :D

-nancy

Dang it's hot in here!

It has to be about 100 degrees in here - We're still cooling one of the large kilns (it's a Paragon with 3"brick - Takes FOREVER), and waiting on firing a small glaze load of [tabs] for orders.

So, while I'm waiting on that, I thought I'd post about this past weekend's gig, Northalsted Street Market Days.Street festivals are generally not very good for artists - There's liquor (read: drunks), unruly children with oblivious parents, the 'I can do anything, and I can do THAT' comments, buy/sell, and of course, grime. And Lepre-Cans.

Market Days is one of the few we participate in - It's well known (especially in the LGBT community), the organizers mention the arts-n-crafts, and it gets a ton of traffic - Even with the heat (a balmy 95), this weekend's event probably had about 100,000 people walking through - And the way we figure it, if only 1% of the attendees come into our tent, and if a quarter of those people actually shop, we'll be fine, and we were.

But the odd thing was, we weren't harassed all that much by ignorant passersby, and all of our 'staple' people came to say hi, and actually hung out - We have customers that have been buying from us for years, and they usually stay to chat, but this time, we were hanging out, and talking about how the neighborhood had changed, stuff like that. It was really nice :)

I've got some pictures tp put up on flickr, but above you'll see a shot from outside our booth - It's what I like to call wall to wall meat :) I don't have a ton of pictures, because, frankly, I was tired! The heat sucked up my energy!

The weekend went pretty much with incident, except for Saturday overnight, when a bizarre little storm with high winds blew through - Luckily, because we've been doing this long enough and know better, we packed everything up, weighed down the canopy, and zipped up tight. Others hadn't faired as well, and lost part or all of their work :(

On to preparing for Bucktown ArtsFest...

-nancy

waiting...

Well, we set up the page at least :)

It's been kinda crazy around here, participating in outdoor art festivals and trying to juggle both of our ceramic lines, but hopefully by the end of this month, we'll be caught up with everything.

Mid-July to now, we've been working on some custom items/shapes for a client in St. Louis; she's been very helpful with her images and descriptions, guiding us a bit. She really liked our covered bowl for her pits (did I mention this is for an olive tasting shop?) - and at the moment Andy is working on 2 square vessels, which will be made into production molds. We'll introduce them into our own line at the end of November (fingers crossed!)

This weekend (8.11 + 12) is one of our favorite street festivals - Northalsted Street Market Days! Smack in the middle of Boystown here in Chicago, it's tamer now than it has been in the past; I think the core members of the community are getting older :)
But it's still a helluva lot of fun, and we have a lot of friends & fans there.

That's it. I'm off to go through our decals for the ware for this weekend; hopefully I can get Andy to post something here - He has a lot to say :)

-nancy