and on that note...

crowd on day 1
Originally uploaded by circaceramics

Renegade was the last outdoor event of the year for us (phew!), and I want to briefly say that what a fantastic crowd of people! I know, it was pouring rain non-stop (in degrees of course: drippy, then downpour, etc) but look at that image above - People were out, they were game, and they were interested. Gotta love the diy/indie show crowd :)
Had this been an art festival, it would have cleared out in a heartbeat.

On a side note - If anyone reading this purchased something from us on Saturday @ Renegade, could you contact us please? Our credit card machine got wet (surprise, surprise) and we lost all the transactions on that day (we contacted a few people already, but are missing a few more).

Let's see...Our last few festivals prior to Renegade went really well. Starving Artists' Show in Milwaukee was great (crowd pic below) - Had a lot of younger customers, all of whom we told about Art vs. Craft show in November, also in Milwaukee (we just got notification last week, and we're in - Yay!)

Bucktown Arts Fest was great, Northalsted Market Days went surprisingly well. So all in all, we feel pretty good about this past season.

And now, we're getting ready for our open studio weekend on October 4th + 5th, which we've decided to have the same weekend as Ravenswood Art Walk, part of the Chicago Artists Month series of studio tours. Andy & I were both pleasantly surprised to hear that this year, our building was actually going to be organized in it's approach.

As many of you may or may not know, our studio is located within a building that is a block long, and half a block wide. There are approximately 400 small businesses operating within, and out of those, only 7 can be deemed 'arts oriented'. In the past, whenever the art walk was looming, we'd try to get something going - But it's difficult to get a few people walking through a building where there are only a few pockets of art activity. Often people would just walk by because it didn't look like anything was going on in here.So anyway, this year, our building will host about 100 artists (part of the layout is above), all displaying their work throughout the building. There's also going to be a Ravenswood Art Trolley taking people back and forth, from Lawrence to the north, to Cornelia to the south. We're happy to be participating and are looking forward to all the activity - Should be interesting :)

What else...We have our event schedule worked out, and we'll be posting that soon. We'll also be sending some tiles out to a show put on by the Clay Studio, out in Philly, for the holidays - I'll post more info about that later. They asked us earlier in the year, so we've been planning some designs for it - We're making about 35 tiles for them and sending 25. It'll be a good batch of clay!

And I think I forgot to mention that we do have some stores carrying our work now! These brave people ordered from us, not an easy task. I say this because we do not have 'line sheets'. I tried to make something simple by making up 3 categories: shape, colour, image. I send out these PDFs, and then cross my fingers!
The shops that carry our work here in Chicago are homeboy & sacred art; in Portland, OR we have Elsa + Sam. I can honestly say that they've all been a pleasure to work with and incredibly patient, especially because of event schedule.

What else...We'll be cleaning our studio soon next week for the Art Walk/ Open Studio Weekend. It's quite the pit of disrepair if you catch my meaning. I'll probably put up another 'before and after' shot on Flickr, so you can see how awful it is in here!

Ok, that's it - I know I'm missing a bunch of newsworthy tid bits, but I'm blanking out on what they are - Sorry! If I do think of them, I'll write about it here :)

Thanks for reading, and I promise to not leave such a gap next time between postings!

-Nancy