Yesterday I dropped off a handful of charm necklaces and etched pendants at the BAYarts Gallery Shop in Bay Village.
New etched pendants available at BAYarts Gallery Shop
I also learned that the photo taken by the Avon Lake Press reporter did appear in yesterday’s paper. How fun is that?
That just about sums up the last week for me.
Tuesday I taught etching to an exuberant crowd of a dozen Bead Q employees, the largest class I’ve taught so far. I got some really nice feedback, and my students did some really cool work, too. I also learned that a dozen is far too many for this class, and from this point forward I’m limiting etching to six students at a time. I heard over the weekend that one of my August etching classes is fully booked, and the other is getting close. If you’re thinking about signing up, now is the time, unless you want to wait for September or October (no dates scheduled yet, but I assume we will).
I spent most of last week preparing for the Avon Lake Summer Market, which again this year lived up to its history as a really good show for me. Saturday was pretty much nonstop until early afternoon, then settled down to a thinner crowd but still a steady pace.
Avon Lake Summer Market, before the crowds hit
It was great to see so many of my regular customers and friends, and to meet some new people as well. I was next to Jen of Seat of My Pants, who makes adorable bags and braved out the day despite looking like she was going to burst any second. I had some really wonderful praise for the new work I’ve put so much of my heart and soul and energy into over the past few months, and I was asked to bring some work to BAYarts for inclusion in the gallery shop there, which I will be doing later this week.
We got some great preshow publicity this year, including a short piece in the Plain Dealer’s Friday Magazine, and I had my picture taken with a customer for the Avon Lake Press, which may be included in Wednesday’s paper.
I went most of the day thinking it was a good day but not a record breaker, yet when I got home and counted up I found that I had done even better than last year, my best show ever. It made the exhaustion worth it.
After eleven solid hours of sleep and a little nap here and there yesterday, I’m feeling almost back to normal, just in time to teach the Chunky Chime necklace at Grand River Beads on Thursday and get ready for the North Olmsted show on August 10.
Then today I got an e-mail from the gallery coordinator at the Avon Lake Public Library, who wants me to do a show there for the month of December. That was just the push I need to get it together with some of the bigger, showier pieces I’ve had swirling in my head for a while now.
I received this video link through the Copyediting-L list. If you love your fonts as much as I do, you’ll likely find this amusing: The Font Conference.
The weekly entertainment update I get via e-mail from the New York Times featured Mamma Mia today. I am ambivalent about Abba — it’s pretty much just fifth-grade nostalgia background music for me — but now I have “Dancing Queen” stuck in my head. It’s not good.
I have been nose to the grindstone in an avalanche of freelance projects. A few were running late from the publishers, one was running early, and one was a peach of a rush project that I couldn’t turn down, so I started out the month with eight projects in various states of completion. I’m still trying to figure out if that was a good or a bad thing, but the paychecks will be nice once they start to come in. I slugged through it and managed to return everything on time, and even a couple of them a day or two early. It was a good feeling. I’m on the last one now, then I’ll have a bit of a breather before the next slate is due to arrive on my desk. The break will be welcome, since I have a couple of upcoming shows and classes to prepare for.
My biggest show of the year and my favorite to do is the Avon Lake Summer Market, which is coming up next Saturday, July 26. Erin and Kristen do a fabulous job of putting together a beautiful show with a wide variety of vendors. The setting couldn’t be more lovely, and they do a nice job of publicizing it. It’s a fundraiser for restoration of the Thomas Folger Home. I hope to see some of you there.
My August show will be the North Olmsted Juried Arts & Crafts Show on Sunday, August 10. This will be the second year for this show. They do a really terrible job of promoting it, but I stick with it because I think it has a lot of potential. I wrote a long feedback letter last year giving them some pointers for promotion, but so far they have not taken them to heart.
This year I started teaching some classes, too. I’m teaching bead classes at Grand River Beads. The May and June classes were bracelet variations on a kit design using large borosilicate beads. On July 31, I’ll be teaching a necklace version, then I’ll be retiring that class for a while. For August, I’m working on an original design using furnace glass and crystals. I’m also teaching etching classes at Bead Q in North Olmsted (8/17) and Chagrin Falls (8/4).
This video is making the rounds, but if you haven’t seen it yet, take a couple of minutes, put some joy into your day, and ponder the power of serendipity.
I’m still not entirely sure what happened with that little glitch in my sidebar, but the answer seemed to be switching themes. Isn’t the new DePo-Clean theme lovely? It suits my love of clean and streamlined things, and I love the Flickr plugin that puts the little pictures up top there. I’ve been a fan of Derek Powazek‘s for a loooooong time, and I am grateful, too, to Adam Freetly for making it widget-ready. There are still a few tweaks to be done, but it will do for the time being.
And now we can add to that last post that all of a sudden my photo, Etsy mini, and Flickr badge are now all missing from my sidebar. I’m just not equipped to deal with this today.
Not sure what is going on, but there seems to be some kind of capricious, selective electronic vortex surrounding my house.
I have been trying to get to marthastewart.com for three days now to access a couple articles of interest, but it will not let me get there. I get a “server not responding” error, no matter what browser I use. I have not found any other website that behaves this way. My husband tried last night from his PC laptop and his Palm and wasn’t able to make a connection either, although he was able to connect from the same laptop at work this morning. I’ve asked a few other people to try from assorted computers and locations, and they can all get in fine. I’ve cleared my cache and cookies; unplugged everything from the cable modem, router, and Vongage box and let them all rest for 20 minutes; restarted my computer — all to no avail.
Now, the really weird thing is that I can get to some things on the subdomain blogs1.marthastewart.com (Martha Blog, Dinner Tonight, and Bluelines [oh, alas for the demise of the printed Blueprint]), but not others (Bride’s Guide).
What little I understand of my net search results seems to point to something in the router’s firewall (although the site was working just fine last week), but I know next to nothing about networking and firewalls and am terrified to tackle this on my own lest I really mess something up (my net access is critical to my business, whereas access to Martha specifically is not). I’ll just have to wait until my IT guy can take a look at it.
Then, early this morning, my phone made a really weird beep and all of a sudden I had messages — eight of them, going back to late last week, all of them new to me. But in the meantime, I have received a few calls and checked voicemail. I don’t get a lot of calls, so it didn’t occur to me that I might be missing any. Apparently I was.
If I’m wearing a tinfoil hat next time you see me, you’ll know why.
Gretchen has some wonderful photos of Wednesday night’s lunar eclipse up. We had a beautiful view here from the edge of the woods, too.
This seems like it would be a really interesting article on the development of punctuation:
From Interpunct to Interrobang
Too bad I can’t get past the myriad punctuation errors. Irony, anyone?
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