Tag Archives: folk art

to market, to market…

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freretstivus market, that is. TODAY! noon til 5pm – i will be there. come enjoy the beautiful day before we get more nasty weather tomorrow. and don’t forget about the last stop shop at the big top on thursday, 6-10pm (1638 clio street).

and remember, i do custom work also… so if there’s a clock or sign design you like, i can make it in your favorite color combo and have it done in plenty of time for christmas. i even have some blank scarf material in stock and could print up the scarf of your choice. so don’t be shy – just ask!

happy holiday shopping, y’all.

almost there…

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the anticipation of moving is just about killing me. i can start moving in on the 10th, though i’m paying rent on iberville until the 20th (my 30 days notice). the days can’t move fast enough.

it feels like the pace of my life has picked up considerably in the past week or so. every day feels hectic now. i’ve started to pack up, though not terribly quickly. but the boxes are starting to pile up in corners. fae is completely moved out with the small exception of a few storage boxes in our walk-in closet, which we will get to some day in the next week or so. the house is, therefore, half empty. it feels very weird still being here, trying to maintain my routine and schedule in a half-empty, partially-packed up apartment. the cats are very confused and a little freaked out, particularly when my landlord brings people through looking at the apartment.

and, i must be crazy, but i somehow got talked into doing the freret market this saturday. i haven’t done a market probably since freret back in march or april (can’t remember, but it’s been a long time), and i haven’t really made anything new since then either. i’ve been in a creative funk. so i’ve had all this stock that i made in the spring, thinking that i was gonna stay on top of sales and stay well stocked and maybe start getting some into stores, just sitting around gathering dust. so i’m making this market a clearance sale. if you like my stuff and want to stock up for holiday gifts, now would be a good time to swing by and grab some stuff. make me a REASONABLE offer on anything and i won’t refuse. i need money for moving, and i also really don’t want to move more than i have to… so if i can liquidate some stock, less stuff to move!

i’m gonna have a $3 bargain bin of tshirts, ties, tanks, shorts, pants, and any other printed apparel i can find. cufflinks are gonna be $10. and signs and clocks and prints will be at least $5-$10 off. really – make me an offer on anything. i just want to move product.

and, just so you know… i’m thinking of not making the clocks anymore. i’m kind of tired of them, and there are now several copy-cats around town making other sorts of record clocks and selling them for way less, therefore glutting the market. i will still make custom orders – like if you just really gotta have a black and gold fleur de lis clock or blue nola heart or red scoot clock, fine, i’ll hook you up – but i’m just so tired of lugging all the boxes around and having to store so much inventory. SO… all this is to say, i’ve got about 30-40 clocks of various sizes/designs/colors left, but when they are gone, that’s it. come out to freret market on saturday, noon til 5pm, and get ’em while they last.

one last thing – and those of you who follow me on facebook will already know this – but i’m selling one of my folk art chairs from my early days (pic below). it was always one of my favorite chairs i decorated – i used to comb the thrift and furniture stores for wooden chairs with good lines and not much paint/varnish that i could strip and then custom paint in my then-geometric folk art style. this one’s a little woo-woo goddessy, but i still love the colors and the paint job has held up remarkably well for being 17 years old! one of a kind and a mags original! i’m saying $125 but really, if you like it, make me an offer. i really just don’t have space for this in my new place and i think it’s time it found a new home.

bayou boogaloo!

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i love the bayou boogaloo. for all the years i was away in kentucky post-federal-flood, i was so sad i could never seem to make it here during memorial day weekend (too soon after jazzfest) so i could partake – either as a vendor or just a mid-citizen – in the boogaloo. i mean, come on – a music festival in my own neighborhood! (well i guess an argument could be made that jazzfest is also a music festival in my own neighborhood, but the boogaloo is more of a community, grassroots event, and even closer to where i live than the fairgrounds.) last year, i was FINALLY able to participate as a vendor, and it was glorious. so much fun, so many sales (thanks everyone!), and so great to see so many of my mid-city neighbors!

this year, i have been looking forward to the boogaloo for months. the new orleans craft mafia is again, like last year, offering a free t-shirt recycling workshop adjacent to the kid’s tent, in the “eco” area of the festival. (see the festival map below.) we’ll be out there both saturday and sunday – saturday from noon til 5pm, and sunday from 1-4pm – teaching people how to make tote bags, halter tops and other fun stuff out of old t-shirts, with a minimal amount of sewing. we have a good stash of donated t-shirts already, but we’re still accepting donations – just bring ’em on out to the fest and throw ’em in our bin. if you don’t have any t-shirts to work with, don’t worry – we got ya covered. oh, and at the end of the weekend, we’ll have a little fashion show at 5pm on sunday for you to strut your stuff with your new creations, too!

so yeah. i’ve been looking forward to it. but at the same time, freaking out… because a) i had a really successful jazzfest show at jen’s and sold a lot of t-shirts and signs – which is good, yay for money and sales, but also has left me with not as many of the signs and t-shirts i would like to have to sell at the boogaloo; and b) i started this census job that has been kicking my ass! it’s been a long time since i had any kind of “real” job (meaning worked a job outside of my own house), and it’s been a hard adjustment getting used to both that aspect as well as the strange start/stop nature of census work. for example, on any given day, i: have a daily meeting at 9am for a half hour; might go out to make rounds on a new block i’ve been assigned in the morning for a couple of hours; come home for lunch; spend an hour or so going over all the paperwork from the morning to make sure i have it all correct; go back out to a different block for 2nd or 3rd or 4th rounds, trying to find folks who weren’t home the first time; come home again to cool off and do paperwork; go back out in the early evening trying to catch folks coming home from work who i’m having a particularly hard time trying to find; come home, eat dinner, and maybe even go back out again after dinner before dark, for the pesky hard-to-find folks. and then spend more time on paperwork when i’m home. (and then collapse!)

and all of that only got me like 6-7 hours of actual on-the-clock work. but i’ve been working since 8:45am! so it’s been a big adjustment, to say the least. and has left me little time to think about things like ordering t-shirts to print (much less finding time to actually print them), cutting/sanding/painting wood for signs, and making clocks. and, to top it all off, though i did well at jazzfest at jen’s, it’s the only good market/sale i’ve had in months, so i’ve been begging/borrowing/stealing to pay my bills and am deeply in debt… and we’ve only gotten one paycheck so far from the census. so i didn’t even have the money to invest in buying t-shirts to print, or paint to make signs, etc. (much less the booth fee for vending at the boogaloo.)

so this all came to a head on saturday night, as fae and i were hanging out at home and i was surfing the internet, trying to find some wholesale outlet that actually had the style/color of t-shirts i wanted to order (all my usual outlets were sold out of at least one size and most of them several sizes) so i could order them in time for them to actually arrive in enough time to be able to print them… and i realized, what am i doing? i don’t even have the money to pay for these. nor do i have the money to pay for my booth. and even if i could scrape that up, there’s no guarantee that i’d make it back… just because i sold a lot of 70119 t-shirts last year at the boogaloo doesn’t mean i will this year. sales at markets has SUCKED overall so far in 2010, so why would the boogaloo be any different?

and, as an aside, i have been wracking my brain trying to come up with an oil disaster related design, which i thought might be the biggest seller due to the timing, but i haven’t even been able to find the time to work on coming up with that. (and even if i did, i’d be donating the proceeds to the gulf restoration network, so it wouldn’t be something i’d be making money off of. which i still really want to do, but, it was just one more piece of the puzzle that wasn’t coming together for me.)

so. all of a sudden, it came to me. i can’t do the boogaloo. i can’t afford it, i don’t have inventory, and i don’t have time to think about it. and the second i started thinking about not doing it, i instantly felt relief. i immediately posted something on my facebook page, and thought i was done with it. i slept better and the next few days i didn’t think anything about it. it was actually really nice. sad, but also stress-relieving.

and then yesterday, my friend rachelle offered to share her booth with me, which was so sweet. i thought about refusing, but then i figured if i don’t really need to spend any time making stuff and i just take what i’ve got and make as much fit as i can in part of rachelle’s booth, around her stuff, then it doesn’t have to be stressful and maybe i’ll still make a little money anyways. and i always have fun hanging out with rachelle at markets – we almost always set up next to each other. so thanks, rachelle.

so now i am once again doing the bayou boogaloo. and of course, i am going to try to make a few signs this week, maybe a few 70119 clocks. but i’ll only have a literal handful of t-shirts, and a weird assortment of clocks and signs and cufflinks… and that’s it. not a big effort. but at least i’ll be there.

hope to see y’all there!

beer fests are fun!

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on saturday, i – along with several other members of the new orleans craft mafia – participated in the inaugural top of the hops beer festival on the northshore, at fontainebleau state park. being a big lover of beer myself, i was really looking forward to it, not just as a vending opportunity, but as a beer-drinking experience.

can you tell they were the sponsors of the fest?

the weather had been predicted to be sunny and 0 % chance of rain. unfortunately, that didn’t really work out. it was mostly cloudy, VERY windy (gusty, even, resulting in greenKangaroo’s tent blowing over during set-up and making us all nervous throughout the day) and threatened rain all afternoon. luckily, only a few drizzly drops made their way to the ground late in the afternoon, though it was sprinkling consistently while we broke down at the end of the day. but no major catastrophe ensued, and the sun did peek out a few times, enough to keep everyone warm and add to the enjoyment of the day.

some of my little beer folk art hanging in my booth

i somehow didn’t really remember to take many photos – must have been all those 2oz samples of beer i chugged down in the first hour or two! i knew i had to sober up by the time i left, so i could drive home safely, so i tried to do most of my beer drinking early on. it’s a strange event, having scores of beer vendors lined up in a row, pouring endless 2oz samples. it’s not enough beer for you to fill your tiny mug and walk away to enjoy it; just long enough to take a few swallows, try to savor each particular beer as best you can, and move on to the next one. after a while, it becomes hard to distinguish each beer.

i do remember particularly enjoying a few beers that i’d never tried before. i checked out all of heiner brau‘s beers, as i’d previously only had (and love) their amber. but they were out of their strawberry beer before i got there, sadly. many folks were talking about that one, so i’ll have to see if i can check that out another time. i tried lots of beers i’d heard of before but never tried – chimay, hoegaarden, several flavors of flying dog and sam adams i’d never tried, some of zea’s flavors i’d never had before, covington brewhouse, some of the lazy magnolia‘s, and nola brewing‘s new hurricane saison (very nice!) – and many new beers, most of which i can’t remember, that i hadn’t ever heard of before. i came home with several keychain bottle openers from budweiser (you can’t ever have enough of them, even if it does say budweiser) and a new green coozy from bayou teche brewing, for their LA31 beer, which is new to the new orleans market. (i liked it!) i drank a lot of beer.

mc auslan's st. ambroise apricot wheat

i can’t say there were many beers i didn’t like (though i don’t ever have to have dixie’s blackened voodoo ever again), but i can say there was a new favorite from everything i tasted today: mc auslan’s st. ambroise apricot wheat ale. i think i could actually drink a whole six pack of that stuff. often, i like the taste of a beer in small doses, but can’t manage to maintain my interest in it for an entire six pack. but this one, i think i can. the smell alone was just amazing. and i don’t even usually like fruity beers! (like, i hate abita’s strawberry beer.)

so yeah, it was a really fun day. fun hanging out with my nocm homies (including mallory of miss malaprop, who helped staff my booth, and her bf dave, who is a filmmaker and took some b-roll video footage of us for future use). i saw a few friends i had no idea would be there, and i got to not only meet kirk coco, president and co-founder of nola brewing company, but he bought my one-of-a-kind “craft beer drunk here” mixed media stencil clock! i’m gonna have to make it over to tchoupitoulas street to take a brewery tour soon, cuz i love their beer and love supporting the local microbrewery.

some of my bottlecap signs

oh, and i was smart enough before i started drinking beer to ask some of the beer vendors to hang on to their bottlecaps for me, so by the end of the day, i had a HUGE grocery bag full of a wide variety of craft/microbrew beer bottlecaps for future folk art/crafts. i don’t know why i’m so obsessed with bottlecaps, but like much advertising and product design, i find them to be tiny little metal pieces of artwork all on their own, that are awesome embellishments and/or materials for signs, folk art, clocks, mixed media pieces, cufflinks, etc. and, well, it’s recycling, too. so now i’m well-stocked for a while. yay!

i look forward to participating in the top of the hops fest again in the future. hopefully they will add more food and crafts vendors, and maybe offer slightly longer hours to partake of all those beers. but otherwise, i’d say it was pretty well done. if this sounds like fun to you, they’ve got another one coming up soon in lafayette, and have plans for greenville, south carolina and i think even louisville, kentucky later in the year. it’s a great idea; wish it had been mine! what a fun job it would be producing these beef fests all over america!