Jackson Hole Art Fest

Another weekend, another art show for us. We're getting back into the rhythm of doing shows after a few month lay off.

Doesn't this sound like fun? Drive one to forty hours to get to the show, depending on where it is. Work two to four hours setting up for the show, then staff the booth for eight or more hours a day during the show. Spend about two hours packing up and taking the booth down before driving another one to forty hours home or to the next show. Pay the sales tax, order materials to make new stock and fill customer orders, raid the inventory to restock , or work ten to fourteen hours a day in the studio to make replacement stock in time for departure to next show. Remember to feed the cats, water and weed the veggie garden, harvest the ripe veggies (Rita is blanching spinach as Fred types this post), mow the lawn- no it can wait- pay bills which can't wait, try to squeeze in a daily bike ride and maybe work on bringing a new design idea to life to try out at the next show. Repeat every week for the next four weeks. Well, it sure looks like work on our new house and studio will have to wait until we get a couple of weeks off between shows at the end of August.

Thankfully, this weekend's show was only an hour away in Teton Village, Wyoming. This was a "try out" show for us because it is a small show (under 50 artists) and it comes between two other shows we do in nearby Jackson each summer, so we worried about saturating the market, but with the price of gas so dear this year, we thought it would be a good year to try out the show. We hoped we would tap into a different clientel, more vacationers, than the Jackson residents we normally see at the Jackson Shows.

Well, it turned out we mostly met more nice Jackson residents instead of vacationers. So we ended up expanding or Jackson customer base more, although we met many nice out of town folks as well.

Serendipitously, one vacationer was a person who had purchased a hat from us a couple of years ago in Portland, OR. On a trip to Paris, she lost it and had been mourning its loss ever since. On Saturday she had just come down from an adventure in the mountains and stopped by the art show on a whim and found us there. She now has a new hat which she will never lose! What a joy it is to us to make someone so happy with one of our creations.