Brucemore Garden Show – Year 7

I thought I had been writing up reviews of my participation in the Brucemore Garden and Arts Show all along, but when I went back to look at the things I had written in the past I found that I had only documented the first two years. How time flies. Some of these intervening years have been very good. Others have been dismal or so so.

This year Karen and I collaborated on a new approach. She has been taking classes in glass fusing at the Ceramics Center. She made different “tiles” in various sizes that we incorporated into the steel sculptures I normally make. Some redesign was required to be able to fit the glass in, but the basic design was similar to things I have done in the past.

True to form, I ordered the materials with plenty of time to make the new pieces, but then procrastinated so I had to work like crazy the last week before the show. I came up with 11 new pieces altogether, with another two ready to be assembled.

Our friends Doug Beach and Lynne Carlson offered to help us set up our area the night before the show and the additional help really made things a lot easier. We got everything put up by a little after 7:00pm.

We set the alarm for early the next morning and were up by a little after 5:00am. That was really hard for us because we hardly ever wake to an alarm anymore. We hustled around and did some last minute things like putting the prices on the pieces and settled down to wait for the first customers.

They started trickling in at the 9:00 start time and within the first hour we made our first sale. I have been arranging “sets” of sculptures in groupings of 3 and this year, people just assumed that was how I was selling them. It is nice to sell 3 at once. I will sell them individually but 3 is better.

I figured the “baby blue” sculpture would sell first but it turned out to be the red set. The price was enough that all my expenses for the show and the materials to make the new things were covered in that one sale. The baby blue piece did sell next.

By the end of the day we sold 8 of the 11 new pieces and had an order for another set. Karen also sold 2 of her 6″ glass tiles and two fairy houses she made last year.

As I was writing this blog entry, a lady who had wanted the red set telephoned Karen. She didn’t buy it when she was in our booth and when she returned a little later, it had been sold. She wondered if I could make her another set and we agreed that we would repaint the blue set to be red and Karen would make her some new red glass tiles.