Fun Day

Yesterday my friend Sheryl and I had a fun afternoon strolling the Thursday's on First & 3rd market in downtown Rochester. Every Thursday Rochester has a street market on First Avenue around the 3rd Street area which is by Mayo Clinic. It's a big event with artists, crafters, growers, food booths and two stages for performers. This week the downtown businesses were also having sidewalk sales which made the event even larger and actually took up some of the space usually used by the weekly vendors so some of them weren't there this week. That was a little disappointing.

But we enjoyed the vendors who were there, and had a great lunch at Chesters (the restaurant in this photo). We had a well balanced meal of barbecue chicken sliders, french fries, old fashioned chocolate cake (to die for!!!) and mojitos. Quite a combo huh? I think we covered all the major food groups and it was excellent!

New Sale Dates Added

Since the summer began, I've added a number of new sale dates to my calendar. Recently added are two dates (August 27th & September 6th) at the Farmington Farmers Market. The city of Farmington is having a few days they allow crafters and artisans into the event so I thought I'd give it a try. Can't hurt to have some more exposure, right? And selling a few things would be great.

Besides those dates, I've joined the Artigras event in Rochester on August 22nd. One of my favorite events of the year, Riverfront Art Festival in Northfield is September 12 & 13 and I've my fall studio sale will take place in October on a date soon to be determined.

I hope you can stop by and visit at any one of these events. It's nice to meet lots of new people and see a few familiar faces also.

Be well.

Vacation Ends

My husband and I have been on vacation for the past week. Not traveling, but not going to our day jobs which is how any good vacation begins anyway. Even though we didn't go to work each morning, we spent the time working really hard on other things. I delivered pottery to Clover Gallery in Harmony and then spent most of the rest of the week at our studio (Old Crow Studio) in southeastern Minnesota.

Early in the week we sealed the concrete slab in the kiln shed, which sounds pretty harmless. But I managed to get the sealer on my sandals, so rocks stuck to them and then got the sealer between my toes and the sandals so my feet were stuck to the sandals. Sometimes I forget not everything is as easy to wash off as clay. My toes still shine!

After that fun, we painted the studio. When we'd built it several years ago, the beige paint color we'd chosen was nearly identical to the primer that came on the siding so we could hardly tell where we'd painted. Now the paint and primer have aged and faded in the sun and you could see all the places we didn't paint or have good coverage. So this time we chose a very different color. It was a lot of work, but I really like it. Of course this involved me getting paint on my toes and sandals (and just about everything else) again. Fortunately, that was the extent of complicated work for the week. Then it was throwing some pots, picking berries for jelly and breakfast at the Highland Store. We had a bumper crop of wild black raspberries this year. I could have picked for days, but one family can only eat so much jelly.

Tomorrow it's back to the day jobs again to earn some cash.

Be well.