'Tis the Season to be Crazy Busy!

The wonderful one room Schoolhouse at the Leighton Art Centre

​ ​This past week has been busy, busy, busy! This week promises to be more of the same.  I have a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes for 2017 that I want to share here, but I have been short on time and each of these things deserves a nice sit down post of it’s own.  In the coming weeks I will elaborate in more details, I promise!

Card Making at Leighton Art Centre this past weekend...

 One thing that has kept me busy, was this past weekend I got to teach another printmaking class at the Leighton Art Centre. I absolutely love instructing there. For those that haven’t ventured out there, the studio space is a beautiful, old, one room schoolhouse (see the picture above). It is a cheerful and inviting space with lots of room to set up and stretch out and there are so many interesting things to inspire creativity on the shelves and walls. I just love the staff and students there. The class I led this time was another Introduction to Printmaking class – we had a lot of fun designing and making Christmas cards, tags and gift wrap. The beauty of doing something this simple is that the class had plenty of time to perfect their brayer and baren techniques as they reprinted their blocks multiple times.

​ It was great to see some familiar faces and catch up on their work as well! I love it when students show me the stuff they are experimenting and perfecting or the things that inspire them to try a new art form themselves.  It was a great day! 

AKCS Market this weekend....

 ​Another thing that has kept me on my toes is my preparation for the AKCS Christmas Market in Airdrie this coming Friday November 25th (5pm – 9pm) and Saturday November 26th (10am – 4pm) at Airdrie Koinonia Christian School, 77 Gateway Drive NE, Airdrie, AB).

​ I am excited and a little bit nervous – I am dipping my toes back into the world of artisan markets after taking a break for a few years. When I lived in Kelowna, I had a few summers where I would rent tent space at the Kelowna Farmer’s Market to sell handmade cards and paintings. Getting back into this has felt like coming home to my roots in some ways.  If you are one of my Airdrie friends thinking of coming, I truly hope to see you there – I’ve been missing seeing familiar faces since I moved.

 I’ve had a lot of fun making cards on my letterpress (new for market selling!) I’ll have some fun, affordable Christmas and greeting cards that I’ve made using antique metal typeface and fun engraved and linocut images in my collection. All of this plus a nice selection of still life and landscape paintings and hand pulled linocut prints (either matted or matted and framed). The next few days will be spent polishing everything thing up, packaging and pricing for market.

 The nervous feeling comes from not having done this in a while... I think every artist can relate to the “will they like my stuff?”, “is everything priced right?”, “do I have the right mix for this market?” added in with the “will I have it all packed and ready on time?” feelings... it can be a little vulnerable if you stop too long to think about it! On the flip side, the thing I LOVE about selling at market is the face time with customers and friends. Real interaction and feedback absolutely puts wind in my sales (and I’ve often had some great suggestions for future products from people looking for very specific things). I have made some very dear friends through channels like this - looking forward to this part this weekend and hoping to make more friends (and catching up with friends that I haven’t seen in ages).