Reservations

Today I reserved my spot for next years Portland Saturday Market site! Check it out - this is a digital rendering of where I will be!!! Right in front on the waterfront! All these years of volunteering a lot of time and effort at the market have finally paid off. (I help clean the office every week and I am a member of the product review committee) I will have a really good spot, right in front. In this picture you would be facing the Burnside bridge , standing in the new park that PDC is building, looking at my booth. :)

The picture below is the digi rendering of what the new park will look like during the week. On the weekends the market will take over this park (it is even plumbed with electricity and gas and water for the food vendors) and my booth will be right in the center of the picture, on the edge of the market where people enter. Wowza. Makes me shakey thinking about it. Felt like a balzy move. I am hoping it will lead to photography that will get my business publicity. New site = site photography, and my red Leah Glass.com sign will be in those pictures! (I hope)

the Sampler - Portland City Shout Out

Today I received a little Google Alert to show me that CraftZine Blog gave me a little shout out as one of samples in the Portland City Sampler. The Sampler is a wonderful company that serves to promote and advertise small businesses to relevant publications and stores. Here is their words to describe themselves:

The Sampler is a super fun marketing & promotional tool for indie businesses. Each month, independent crafters, artists, shops, zines and record labels who run web-based businesses send samples and promotional materials to a contribution pool. All the samples are photographed, posted to the site and then are portioned out, put in little packages and sent off to Sampler Subscribers, other Sampler Contributors and members of the Media all over the world!

I've participated twice, I like the business model, as I'm all about gorilla marketing. The cost of advertising with this company is the cost of the samples you submit and the shipping to get them all to the Sampler in time. If you are curious about submitting, here is a link with FAQs.

This second time I have submitted some samples specifically for the Portland City Sampler, which was organized through the Portland Independant Artist Cooperative. I submitted small little glass bits on wire stapled to a card and put in a cello bag with a sticker and a flier for Aquila. The last time I submitted full on little mini mobiles, I think 30 of them. This second time I knew there were 100 Portland Sampler boxes that would be made total, so I wanted to be in every single one, thus the small easily made in super bulk sample :)

Images on Glass III

The experiments with printing on glass continue...

A lot of these samples I am slumping into molds to make them into "sandwich plates".

I will take better pictures of some then!

In the meantime, some interesting observations:

-when we mixed glass powder into the ink and then printed on the glass the print turned out splotchy, like the ink stuck to the glass and turn out splotchy

-when we dusted glass powder onto the ink print that had more glass powder mixed in the ink, it was as if the two did not mix! The glass powder on top didn't actually fuse into the glass



- lastly, and most importantly, we found an ink and a process that we like.
unfortunately my note taking skills the other day were somewhat lacking, left a little sumthin to be desired - so I it was hard to decipher the differences between all the samples...

However - hopefully by the end of November we will have some sample plates available for sale so we can see what prints people are attracted to purchase on glass.

Cup of Tea

It has rained here in Portland every day this month. Perpetual gray weather, not much hard dramatic rain, just constant drizzly stuff.

I am drinking tea, black tea from the Tao of Tea, its called Emperors Gold. A delicious golden leaf tips loose leaf tea. I was too lazy to brew a pot of tea today. Instead I just made one cup. Does anyone else have any of these Pom cups, I love them. I make fruit/yogurt parfaits in them, and I drink tea out of them. They have these little lids that fit perfectly on top and they are made of pyrex so they can get really hot or cold without any problems (like canning jars). Its disappointing that Pom sells there juicey tea in plastic containers now. Too bad. I'm not even that fond of the Pom tea stuff, I just liked the cups - I've got a small collection of them now!

Okay, I am babbling. I should be working. I liked how the tea looks with the dark color around the leaves at the bottom of the cup.

It looks like Friday we may get some sun here in the Pacific NW. I won't hold my breath, but I will be quite pleased if that actually happens.

Felted Birds and Gray Days

I had a fun time today learning to felt birdies! This is my attempt #1 - I particularly like his hairdoo.

My felty good times were had at the first inaugural meeting of the IHLA. Hangin' out with my bitchez in the Idle Hands Ladies Auxiliary was awesome. Talk about making the best of a gray Portland day - this colorful felty fun was just what I needed! I made couple of birds, a cozy for felting needles (thanx for letting me keep a couple Maggie!!) and an orange chick rattle. I can't help myself but produce - my crafty hands just kept making one cool felted thing after another.

Check it out - the rattle is awesome, I used one of my Chinese medicine pill containers as the center of the chick, and I left just a couple of pills inside the ball (so it would rattle) and then felted the orange around the plastic container. Here is what the pill container looks like: (the larger ball is a wax covered plastic ball that you have to crack open to get at the inner plastic ball that contains the pills, the inner ball has a plastic cap that is not in the picture)And then this is what the rattle looked like in the end:

So morning-time was super fun, felty goodness with my beautiful friends.

This afternoon was Mac n' Cheese night at the glass studio, I brought broccoli n' cheese - it was delicious (although sorta soupy). Not only did I manage to eat many many cookies (I am growing a gut?! too much indulgence!) but I did manage to get some work done. I cut 140 glass circles and got them ready for the kiln, and Aimee came in today (I LOVE good help - and Aimee is the bestest!) and helped me continue to get ready for the holidays, converting my scrap piles into miniature mobiles, its a multi-step process!

I also got to meet Anne Marie of Glass Heart Studio. She makes amazingly beautiful boro glass plug earrings, swirls and curlies and swoops, in different plug diameters and different colors. They are really exquisite(check out her Etsy shop). She is moving into the train barn a few doors down from the Aquila Studio - it was really awesome to get to meet her tonight. Its an honor to have such good neighbors up there in N. Portland.

It may be raining, cold and gray here in Portland - but hey - I love this city and the people in it make the gray days pretty darned cool.

Fun Soggy Weekend

This weekend the weather here in Portland was rainy and gray, temperature in the 50s and sorta windy. And I was outside selling my artwork! Sheesh I am crazy :)

I actually had a fun weekend in spite of the forecast calling for constant rain and wind. After being depressed all week about the onslaught of this persistent crappy weather, I don't really know why I decided to vend this weekend. Saturday morning I showed up skeptical of my strange choice, dressed in my navy blue rain jacket, my rain boots , two layers of fleece sweaters and two pairs of long johns.

To make a long story a little bit shorter, I ended up switching booths with my neighbor Bob. That small change made my whole weekend so much more fun and exciting! I set up my booth in his spot (2 spots down the road from my reserved space) and he set up in mine. Bob makes incredible metal birds, lifesize and gorgeous, his business is Metal Art by Swan.

Residing in Bob's spot for the weekend was great! I think I really needed a little change of pace to brighten my weekend, and this was perfect. I absolutely love all my neighbors in my reserved space, they are awesome, don't get me wrong. It was just fun to be in a different location for a weekend... even though it was just two booths down :)

I got to hang with my friend Maggie, Papaver Jewelry, she is in the picture above, don't our booths look great even though the weather is sh*t and already getting dark! Oh I forgot to put my big red Leah Glass sign... when I remembered I just didn't bother cuz I figured it'd just get wet and I didn't feel like toweling it off.

And I got to meet many customers that were so friendly and kind. It was not the busiest of weekends, but in my new perspective I was basically right at the entrance to the market, and there weren't a whole lot of vendors, so I was very visible and colorful. People were walking down the road saying to their friends/family "Oh I like those mobiles, I have seen them online!" and man, that just makes me so darned proud - I can't even tell ya! And the fact that many mobiles and other creations of mine went home with new owners, that makes my day even sweeter!

Today I made a lot of rings (I thought that would be a good way of utilizing the rainy day and possibly rousing up a little business from people enjoying watching the process - it worked too!), so I thought I'd share a little video diddy of me demoing making rings.



If you are also curious about my ring making process, here is a tutorial I made years ago - it shows exactly how these are made. Just excuse the old website format... makes me think I should re-do this tutorial... that website it is on is an old template of mine that takes forever to load all the seperate pictures...

sheesh. :)

Fun Times

Okay my blog is not wide enough to play this here... but if you go to
http://www.tripadvisor.com/TIQGame
you can play this. Its fun. I'll warn you though, its long and the map is too small!

This Traveler IQ challenge compares your geographical knowledge against the World's First Travel journal's other 3,281,011 travelers who have taken this challenge as of Friday, November 07, 2008 at 07:56PM GMT. (TravelPod is a member of the TripAdvisor Media Network) -