[ A beat up, weathered blue popup is set up on the side of Alamosa’s Main Street. One back corner is tied to the van’s tow hitch. A table sits in the back left corner, covered with a purple and white Mexican blanket. At the front is my portable workbench, with a folding camp chair sitting behind it. ]
Jasper put a link to the show on the household discord … August 29th? I think? & the application was due September 4th. So I spent that weekend putting together a couple more faery home decor pieces & then filling out the application, of which the hardest part was, of course, the prices.
I managed that a whole day ahead of time, & then realized that I had very little idea of 1) how to DO an art show, & also 2) how this particular one was run.
Turns out it was much closer to a craft show than a gallery show, which makes sense, given that I could choose to set up a popup with my stuff. Which I did, & then asked if I could bring MORE stuff, & upon hearing that I could, decided I was just gonna bring ALL the jewelry.
… all my jewelry display stuff is in the storage unit.
So I set out, two days before the show, to remedy this, with a budget of zero dollars & zero cents. I asked the Blessed Tommaso, He Who Built Eisental Camp An Entire Kitchen On A Budget Of Zero That One Pennsic, to put in a good word for me with the Gods of I Wonder What I Can Find In This Pile Of Junk, & set about wandering around the yard to see what might be useful.
Turns out we had a couple old fridge shelves, the grid kind. Also some metal grid shelving. & I have card stock & Inkscape & am not afraid to use either.
[ A selection of metal grids, often used as fridge shelves, hang from a popup tent; each is covered with white or purple cardstock cards, each of which holds a pendant or a pair of earrings. Many of them hang at odd angles. ]
& then I attacked the stack of plywood with the circular saw, attacked the pile of old roof tarp with a pair of scissors, & joined the two with the first roll of duct tape my eyes fell upon.
[ A hunk of plywood, about two by four feet, hangs from the top of the popup wall. It’s covered in beat-up, formerly-white tarp, which has been attached with neon green duct tape. Eight faery home decor pieces hang from it. Another, similar piece, sits on the ground, leaning against the popup leg; it’s filled with earrings and pendulums. ]
Then I spent NINE THOUSAND YEARS punching holes in each of the cards, writing prices & names on em, then attaching jewelry. At one point I couldn’t find the hatpin I use to make earring holes, & almost had an entire meltdown over it, but I did my deep breathing & they turned up.
It all looks EXTREMELY JANKY & I LOVE IT.
THEN I stuck CJ’s popup in the van, along with the two plastic buckets me & Jasper used to make pell bases cos they’re heavy, & then me & Jasper & Loiosh drove into town.
It was, thank the weather deities, not windy. Loiosh was feeling VERY froggy & pinned me in my chair for a while halfway through setup, for the sole & express purpose of purring vigorously at me, but that wasn’t actually a problem, because Jasper was still busy getting all the faery home decor stuff, the necklaces, & maybe half the pendulums arranged on the plywood, then tacking them all down. I hadn’t wanted to do that at home, because I didn’t want to transport them that way, but then I was too tired to take everything back off at the end of the day so my entire jewelry inventory is still sitting in the van, hanging from hunks of plywood & metal grid things.
I’d stuck my jewelry workbag & the basket with spare wire & stuff in the van, too (my portable workbench & camp chair live there) because one of the questions on the application was ‘are you willing to demonstrate your work’ & my answer to that is HELL YEAH I WILL. I even found a nice hunk of rusty steel wire while we were getting set up, which wound up getting used in the piece I got mostly done over the course of the day.
[ My beat-up old workbench; it’s made from pallet wood. On it is an old mouse pad covered with blue fabric, various pieces of metal, a couple jewelry tools, and a small, flat jewelry anvil with a spiral piece of copper sitting on it. ]
I sat there & worked on stuff for a while, Loiosh nommed on gooshyfud & collected a lot of love from passersby, Jasper took a couple packed orders to the post office. After a while I had to move my work setup to the other side of the tent to get out of the sun. Loiosh took a nap, then woke up & was wiggly, so I stuffed him in the stroller & took him for a walk. Did you know Salida has a circus? I did not know this! Loiosh flopped in their booth for a good twenty minutes & was the happiest cat in the world. We stopped in at Milagros to grab a mixed berry smoothie & some ice & then headed back to the booth, where I ALMOST had the thing I was working on finished up when it was time to tear down. (The rest took about six minutes Monday morning.)
[ A faery home decor piece hangs against a white background; it’s roughly triangular, point down, the top of the triangle curved upward. The spiral wire from the last image is part of it, along with a number of silver-colored and purple beads. ]
Tearing down took, like, fifteen minutes, which I LOVE, because everything was just hanging on boardlike objects which could just be stuck directly in the van. I wish I could do this with the soap!
& then I drove home & went basically immediately to bed.
