Guild Show

As I mentioned last week, I belong to the Foothills Craft Guild. It's the oldest guild in Tennessee and does a show every year in November. Sometimes they find other venues for us to participate in. This past weekend we had a show at the Emporium in downtown Knoxville. I think 35 of us participated and were each allowed to submit 3 pieces for the show. No awards or anything, just a show with a chance to sell something.

I went down Friday evening for the First Friday event. All of downtown is open with the shops having food and wine. I snapped this picture during a lull. There were alot of people there! The gallery is in the lower level and on each side are studio spaces. The guild has one space for their headquarters and a permanent exhibit of their collection that we can donate to.

I suspect that the rest of the weekend was much slower. I was there Saturday morning from 10 til noon. We did have a few people come through to see the show but mostly it was a chance to meet the other crafters who'd volunteered for the same time period and get to know them better. At the show, you get to know the people whose booth is right by yours. Some people never are near your booth so you don't get to chat with them. The people there Saturday were ones I hadn't gotten to know well before.

 As promised I took pictures on Saturday of some of the exhibit. Don't you just love how they decided to tack the label onto the head of my mannequins? I thought it was funny.

 This is Hugh Bailey's cat house. Of course, two of his three pieces sold. He's very popular and I do have a bunch of his critters in my kitchen among the african violets. He's incredibly talented and incredibly reasonable in his prices. That little cat house probably cost $65.

 My painted warp vest looks good on the mannequin especially right by the fire extinguisher. Adds a bit of color to the display, don't you think? The building is probably 100 years old, or close to it, so we do need the added security of things like fire extinguishes prominently displayed!

 I thought Karen Noggle's masks were too cool. The basket is also hers. All are made of leather. She's really talented and makes her living doing leather. She was also in charge of the whole thing. She is director of the show in November too. I think she's done it so long she has it all figured out, but still, what a huge amount of work she does!!! And the grief she gets from people not happy about their spaces, etc etc!!

 Just a view along one wall of the exhibit. The whole thing looked great but we could have had 7 or 8 more people participating.

So, at home I have a new toy. I saw Gilmore Loom's Mini Wave in Handwoven and about had a fit over how cute it looked in the picture. LouAnn and Tina had gotten us into inkle weaving again at the center and I"d pulled my old Knox DeLong loom out of storage and put the belt pictured below on it. I just could not get the tension tight enough on it. I don't know if it's because it was a homemade loom or too old or just the nature of the beast, but it didn't make me happy at all. So seeing this little loom was too much of a temptation and I just had to have it. It came over the weekend and Monday I put a warp on it and took it along to the center to show the possibilities. I do like the way you can get the tension nice and taut. I don't know that I"ll do alot of belt weaving but there are lots of possibilities with it!! Nice and easy to transport is a huge plus!

On the looms at home now are still the painted scarf warp, an almost threaded mug rug warp and on my nilus, plum. Next up will be pink. Hopefully I'll get enough woven this week to have some pictures next time on what's on the loom at home.
Carol;