Golf and Gifts

This is one of the coolest, original ideas I've heard for an arts/craft show in a long long time.

Art Out of Thin Air, the energetic year-old artists' organization in Grand County, Colorado, is holding its first member show at the new Pole Dreek Golf Course Club House in Tabernash.

The show will be held from July 2 through July 23, 2009 with a Show Opening and Artists’ Reception on Thursday, July 2 that sounds like it's going to be a lot of fun.

Each artist is allowed to show two items for display and sale (or not). If an item sells, the artist can replace it with another through the duration of the show.

The show not only gives local artists exposure to an audience that may not usually attend arts and crafts fairs. It's also an audience known to have money and taste. In return, the public golf course gets to show off its new clubhouse while its filled with art and people.

I'm thinking my hand-quilted pillows using vintage golf posters reproduced on fabric may be the perfect things to display.

The fee to participate is minimal: $25 to show one artwork or $30 for two. The money will be used for advertising and other necessities. In a great gesture, Art Out of Thin Air organizers promise to return any money left over to the artists.

The deadline to acknowledge your intention to participate is Friday, June 5. Grand County, Colorado, artists who are interested in participating should contact info@artoutofthinair.com

Charge!

I finally gave up on Wells Fargo Bank late last year and cancelled my long-held merchant account. The fees were just getting ridiculous. A fee for this, a fee for that, a fee for something else, on top of the percentage of sales they sucked from my account each month. And all those fees or percentages seemed to increase at an alarming rate.

So far I don’t think I’ve lost a significant number of sales by no longer accepting credit or debit cards. But as I head into the big summer show season, I’m wondering what kind of hit I may take. It could go two ways, I figure:

-- With everyone tight on cash, credit card use will be heavier and I’ll lose sales.

-- Credit card interest rates are killing people’s finances so they’re using them less frequently, meaning they should have the cash or write a check to pay for their purchases and I won’t lose many sales.

We all know many arts and crafts show purchases are spontaneous. A customer needs to really like and want a product to consider walking over to an ATM to get cash or back to the car to get the checkbook, then returning to my booth to buy something. They may say “I’ll be back to get it,” but they often aren’t.

I’ve sometimes directed people at shows to my online sales, but that, too, removes the spontaneity of purchases. While I’ve been surprised by some of the follow-through for those types of sales, I’d rather make them on-the-spot in my booth at a show.

So, if the first couple events next month indicate I’m losing sales by no longer accepting plastic, I’ll have to reconsider. The research is headache-inducing. So many banks and card processing companies to choose from but few that offer exactly what I want: low fees, low percentages and the ability to put the account on hold for months when I’m not doing shows.

Anyone have any merchant account provider recommendations or suggestions?

Buy Direct

See that ArtFire icon on the upper left of this page? Click it on and shop for Day Dream Crafts products right from this blog. Quick and easy.

We'll be adding new products to our www.ArtFire.com studio regularly. Look for more wine bottle bags, lunch bags and quilts as well as some very cool pillows made with fabric reproductions of vintage postcards, travel posters, photos, labels and advertising.

Thrifty Business

I hit the jackpot at my local thrift shop today -- many yards of unused cotton fabric from someone’s abandoned or unloved sewing stash.

There’s a fruit print that’s predominantly grapes and will make a great lining for my wine bottle gift bags or the back of a pillow made of fabric reproductions of old wine labels. The yards of solid dark green, navy and burgundy fabric are perfect for pillow backs. The kitschy 50s cabin/canoe/bear/moose and cowboy reproduction prints will come in handy. And the half-yard pieces of oddball novelty prints -- Ms. Pacman, tractors, lizards -- may find a use in some future project. OK, maybe not Ms. Pacman, but the tractors have potential.

The shop and a couple other thrift stores in the Denver area have my business card taped up near the cash register. They know to call anytime someone unloads grandma’s attic, mom’s no-longer-used sewing room or an out-of-business shop’s inventory.

I’ve come home with yards of top-of-the-line quilting fabric, bags of patchwork pieces and their templates cut from cereal boxes or magazine pages, boxes of batting, vintage quilt blocks, baskets of thread and jars of buttons, all of which were re-used and upcycled into pillows, quilts, totes, bags and collage artwork. Most of the finds average to about $1 or $2 per yard, far cheaper than the jaw-dropping prices now found at quilt shops and fabric stores.

Everything goes into the wash before I use it, even if the products had never been used. They often take on the musty smell of storage, had been used as a cat bed or have been picked over by one too many sticky fingers. Washing them well is not negotiable. Even buttons and sometimes spools of thread are tossed in a mesh lingerie bag and washed on a gentle cycle.

The best detergent product I’ve found is not the expensive quilting-only washes or gentle-cycle products, but a small blue plastic bottle of liquid called WIN. It’s not available in stores, only online (try Amazon).

WIN is designed to take the stink out of sweaty well-used synthetic sportswear. All those “wicking” fabrics designed to pull moisture away from hiking, biking, running, skiing, snowboarding or snowshoeing bodies also pull the stink right into the fibers where it stays. One wash with “super oxygenated” WIN takes out the odor without damaging the fabric, making it perfect for quilts and quilting supplies. Use the gentle cycle of your machine and warm or cold water.

After a quick press and nice fold, the new finds get added to my fabric stash piles, revealing none of their low-cost thrift shop origins.

Arts Show Season Starts Soon

My first arts and crafts show of the 2009 summer season is just two months away. It’s the Festival of Arts and Crafts in beautiful Grand Lake, Colorado, June 6 and 7.

This is a sweet little event held in a gorgeous town park with views of the snow-covered peaks of Rocky Mountain National Park and the sparkling blue waters of Lake Granby. Area wildlife often walk through town and having to shovel moose or elk droppings out of your booth space before setting up is one unique element of this show. The organizers do their job well. The free pastries and coffee each morning are a nice touch.

I love using this show as the start of my season. It lets me test new products, play with my booth design and get feedback about both from returning customers and returning vendors who’ve become friends as well as friends who have become customers. Grand Lake is an easy and gorgeous 45-minute drive from my home.

Early June may seem late for just getting started with the summer show season, but this is Colorado, where weather in the mountains can range from hot sunshine to snow and wind any month of the year.

Three years ago, we awoke at Grand Lake to find six inches of snow on our booths. Many artists left, but a few of us brushed the snow away, bought dry socks at a nearby store and opened our booths with surprisingly good sales that afternoon. A year earlier, I spent the weekend in shorts and t-shirt, constantly fanning myself to cool off under the summer-like sun.

Early June also is the time that reverse-snowbirds from Texas, Oklahoma and Arizona start returning to their summer homes in the mountains and start looking for new ways to decorate those homes, providing the show with a build-in customer base.

Two months to go means evenings and weekends full of sewing. I customize my inventory of pillows, bags and other items for each show, reproducing vintage postcards and travel posters of that area on fabric and then quilting them into one-of-a-kind home décor items. Fortunately, Grand Lake and Rocky Mountain National Park have been popular tourist spots since the early 1900s and great postcards are easy to find.

For details about Grand Lake, go to http://www.grandlakechamber.com/index.html.

Everything Old is New Again

Everything old is new again. That adage isn’t just about fashion or architecture. It’s about my arts and crafts work. I take vintage textiles, antique quilt squares and old patchwork castoffs and turn them into new decorative quilts, pillows and totes.

The first photo here represents once such project. It’s a decorative quilt that started with a single late-1940s or early-1950s hand-pieced quilt square in a maple leaf pattern. The leaf is made from old plaid shirting fabric set in muslin. I found the old quilt block in the bottom of a basket of sewing supplies at the back of an antique store. It was wrinkled, uneven and had a nasty musty smell. But for 50 cents I took it home, washed it twice, pressed it flat and trimmed it square.

I set the refurbished quilt block on point with muslin corner triangles. To that I added a contemporary teal southwestern print that complemented the blue leaf. Borders, an appliquéd Kokopeli figure, beads, buttons and intricate hand-quilting finished the project. The eye-catching final product sold in the first hour of my next craft show.



The quilt in this photo required a little bit more work. The center pink star-and-ribbon piece is actually four antique quilt blocks that I connected to form one medallion. Three were in good shape but one required some repair work. I carefully removed two badly torn muslin pieces, cut new ones and re-stitched the block. But my new muslin was a much different color than the well-aged original muslin. I stitched the four squares together to form the medallion and then tea-dyed the entire piece, giving it a very aged look overall.

The finished center piece was then set on point with a vintage-looking reproduction print of children playing in the snow -- building snowmen, throwing snowballs, skiing. The pink in the print perfectly matched the tea-dyed pink fabric. This quilt, 38 inches square, is currently available at ArtFire.com: http://www.artfire.com/modules.php?name=ViewListing&product_id=148947.

The key to working with vintage quilt blocks or fabrics is to make sure they’re in good enough shape and durable enough for your project. Interfacing ironed onto the back of a fragile piece can give it more life. Don’t look for perfection in vintage fabrics -- enjoy the stains, spots, frays, discolorations, and mismatched seams for the stories they hold. I love taking something old and worn, and turning it into something new and useful. Now, if I could just find a way to do that with myself.