The Weasel will seek any way in....

Ah, the time honored tradition of artists seeking any means to subsidize their income....
Our local Farmer's Market in Charlottesville, VA is ready to start up in April and I would like to try to get in on it to experience what it is like! I learned a good deal from the "Holiday Market" that they held last this past winter on the downtown mall. Lesson number one: I hate cold weather. Lesson number two: People generally don't understand what a block print is or what printmaking entails. I didn't give the Holiday Market a fair try as I only sat for one day but sitting outside all day in the freezing cold on the advent of a snow storm with a total of two customers was not my idea of success. I am looking forward to the summer market though because I love sunshine and fresh vegetables! People didn't really know how to approach my stand with prints and framed works in the winter. They sort of treated it like a gallery and viewed the work and made comments but no real interest in sales. For this summer market I'm focusing only on "pedestrian" materials like journals, cards, and such. To begin with there will be only two products for sale just to see how things go. Those two products will be "Upcycled Cork Stamps" and "Hard Bound Journals".
I completed the display for some cork stamps that I made yesterday. It was so much fun to get this project together! I collect corks from bottles of wine that we drink over time and I had collected 28 before I really knew what I wanted to do with them. I designed a simple box template that I stamp my information on the front of and a sample image of the completed stamp on top. After I complete an image, I stamp it on the top of the box and in my "Stamp Morgue" book to record its existence and then wrap it in tissue paper and stuff it into the little box to await a new owner! I had made a small box full of them and could foresee that lining them up on a flat table was not my idea of successful display....especially if the wind kicked up. I sat down and sketched out a rudimentary design for a vertical display stand and set about assembling it out of odds and ends of foam core and cardboard that I had ferreted away over time. After much tweaking an adjusting, I covered the whole thing in glue soaked craft paper. The boxes fit perfect and reminded me a lot of old country store displays with their lithograph label boxes and sparkling bottles of tinctures! I had a cork stamp that I had carved a few months ago that I fell in love with and I set about stamping out little birds to paste all over the box so that it would still look good after the products were sold! I will also be bringing the stamp with me to show people what it looks like and how well they work. I made the sign out of different papers I liked and hand wrote the script. The sign detaches so that it will travel better. I will say that I just know that after sitting in the sun the nice bright colors will fade but at least I have a photo record of what it looked like. I hope that when I do get out there that I will see all those little birds I pasted onto the display by the time I leave!