SOWA - Pictures, Finally

Finally, a couple pictures from SOWA! The South End of Boston is a really cool, vibrant neighborhood, the South of Washington area is undergoing a rebirth of sorts, and I love that they have an open air market there every week over the summer now. The Art Walk coincided with the market's opening weekend.

We set up on Friday, in the midst of normal Boston workday traffic, it was a little crazy, but there was temporary parking for us, hooray!

The buildings where we set up - we were to the left a little bit of this picture, I just like the old brick smokestack here...

Here's my little set-up. Photographing indoors sucks, in a word. That flash just sucks all the color out of everything, doesn't it? The set-up worked out pretty well in the end, though. I'm not sure whether I'll continue to use hangers (like on the right in this photo), things do tend to slide off of them... And I like how the ladder display look. But the benefit of the hangers is that you can see more of the pieces that are to the rear. Hmmm. Must think on this more. The baskets hung on the gridwall worked really well for my eco-felt pillows.

I didn't do a very good job of getting around to take photos of other WAS people - but my friend Peter did! Check out his blog entry! (There's even a picture of me, eeks.)

I did manage a picture of my neighbor, though, the fabulous Ms. Vicky of Art by Verde:


Her work is just gorgeous. Love it. I came home with some of it. :) (One of the small landscapes to her left in this photo.) Vicky has a studio at Western Avenue Studios and was my first neighbor there (before she moved to the third floor, the traitor! lol!).

There was a *ton* of foot traffic through this show, but not a lot of bags going by, which means there were a lot of people just browsing. Not surprising, given the current economic situation, of course. I was pleased with how much I sold, in the end, especially since this really isn't the season that I sell well in, generally. Handed out a ton of cards, postcards and Western Avenue brochures, too, so that's always good, especially since last year people really *did* come back at Christmas time.

I also learned an interesting lesson, being next to Ms. Vicky - people seem to get stressed out about their booth location at a craft fair, etc. etc. Well, Vicky couldn't have had a tougher location, in my opinion (in the middle of a side corridor) and her stuff flew off of her pegwalls. Interesting, huh? A combination of really gorgeous work, that people really like, and reasonable prices (she paints a lot of small pieces, but she also sold one of her large pieces to a couple from Croatia!).

I'm trying to figure out how to apply this to my work... Weaving is very time-consuming after all, even if I am a fast weaver. It's interesting - I get two types of comments. Either raised eyebrows at the prices or comments about how *reasonable* my prices are. You can tell which group of customers know about fiber art/handwovens...

And considering my taste in yarn just keeps getting more expensive, my prices aren't going to be coming down anytime soon. I figure one way around it is to make sure my designs are interesting enough to make the pricetag not outlandish. And I'm also starting up a line of lower-priced, solid-color scarves, since I get requests for them quite often.

Anyway. The show was a lot of fun, and a really great way to try out my set-up, etc. I'll be there again next year, if they'll have me!