Autumn Art Fest 2011

This past weekend was the annual craft fair, or more properly, the Autumn Art Fest, at UUFR. This was my 4th or 5th year participating, and it was, as always, great fun! I expanded my offerings quite a bit this year from the tea tins I originally started out with.

Tea tins covered with chiyogami paper

Based on last year’s sales, I was beginning to believe I had saturated the local market interested in tea tins, so this year called for some brainstorming. I had come up with some ideas, and just as I was thinking about what kinds of cloth I could use to make several of them and still stick to a nice Japanese theme, shibori artist Susan Fennell emailed me to say she thought she wasn’t going to have time to do the fair this year. Sad news for me, because it’s always fun when we can have our tables near each other and talk about Japanese arts and crafts (and more!), but maybe I could represent her at my table too, by making my new things out of cloth she had dyed! She very kindly whipped me up a whole selection of fat quarters in many different colors and patterns, and I attached her card to each of the items I made. Here’s how they turned out:

Business card cases

Needle cases

The needle cases “pages” are made of felt, which helps remove oil from our fingers that can eventually cause discoloration to the sides of needles and pins, and I think the nice flat, compact shape should make them pretty good for taking projects along.

Teacup pincushions

The pincushions also feature round felt pockets under the surface of the fabric, filled with emery sand, which helps keep the pins and needles all sharp. One thing I think I might try next year would be to paint some designs on the sides of the teacups, since they seem a bit plain, but I know at least one customer this year said she prefers them this way. I did have a few people say they hesitated to buy a pincushion in a teacup due to the propensity of puppy tails or inquisitive noses and paws to push things onto the floor, so I need to come up with an all-soft version, too.

My favorite new items were these memory games:

Memory game sets

Here’s a shot of all the game pieces together, showing the different patterns of chiyogami paper making the matches.

Memory game tiles

The wooden tiles were cut from a block of Brazilian cherry. I then hand-sanded them all and finished them with non-toxic salad bowl finish, the same stuff we used on our butcher block kitchen counters. After the finish dried, I used very fine steel wool to smooth out any sections of excess finish, and then affixed the patterned paper with acid-free archival glue. I think they turned out pretty well, and the 3-year-old great-granddaughter of the fair organizer seemed to approve as well, since she kept coming over to my table to “help demonstrate” all day Sunday!

I also decided to take some of my original temari this year. I’d tried it a couple of years ago, but no one knew what they were, so they didn’t sell. (Well, my grandmother bought one, but I thought that was silly, because I would have given it to her for Christmas anyway.) This year, though, it seems the word about temari has spread! I had several people stop by and say, “Oh, you make temari!” and I sold two of the four balls I’d brought, one to a fellow needlecrafter, and the other to a woman who had lived in Japan for several years in the 1970s and collected some temari then.

A selection of temari

The four balls on the right were the ones I took this time, and both of the middle ones, with stitching in bright green and purple, were the ones that sold. I’ll blog about them all in more detail soon.

Another new item I took this year was an origami crane mobile, but I have yet to get a truly good picture of these, since they tend to move around. But they were lots of fun to make, and I hope to make more, so I’ll definitely have to figure out the right photography technique.

All in all, a pretty successful year! (Even tea tins did well again! You never can tell…)

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