WCCJ Holiday Market - Shopping for a Really Good Cause

Look at this BEAUTIFUL graphic I just got for the WCCJ Holiday market! From the looks of this poster they're going to have some beautiful work. And I'm going to be part of it - botanical beeswax candles, anyone? Very excited on this end.



Best of all, a portion of the proceeds go to support Western Carolinians for Criminal Justice (WCCJ), a cause I strongly believe in. A semi-little-known fact is that I actually possess a law degree myself, and in fact practiced law for several years before we moved back to Asheville, so this is a cause I can fully get behind. It's true that in 1997 when I graduated from UNC with a JD I never thought I'd be supporting criminal justice by selling candles - probably actual use of the law degree would have seemed a safer bet. I love that - you just never quite know where you're going to end up. Keeps some excitement in the whole process.

So - the sale is December 4-5 at the Grove Arcade, lots of great artists and artisans will be represented, and I'll have a lot more information as the time gets closer. I was going to wait until I had a little more detail before I mentioned it - but the graphic just showed up in my inbox, and was so pretty I couldn't wait.



Wait, there's more! Yet another copy of this graphic! Why? Because blogger decreed it should be so. I don't know its reason, but blogger was very insistent, so here's another, somewhat smaller, copy for your enjoyment.

Where Aren't We Going to Be?

It's candlepalooza around here. I'm getting ready to take some candles over to the Asheville Art Museum for their Holiday Market (which should be really cool - they bring in a lot of art & craft for the week - I'm looking forward to doing some shopping there.) And tomorrow I'm taking candles over to the Asheville Shop at the Chamber of Commerce - lots of local work in there. And a week from today we're going to the Vance Elementary Holiday Craft Explosion from 12-5. So lots of candle making going on around here.

Also going on around here - lots of bike riding, lots of swimming, tiny little dribble of running. Today Robin and I are heading out on the road bikes - because it's warrrrrm. The mountain bikes are more fun in the cold - really it can't get too cold to ride a mountain bike around here - but the road bike can be slightly miserable when it's really cold. Speaking of mountain bikes Robin introduced me to a new Bent Creek trail on Friday. Lower Sidehill - although if that's the lower version of that trail I'd certainly hate to see the upper one. Somehow I just get in a rut of doing the same thing every time we go, so it's fun to be with someone who knows the trails so well.

More later - gotta go label candles and find my short sleeved bike jersey.

Lazy Sunday

So Art in the Park was yesterday - and the weather gods were not so kind to us as they were they first time. It was cold. In fact, if you won't be offended, I'll confess that it was fu@k!ng freezing. We got there at 8:15 to set up, and left at 4:00, and in between was kind of a lot of time to stand around in the howling 40 degree wind. But we alternated taking fun field trips - down to City Market to visit our peeps, and otherwise around downtown, and so the time passed pretty quickly. And here's the shocking part of the whole thing - people still come to these things, even when rain looks imminent and the wind is howling and it's 40 degrees. Me? I'd be curled up at home (or maybe running, but you're moving and get warm), I probably wouldn't be out perusing art booths. But there are people in this world that actually do, and to them I say. . . THANK YOU! Because we actually had a pretty good day, and I find that miraculous. At one point I was actually half way hoping a customer wouldn't buy something, because I was too cold to take off my gloves and operate the credit card machine. But then sense reasserted itself.

To reward myself for my long day in the cold, I got up this morning and was in the Warren Wilson pool at 8am for a swim clinic. To each her own I suppose. It was actually fun - because I can tell that all of my attempts at learning to swim are paying off. (I mean learning to *really* swim - because I could always doggie paddle, but that was about it.) And to reward myself for being in the pool at 8 I slept away the afternoon. Ah, bliss. Ok, I did go run after I woke up, but only for 10 minutes because I'm on this super-slow return to running plan. And it does feel kind of silly to drag on all of my cold weather running gear for 10 minutes, but it's kind of fun too. Like a joke that only I'm in on. I guess you take what you get when it comes to entertaining yourself.

This Week in Pictures

Here are a few random pics from the last week or so:

Art in the Park - weather was GREAT, booth location was GREAT, other vendors were GREAT, customers were GREAT - and we're getting ready to do it all over again this Saturday. Weather forecast currently not so fortuitous.


Sam's fall baseball picture - see, I told you Little League is the cutest sport ever. And you haven't even seen the 5 year olds who are really too young to play but their dad insists anyway. (I'm not being sexist - it's always the dads. Trust me.)


My hair if I blow it dry. Very Diana Ross, no? It's a look I generally avoid, but the other day I left swim practice and needed to go work outside and it was cold so. . . Diana Ross. I picked Sam up at school and he took one look and said "Mom you need a haircut. You're hair's all fuzzy, and kind of sticking straight out on the sides." Perceptive fellow.



New maple leaf candles. I think the red's a pretty good contrast with the beeswax, and even Clark (v.p. of marketing and CEO of the disdainful sniff) thought they came out pretty well. I'm not being overly harsh on Clark here - an artisan crafter pretty much needs a person who makes no bones about what deserves a disdainful sniff. Otherwise you can find yourself going crazy and gluing rick-rack to god only knows what, and pretty soon you're a Cracker Barrel crafter. Seriously, it could happen.

Return of the Crafters

This week we're taking a departure from our regularly scheduled program. We usually (as in every Saturday for months and months on end) are vendors at City Market. And I love City Market - it's big and fun and interesting, with a ton of cool vendors. But for the next few weeks we're trying something new - Art & Craft Shows. It's what you might call an experiment, and one we're really excited about. So, here's where we'll be for the next little while:

October 3 (tomorrow!) & October 17: Art in the Park. Asheville's first Art in the Park, to be held at Pack Square from 10-5. Couldn't be a better location in Asheville, and we couldn't have a better location at the show - come find us in the red tent right in front of the Art Museum. The list of vendors looks amaaaaazing. Beautiful stuff. (check out the website if you don't believe me.)

October 10 - Church Street Art & Craft Show in downtown Waynesville from 10-5. We haven't been to this one before, but it purports to have a bazillion visitors and be way fun. They even have two stages for bands, and downtown Waynesville is like something off of a post card, so come join us for the fun. Again, look for the. . . red tent. Are you sensing a theme here?

And in the midst of all this roaming about, if you 'd like something we make but don't want to roam about yourself, I've finally managed to get the etsy site up and operational. It isn't fully stocked yet, but I'm making some progress.


So how does one prepare for all of this
art & craftiness?? By making wreaths, as evidenced here (also this serves as photographic proof that I should really listen to my mother and consider wearing makeup on a more regular basis.) In addition to my lack of makeup, please note the treehouse-like setting of my flower building. Love it.

And preparation has also included making candles like a maniac. Our sideboard is barely visible under all of the beeswax.

And lastly, prep has included a fair bit of Little League baseball, which is still hands down the cutest sport on the planet. Sam had some good plays last night, but my favorite part of the game was his teammate skipping back to the dugout after being tagged out at first. Skipping. Priceless.

Art in the Park!

So Pack Square Park is finally coming along downtown (finally!), and I sort of had been hoping City Market might move there. Alas, it seems that is not to be. But I was still hoping cool things would start happening in the park, preferably cool things I could be part of. And then, eureka! I heard about Asheville Art in the Park. It's a fine art & craft show taking place at Pack Square Park the first three weekends in October - and we're going to be part of it! I'm excited to be joining so many talented artists for this show - go to the website, they have a great video of lots of the artists (not us, because alas I have no professional pictures of my stuff. In fact, I'm slightly intimidated, though very flattered, to be included with this crowd.) So I'll keep you updated on progress, and meantime mark your calendars! It'll be a great way to kick off the park.

Saturday at the City Market

I walked around at The Asheville City Market on Saturday taking pictures of vendors other than me (for once). Here it is, a sampling of all the other cool stuff out there at the market:

Happy Market Day, and Trial Run of the Wetsuit

Was a happy market day today - happy as in, I'm happy so many people like to come shop at the City Market! It was a mob scene - all of my flowers (of which there are not yet as many as I would like) were gone by 10:00. And the market's open until 1:00, so you can see that there was quite a bit of lost sales opportunity there. But we sold about a zillion tomato plants, a bunch of other starts, some seeds and a bunch of crafts...

we sold vegetable baby rattles, and ...


and a few pairs of booties, among other things.

So a good day, and I left Clark alone for a couple of hours of it. Because for the first time this year I actually made it to a... Tee Ball Game! Cutest sporting event ever. I'm pretty sure the other parents were beginning to think Sam had divorced parents that split custody of him, because Clark and I never showed up at the games together, and I'm usually the one who takes him to practice. And I guess we still didn't show up at the game together, since this time Clark held down the fort at market, but since I was trying to finish up a knitted dog (like this one) while Sam was playing, it sparked some conversation and they at least figured why I'm not at all of the games.


After market we headed back to the farm, and I was dying to try out my new wetsuit (like this one, except larger and with less beefcake in it.)



So I squirmed myself into it (no easy feat) and launched into the lake. And it turns out everything I've heard is true: (a) wetsuits can mask a lot of swimming issues, since the bottom half of your body just floats along behind you - major thumbs up, and (b) practicing swimming in open water is a good thing (less freaky this time - last time I got in, took a few strokes in the mucky water, and yelled back to shore "If anything shows up through these goggles I'm going to lose my sh!t!!!!!" This time didn't feel quite as much like a snapping turtle, a snake, or the loch ness monster was about to pop up in my field of vision.)

So I did a little swimming, we rounded up Sam, who was about knee deep in mud at the edge of the lake, and we headed home with lofty ideas putting in a bunch of plants in our yard (plants that have been living on the bench on our patio for way too long.) In fact I smugly marveled to Clark that market days just don't seem as tiring this year as they did last year. And then it hit me and I drug myself into the house and have barely managed to stay upright while typing this. Clark (the show off) is out planting flowers.

One last funny note about market mornings - we had to drag Sam along with us at 5:30 this morning because my mom wasn't feeling like hosting a sleepover last night, and as Clark carried him downstairs Sam yells "I don't know how you guys live like this!" Drama king.

Behold, the Candles Actually Exist

Here it is - proof that I'm not making up the candle story, and also proof that I did create something besides a big mess with all of the beeswax. They're still a little bit of a work in progress, but overall I'm pretty happy with the trend (as in, they started out cracked into big pieces, then went to slightly crazy looking, and have now progressed to a pretty close facsimile of what I'm trying to do.) I'm having fun figuring out what kinds of flowers and plants look good in them, and also getting the whole overdipping progress ironed out. And also figuring out what you can and can't accomplish with a heat gun (note to self, don't let the end come anywhere near the fingers. Got a couple of blisters today that will bear that one out.) But, and most importantly - the candles do exist!