Art Fair Too!!

As I was considering where to go on my lunch hour on Friday (when I'd be on my own, instead of with a pal), I realized that there was a piece that I had seen on Wednesday that I really liked. I wondered if I would like it again. I did!! So, I bought it. Look at this:

That's pottery!! That was made by Kris Stewart, a member of the Potters Guild of Ann Arbor. It's about 12-15 inches long, about 3 inches wide and is, essentially, half a tube. The surface, though, is what got me. It feels like a birch tree. The texture is uncanny. This potter has done some serious study of the inspiration and of her techniques. It is a truly impressive piece, and I will say that it impressed me far more on Friday than it did on Wednesday. I think the big reason is that when I saw it on Wednesday I was just getting started on the fairs and didn't know what else was out there. On Friday, I was really paying attention.

As the lady was wrapping it, she mentioned that it's a bit fragile, and I realized that I was halfway to where my husband had parked the car. So, I headed to the car and went down a block of the fair I hadn't previously gone. There, I encountered a booth where Adam Egenolf uses a crystalline glazing process. I wish I could have gotten a good picture of the piece I bought, but it is a study in shades of white and simply didn't come out in my attempts. The pieces are very lovely, very unusual, and utterly amazing.

The second day of Art Fairs rain started as I was heading back to my office. (There is a rule in this area that if we get only one day of rain in July, that day will be during Art Fair, and the rain will be torrential and threaten tornadoes.)

After work, I headed for Main Street. I left work shortly after 5 and sent Hubby a note that I would be at his office by 6, so this was supposed to be just a sightseeing trip to the part of the fair I hadn't seen yet. Right. I stopped at a booth where Sandra Lima of Mount Gilead, Ohio, was selling collages. They were lovely. We got to talking. Of course I bought a piece. I think it was the brownies that got me here:

The piece is probably about 14" x 17" - I really should measure these things. I have a spot on my bedroom wall for this piece. (My kitchen walls are quite full, thank you!)

I want to remind you that if you are going to be in southeastern Michigan next weekend, the Greater Ann Arbor Quilt Guild will be holding its biannual show at Washtenaw Community College's Morris Lawrence Center. Saturday, 9-5, and Sunday, 11-5. I'm the volunteer coordinator for the show and will be somewhere near the front of the show most of the weekend. Stop by and introduce yourself!

Art Fair!!

I LOVE Art Fair, love it love it love it. It runs Wednesday through Saturday, but really seems to start on Monday, when the streets start getting closed off, and the booth boundaries get marked. The first two days of the fair, I went out with a friend at lunch time, and we poked around, chatted with people we knew and didn't buy anything except some candied almonds. I've gone out by myself in the evenings, and last evening, I bumped into a friend from the book club, and we wandered along together.

Anyway, the first evening out, I made an impulse purchase:

Isn't that gorgeous? It's 8" on a side, and it's all stones carefully placed on a piece of slate. I kept looking at it and looking at it and looking at it, and well, it had to go home with me. If you want to see more of the artists' work, check out their website.

I also made a very conscious purchase. In addition to the "official" art fairs, there are a couple of "private" art fairs. At one of these, I've gotten in the habit over the years of buying a dress or top. This year, it was a spaghetti-strapped dress with this darling painted on it:

The vendor is called "Creations by Tina," and she's based in Sand Springs, Oklahoma. I was unable to track down a working website. She paints jersey dresses all over and then puts a large motif in the sternum area. My only cavil with this dress is that it didn't have pockets. I had to install some side-seam pockets yesterday morning before I could wear it to work. Of course, when you're 50, and you haven't done much "working out," you wear a T-shirt under the dress...

Next, I've been spinning along for the Tour de Fleece. Here is what I've done over the past week or so:

I'm so pleased with how pretty it is!!

Finally, I want you to see what the Yarn Piggy did with the piece of hand-dyed fabric I sent her last month. So, check out her blog.

I opened the front door today, and I think we'll be able to swim to work - yeah. Hot and HUMID!!

What I'm Reading Wednesday

Every so often I see a movie where I want to grab people and say, "You've really got to see this movie." In the last couple of weeks, I've seen two of those movies (thank you, Netflix!). Both are about people living in dangerous times under tyrannical regimes. In both movies, most of the characters are struggling with questions concerning how much of their sense of SELF they can give up in order to survive and not become someone else.

The first movie, which I saw this past weekend, is The Lives of Others (German, with English subtitles). It came out in 2006, and I meant to see it in the theater, and .... anyway. It won all sorts of awards, including the Oscar for best foreign film of the year. The movie concerns the Stasi (secret police) in East Germany in the 1980s, and the surveillance of "enemies of the state." There are SO many places where this movie could have gone seriously offtrack - violence, torture, sentimentality, big dramatic scenes - and it doesn't go those places. It is a quiet, carefully controlled film where one really gets inside the heads of the characters. Put this in your queue, borrow it from the library, whatever. Just see it.

The second movie, which I saw the weekend before last, is The Black Book (Dutch, with English subtitles). It also came out in 2006. I had never heard of it, and I'm not entirely sure how it got in my queue, but I'm glad it did. The film is set in The Netherlands in the last few months of the Second World War and is centered on a young Jewish woman who has been hiding from the Nazis through the duration of the war. The film starts with her losing her hiding place and having to find another way to survive. This is also a very intense movie, filled with lots of places where the movie makers could have gone seriously off track, but the movie stays close to the heroine as she struggles to make it out alive.

Both of these movies have been accompanying me on my daily rounds as I think through some of the decisions the characters made and why they made them. I like movies that do that to me. That's what I've been reading - subtitles!!

On a crafty note, I bound, sleeved (for the show), and labeled the Scraptastic quilt this past weekend, around my other activities. You'll see that I went with a different fabric for the binding. I had wanted to use this fabric, but I didn't think I had enough until I came across another piece of it in a different cupboard.

This weekend, the quilt guild had a "garage sale" where folks brought in stuff they don't want any more, and the rest of us buy it. I found a piece of fabric, at least 4 yards, possibly 5, for $1 that will make a great dress!

Isn't that pretty!!

The next few days will be taken up with The Ann Arbor Art Fairs. There are four official fairs and a couple of unofficial ones, and the closest to my office starts just across the street from the building where I work. Woo hoo!! Of course, I love to stroll the streets and look at the pretty stuff and talk to artists and buy special items; but, get real, the one constant every year is this:

A dinner-plate sized piece of fried dough sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar and eaten hot .... gotta run!