Levis Commons 2010 - Revisiting the 2010 Art / Craft show season

Another installment in the saga of my trials and successes in the Toledo art/craft show circuit...

Friday- setup. Took 3 hours - sunny and HOT! Staff passed out water to us. ( And WE just passed out! LOL)

Sat. - Cloudy start - hot & humid. Rain started 10 - 10:30, rained until 3 - got too cool for my sleeveless attire! Great artist amenities - coffee, donuts, bagels (think there was even a toaster in the artist "hospitality" tent!) juice, water, pop, fruit, and Andrew Z's supplied pizza! The hard part was getting to the food tent without getting soaked! Still had good sales, but really dropped after 5:00, and the show was open until 7:00! Drizzled until close. Dusk when we left. (Wind picked up about then, and I of course was worried the canopy would blow away, but everything was fine).

Sunday. Cloudy start - much better. Sun and breeze. TOO much breeze. Warm chocolate chip cookies donated by Max and Erma's. Was chilly most of the day, but sales were again good. I did purchase one thing, but I hated to leave our tent to go shopping, since it was spread out quite a distance would take me too long. Teardown went smoothly. (This is the Michigan Artist's Guild, which is the same Guild that hosts the Ann Arbor Street Fair, and I could really tell ~ everything was well organized and everyone knew what they were doing)! It WAS the most expensive festival I have ever done ~ guess you get what you pay for!

Dumpster Diving - Fun For Everyone!

One of the few problems I have with my castings and traveling is what to use for packing/cushioning material. Most bubblewrap is too thin - it works, but only if I use several layers. Newspaper is great, but it looks sloppy, tears easily, and gets wet if I have to pack in rainy conditions. The best materials I have found so far are foam rubber (but that stuff is incredibly expensive) and heavy duty bubblewrap, which is hard to find AND expensive. As a result, I am always on the lookout for better packing material.

So, one day last week, as I was walking to the park for - I'm positive- the absolute last time this year, I was thrilled to find this pool cover by the street in front of one of my neighbors! It was pretty clean, and it is actually ...BUBBLE WRAP! Very thick, strong bubble wrap, too!

So I dragged it home, spead it out in my backyard, continued back to the park (where I did see a deer!), came back, swept a little dirt off the cover and proceeded to cut this thing into nice sized pieces for packing in the quickly fading light of dusk. I'm glad we have had a dry spell, I don't know if I would've messed with it in the rain, but now I have a LOT of packing material for just a little bit of labor. Sometimes checking out other folks' garbage is a fortuitous thing!