getting ready for the Faire...

My big art event for the summer is this coming weekend--having a booth at the Midsummer Arts Faire in Quincy, Illinois. It's the only one I'm doing this year, mainly because I missed the deadline for some others.

But I've been spending a good deal of time getting things ready for the booth:


These are cotton shirts I dyed. I also dyed silk scarves to sell. And spent time mounting pieces and cutting mats and framing things. Lots of little, non-creative stuff. The results are ready to go:




I don't mind so much the matting and framing. But I find that I sometimes resent the time spent dyeing scarves and shirts--and yet I need to have them to assure that I get my investment in the art fair back. For some reason, people seem to be able to rationalize or justify spending money on something to wear. But not so much something that just hangs on the wall.

Never mind that art nourishes the soul, evokes emotion, soothes the savage beast. This frustrates me, enough that every year I question why I do art fairs. This particular one has an easy side benefit, in that I will see a lot of old friends. But if I have to make stuff I don't want to make in order to be able to display the stuff I do in the off chance that someone will buy my ART-- not my craft--why am I doing it? Sometimes the answer isn't real clear.

That is all.