Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Leeper Park Art Fair


Well, yesterday Dar and I had a day to unwind after the Leeper Park Art Fair in nearby South Bend. I hadn't done that show in over 25 years and it was interesting to do a show so close to home.

I made a huge mistake with the kiln -- a mistake I've never done. My plan was to fire on Thursday so I could unload the kiln on Friday and still get up to South Bend to set up my display on Friday afternoon. I candled the kiln overnight Wed and woke up at 2 A.M. to start the kiln....

...but when the kiln got red hot (later that morning) and I peeked inside, I realized I had forgotten to put cones in the kiln. Oops.

I turned the kiln off to let it cool enough to allow me to reach in (several hours later) and put cones in, but here's where it went from bad to worse....

...I put the wrong cones in. Yeah. The wrong cones. I've never before done that, and I can't even imagine what made me reach for the wrong cones this time.

So, again I had to cool the kiln down and get the proper cones in.

By this time, plans of firing on Thursday and unloading on Friday were long gone. But here's where my kiln cone goof was one of the better things that happened to me all weekend (a weekend with some pretty darn good stuff happening).

See, if I had been set up as planned (on Friday afternoon) my display would likely have been destroyed by the 75 mph winds and storms that blew through the park at 7 P.M. on Friday. There were a number of blown up and bent canopies due to the wind. I don't think that I've ever had a mistake turn out quite so well.

Anyway, after driving through the eerie darkness of power outages all the way from Plymouth to South Bend at 4 A.M. on a post-storm Saturday, I finally got set up at Leeper Park.

I had a great show AND I won an award too!

I also got to visit briefly with my potter-friends
Glenn Woods and Keith Herbrand (The Pottery Boys) and Sandi Finney.

Here is a special order for my friend Stephen. The man seems to be a wealth of great ideas...



4 comments:

  1. Divine intervention :)
    I had a similar experience once in Salt Lake City. I was helping set up a trade show booth and we got hungry. So instead of starting to set up we went to eat as the first ever tornado blew through town and ripped the event tent all to pieces. One person died and many people lost their booths. Ours was not set up yet, still in crates because we went to eat!
    Congrats on the award, nice bonus!

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  2. A tornado in Salt Lake City?! Wow, that makes your story doubly weird. Best timing of your life!

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  3. Nicely done!!
    I will need at least four of them.
    thanks, Stephen

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  4. Stephen,

    This is art. One does not duplicate four works of art.

    Philistine.

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