This last month has been chaos. Fantastic chaos. Amazing chaos. But it is going to take a little bit to recover from these two incredible shows.

In mid-June I managed to pack a lot of my art into some suitcases and flew out to Portland, OR. I then drove up to Camano Island, WA with my parents to get ready for the three-day Camano Island Studio Tour. My dad’s cousin and his family run Sunnyshore Studios there and hosted a tent for me at the location along with other artists in the family and from the area around the studio. This event took place during the record-breaking heat wave in the Pacific Northwest. Thankfully being on the coast made it a little cooler (mid-80s to mid-90s), however it was still quite warm to spend a weekend outside in a tent. In years past I’ve had my work spread throughout the studio inside, but the tent allowed me to show all of my art and cards/prints/magnets in one place and demonstrate for people what I do at the same time. A lot of art went to loving homes during the show including “Adorned”, the piece that I created for the 2019 Minnesota State Fair. The woman who purchased it said it reminded her of art that her father had brought home when she was a child that had been lost to time. This show is typically two weekends including Mother’s Day weekend and has more studios participating, so we didn’t know what to expect this year. The turnout blew us away. People showed up in a big way. It was a lovely and invigorating weekend.

Then this past weekend was the Minnehaha Falls Art Fair in MN. Rather than having to fly across the country, this show was practically in my backyard (which is MUCH easier and I didn’t have to worry about TSA confiscating a suitcase full of magnets or losing my suitcase with originals in it). My dad also flew out to help with this show. Not only was it a long weekend with a total of 21 show hours over three days, but setting up and tearing down a tent for an art fair is a tremendous amount of work and coordination. Its not something I can do by myself, and with my husband’s work schedule it was going to be tough for him to help me with a Friday set up. I really appreciated his help and also made me even more thankful of how much my husband typically does to help for these events.

Just like the show at Camano, this last weekend at Minnehaha was full of people out and about and engaging with artists about our work. The first time this event took place was in 2019 and was only one day, which was traumatically rained out – I wrote a blog post about this 7/22/19. It was rescheduled for October 2019 and also was a cold and rainy day that maybe 1/3 of artists stuck around for. 2020 was obviously cancelled. My husband and I have been referring to this as the cursed art fair that we knew would be amazing if these greater forces would ever allow it to take place. This weekend reversed the curse in a big way. There were so many visitors and many positive conversations and discussions about my work. It was another hot weekend to be sitting in a tent, but so worth it and much better than trudging through mud like in the past! Another large original piece, “Vessel”, also found a new loving home. Its hard to part with these pieces that I have spent months pouring over, but I’m so glad that they will be cherished.

I am grateful to everyone who took the time to look at my work at these events and to share your feedback and thoughts with me. I know that there were a lot of amazing artists and beautiful things to look at, so I am honored by the time that you took out of your day to stop through, had a conversation, and followed up by checking out my website or social media. Experiences like this help me to know I am on the right path and help inspire me to keep creating more!