Is It the End? Or Just the Beginning...?

Coffee in the Los Angeles Skyline mug with a side of plain MM's, no music though. Didn't get up till 7:00 this am and the spouse got up with me and made me coffee first thing. I am blessed. It isn't really the end of the week, it is the beginning of the pre-show prep.

And now it's an hour and a half after I started this post and I have a kiln load in, J off to school, and a plan done for the Archetype Industrial (AI) pieces I want to show at the BMAC next week. I created a new color series yesterday and am excited about the diversity it brings to the Morceaux de verre styles. I call it "forest" and it is juniper spruce tint, pale grey, dark green, silver aventurine and teal. It is a good color coming into the winter season (in July! You gotta love retail.) and should also sell well in the colder northern markets.

So it's Friday, but I will be working all weekend getting ready for the BMAC, finishing up the website as much as I can and getting the outline of the book done for the editor. Time is shushing by. Remarkably, I am not stressed. We are into the che sera, sera pre-show phase. It is now down to number of hours before departure and finite number of pieces which can be fired. I have made my peace with not having as much as I would have liked and being happy that I have some new things.

One of the new things I am going to have (after I make it between now and Monday) is a display for samples of all the AI patterns (the photo above right is of a couple of AI platters stacked). At last summer's show where I debuted this series, I naively thought that store owners would be content to leave the pattern selection to me and would just say "mostly organic" or "mostly geometric" or "your best sellers". But I guess it is the nature of a small business owner who does his own buying to be a bit of a control freak and want to pick all his own so this year I will make it easy. I will have a good photo of all the patterns to take away for remote ordering, a samples display where tiles can be moved around and grouped for ordering at the show, and a few recommended basic order groupings written up.

That last one, the basic order recommendation write-ups, was a suggestion from Mike Shapiro, owner of Shapiro's at Bay Walk at the February show. And rather than do a big catalog this year and waste lots of paper, toner, electricity, and time (let's not forget time), I am going to scale down my handouts and do something simple. Of course I won't be creating these sales and marketing materials until I get to Philadelphia. I won't even be buying the supplies till there. Hope set-up goes well so I have time.

And speaking of Philadelphia, for the first time I wasn't able to get a decently priced room on priceline.com. Either it has become the most popular way for cheap artist and store owners to get rooms, or Phillie has a lot of stuff going on next week/weekend. The official rate on the Marriott (attached to the Convention Center where the BMAC takes place) is $312 a night. Like I going to pay that! So after almost 10 years of hoarding them, I used (all) my Marriott rewards points to stay there from Tuesday through Sunday. 80,000 points. Whew!

The final news of the day is happy news: Barbara Muth, artiste de verre extraordinaire from Washington DC is coming out for the weekend with her husband. I am so psyched! I might actually get to play a bit! Or we'll just eat and drink a lot. Also a Fine Thing.