Snowy Sunday In Atlanta

Coffee (with hot chocolate!) in the New York skyline mug, "Beautiful Racket" by Mary Chapin Carpenter on iTunes. It's Sunday, Elaine, Bill, Katie, and Daniel have piled into their car and headed off into the storm towards Greenville and home (it's snowing! Big Fat Flakes!) and the Griffiths repose for a tiny bit before I head to the studio to cut all the solid glass cylinders made by the Waldorf 7th graders into 1/4" think round slices. It is my optimistic hope that these 2" wide circles will be laid out by the class into a beautiful wall collage/mirror frame and then fused solid by me... in time for the auction next Saturday. Nothing like leaving things till the last minute!

This weekend the Snells came down form Greenville so Elaine could help plan the display for the permanent showroom in Dallas. This project has been very exciting as it is a completely new marketing departure for me. When it was first proposed I thought of it as an extension to my show schedule, but it's really not--it's a completely different market. Now I think of it more as a retail opportunity to work with designers and less as a stocking-buyer market. Given the redefined focus, a display with a bit more art, a bit more flair seemed in order.

Todd's original idea for the layout was to have fabric draped on the displays and swirling around the floor to soften the starkness of the plain pedestals and the brown carpet. He and Elaine have extended that idea and now we're covering all the display elements in heavy white cloth to look like the room is being painted (we ended up using table cloths for the purpose as the paint cloths I found are a dingy brown and other fabric from the fabric store is either too thin, too expensive, or both).

We have empty, bright silver paint cans to scatter around the space that have chunky frit glued to them like paint drips and Todd's little wire men hanging, sitting, standing and waving long, thin paint brushes with glue-and-frit-dipped tips. Elaine even made two long "paint spills" out of pieces of blue and yellow cathedral glass sprinkled with various sizes of frit. I tack fused them yesterday and they look great!

I posted last week about the IKEA red chair, and sadly it is too big for the space. It's not a big chair, but it's a really small space (10' X 10' goes fast). Luckily, I have an old, rusty iron stool in the studio that I will clean up and paint black this week that is the perfect size. The 19" tv is just the right size for the space and the dvd player will give me a an opportunity to hone my mad slideshow skills. The pedestals are out--the contemporary gallery look they provide is not conducive to the art-filled-home-in-the-midst-of-being-painted look we are emphasizing now (and they're too tall for the walls), but the dollar store flat pack furniture is perfect and will be augmented by a couple of cloth-draper cinder blocks.

I am taking down my pipes and track lights and replacing them with six floor spots--one of which might even be placed in a paint can (if it has enough clearance around it for the light to cool--don't want to start any fires...). They are 50 watt halogen narrow-beam floods and the lights are only $15 each from Lamps Plus (good online lighting source-cheap, fast, great customer service).

The vinyl lettering for the wall sign came and it looks great--I don't know why more people don't use this kind of signage at the BMAC and ACRE shows. It is relatively inexpensive, looks easy to put up, and has a serious dramatic impact! The final thumbs up/thumbs down will come after we finish the real showroom install.

Now I'm off to trudge through the snow (Snow! Really! On the ground in Atlanta on March 1!) to the studio so I can finish up work and still have a little family time today.