Every year, for the last 10, we have taken part in a county-wide tour of artists' studios. It's called the Brown County Studio and Garden Tour. Originally the tour included spectacular gardens in addition to the studios and then morphed into gardens AT the studios. Many of the artists (32 this year) already had gardens at their studios but we pretty much started from scratch. ... and kept going. The gardens now are a big part of the preparation for the tour and take about 4 months of my husband's and my time.
Meanwhile, we have been having odd weather ... high temperatures and lots of thunderstorms, tornado warnings, high winds. Just keep the good thoughts for those of us living here in the tornado belt of Indiana.
The studio is being cleaned and rearranged to make room for my two guest artists on the tour: Rose Poe, who does baskets and weaving, and Norene Mara who is a painter and jewelry artist.
We usually have about 400 people through the studio during the 3-day tour. Lots of fun and meeting and greeting.
On another note, our primary phone line, which also includes our Internet service, has been down for one week. As I write this, it still isn't repaired and AT&T has missed three chances to fix it by their "estimated" deadline. I will be briefly borrowing a family member's dialup number to upload this, which I have written offline.
I guess the bright side, if there is one, is I've spent less time online in the last week than any other week since we went on vacation last year. I have been using this extra time to organize and make room in the studio for the guest artists.
As a final note, I received an email this morning from an overseas company who was wanting to sell me rugs. I was particularly intrigued with their salutation:
Hope you are leaving life with great pleaseure.Well, I hope so, too.
I had a guest artist, Norene Mara, that paints and makes jewelry:
I also had a guest artist, Rose Poe, that makes beautifully colored baskets and also weaves.
The gardens could have used more work, but at 90+ degrees, not that many people were taking time to look at them ... out of their cars and into the air-conditioned studio!
The "weaver's garden" had a new umbrella for shade and some cute purse pots (an idea I stole from a friend) hanging on the shepherd's crooks. The purses got a LOT of comments.
The plate garden needed washing ... too bad. Pike was watching for cars ...
Too hot to sell clothing ...
The positive comments make all the preparation work worthwhile. But I'm ready for pool time and to get back to weaving for the fall shows.
