jack

I'm once again doing an October drawing challenge, my seventh year. Here's a sneak preview of this year's sketchbook.

I'm still recovering from Clay Fest. We turned and restocked the van yesterday, and I got the inventory and online In Stock list updated this afternoon. Because of the central sales area, I won't know exactly how we I did until the checks come out next week, though I can get a general idea from the inventory. We seem to have sold 17 soup bowls, 10 stew mugs, 5 painted mugs and 15 tall mugs. A couple of serving bowls, a few dinner salad and dinner pasta bowls, a dozen each dinner and dessert plates. Two cookie jars, three covered casseroles, three covered crocks. No teapots, no banks, though I did sell two incense dragons and a salt-and-pepper set. I spent a lot of time over the weekend restocking my shelves, and had to bring in a couple of boxes from home on Saturday night.

The new space worked really well. The aisles were less crowded, gallery looked great, plenty of space for Demo and Kids' Clay. Doubling the number of sales stations meant that the lines never got onerous, even during the busiest part of Friday night, and we could shut a few down on each side of the hall during the slower parts of Saturday and Sunday. Best of all, with more booths available, a number of newer potters had a chance to try the show. Some of them were folks from other parts of the state, southern Oregon mostly, although we did get some Portlanders as well. A number were local to Eugene, stepping out from Saturday Market for the first time. It will be interesting to see if they did well enough to come back next year.

We had a wait list of 20 people, after booth assignments. What with people dropping and people not being prepared when called up, we actually got all the way to number 20, a week before the show. No more drops afterwards, thankfully, so all the spaces were filled.

We'll need to make a few tweaks next year--putting an extra holding table up front by sales would be a good idea, and there were some issues with the barcode labels--on the smaller ones, the code printed off the edge of the label, so I spent a lot of time looking people up in the back-up book to scan their code. But in general, a very successful weekend. Total sales were $199,000, up $29,000 from last year.