It's a Big Week

The Catwaba Valley Pottery and Antiques Festival is this weekend! This will be my second year participating in this show, and I am really excited.  I have worked very hard to get ready, so I'm pretty pooped at this point too.  I spent a lot of time over the weekend getting things packed up and ready, so I hope that I can just load up the truck on Thursday night and be ready to roll out early on Friday morning for set up. My hope is to try to rest up during the week as much as I can, so that I am red hot and raring to go for the weekend.   Set up is during the day on Friday and then there's a Preview Party Friday night before the actual festival all day on Saturday.  By the show end at 5 pm on Saturday, I will be exhausted.  Let's hope that I'm exhausted but with significantly fewer pots at that point.

I have been so focused on getting things ready and packed up to go that I haven't been as good about photographing the process as I would have liked, but I do have a few pictures that I can share of some of the new pieces that will be with me in Hickory on Friday and Saturday. 

I have been working with a new clay body and I'm pretty happy with how the first pieces have turned out.  This is a very dark brown clay.  Ryoko Cream glaze shows off the texture. 

I have also used a turquoise glaze on this clay that has turned out really nicely.

I am excited to have this new work to show off at the pottery festival.

Do you remember my lamps from a few weeks ago?  It was so much fun to make them and I'm really happy with how they turned out too. 

Glazed and in the kiln.

First look after firing.

(Aren't those bowls on the left shelf nice?  Credit to Vicki Halloran for those beauties)

Happy so far.

And here is the finished product!

I discovered last year that the lighting inside the Hickory Metro Convention Center is not the best.  I hoped to have a couple of finished lamps to help illuminate my booth.  We shall see how it all looks when I've got it all together.  I will have these two lamps that I plan to put on the low shelves plus a couple of lights that I will mount on the tall shelves.  I hope that will help make things will look nice.

If the lamps look familiar it is because they are very much like the ones that Allen used to make.  I figured that I need to start somewhere, so it made sense to start with what I knew would work.  After this success, I'm excited to make more.  I want to try some different shapes and even some that are wheel thrown instead of hand built.  It would be GREAT if these two would sell quickly.