Newseum and a Day Trip

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My cousin Joni sent me this to The Newseum. Hover your mouse over your city and your newspaper front page pops up. Click on your city and the front page enlarges. Pretty cool. You can check headlines around the world too.

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Steve and I spent most of the day in Buffalo yesterday, for the Jr League of Buffalo jury day for their 2009 Decorators' Show House. I think I wrote about this last week - they have a carriage house behind the Show House that serves as a boutique where they sell the work of area artists (on a consignment basis). It's in April so I'd really like to do it - good time of year, presumably a successful venue, out of town - seems right. So it seemed worth the trip to take my stuff there, rather than ship it.

We had to be there at 8:30 so we got an early start, found the place (different from the Show House location) without problem. It took 5 minutes to set up so we headed out to find a Bob Evans for breakfast. As Steve commented, buying that GPS seemed a bit frivolous last year but it's more than paid for itself in convenience. Betty Lou (the voice) provides a little humor as well. I was cracking up the way she kept pronouncing Exit 52E as Fiftwee.

We then went to 2 movie theater complexes, hoping to find a movie that would fall perfectly within our time frame because we had to go back and pick up my stuff between 1:30 and 2:30. Nothing worked out so we walked around the Galleria mall. We were cracking up because we're not shoppers by any stretch of the imagination. The only stores we went into were Yankee Candle (my idea) and the RV store (Steve's idea) to tour a bunch of the RVs. We finally went back to the car to pick up our reading and stitching materials and sat in the food court for a couple of hours.

I will be notified by email if my work has been accepted. I didn't have a chance to look around because a woman from the Jr League was with us at all times (to prevent theft? not sure) but I did notice at least 2 other vendors with greeting cards. I doubt there was any other stitched work like mine so I suspect they will want my Sticky Notes, little tins (more on that another day) and paper jewelry (pins) - but maybe not the greeting cards. My sense is, not based on any fact, is that they probably want a little bit of a lot of different things.

I'd never done one of these jury-in-person things before but here are two things I learned yesterday. Take a moment after set-up, "Do I have everything?" I meant to leave a stack of business cards on the table - had them with me and everything! Now I'm worried the jurors didn't know my work is HAND stitched. It says so on my labels, but still. Secondly, I need to make a smaller version of the big sign I use in my booth, that states that my work is hand stitched. I didn't read anything about this being blind juried so I guess it would be okay if my name and website name were on there too, like on my big sign.

I wasn't sure how elaborate people would get in setting up their area (which was about 2' x 1' deep) so I over-prepared and it worked out fine. I used a black tablecloth, which set off the colors nicely. I took a short card spinner but didn't use it - I put the cards in a tiered acrylic rack.

Overall I'm happy enough with how it went and Steve and I had a nice day together. Nothing overly exciting but we got to do what we do best, eat, read, stitch and spend time together.

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We were supposed to go out to Steve's brother's house for dinner but that was canceled because their daughter hurt her back. We were fine with that since we'd had a long day. I napped on the couch when we got home, but we still went to bed at 9:00!

Today is definitely a studio clean-up day - and I'm off to Geva shortly. Then Simon is having friends over to watch The Super Bowl. Poor Steve is having a routine colonoscopy tomorrow (his first!) so he'll be eating green J-ello and chicken broth for his Super Bowl food. He was already taking tomorrow off is why he picked tomorrow for the exam - but the day after the Super Bowl? Who does that??

He's so stoic that the smell of Simon's pizza and wings will bother him only a little. Me? It would put me in such a foul (fowl?) mood, I'd have to spend the time in my studio or something.

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