Adjusting my display

Here I am adjusting my display at Boson's Bazaar Bizarre last month. It was a fun show to be at, I got a lot of positive response for my products from a wide variety of people, and some good sales, too. My friend (and extraordinarily capable assistant!), Ro, and I picked up some great gifts from other vendors, including a hilarious and wonderful tiny hand bound book called 30 White Roosters by headlesspress. The chicken theme is meaningful to us. Maybe I'll write more on our homesteading tendencies in a later post.

Some more HotHolders I just want to write a bit about. If you don't want to read the stories behind the fabrics, just enjoy the pictures. These are mostly from some vintage bark cloth I've had for many, many years - just waiting for the right project to come along. Very much a "cottage" vibe.

The black and white lion is from a cotton wall hanging that was in Richard's family room growing up. His mother recently told me she grew up with it, too. I hadn't realized it was that old. I put the strawberries around him to balance his fierce grumpiness. The rooster has a similar attitude - he's really asserting himself crowing.

I'll have to take close-ups of these sometime. The details in the cowboys and firemen fabrics and the vintage prints surrounding some of them are delightful. There is a playful dalmatian in every firetruck scene and the firemen look like Tin Tin. There is a better picture and descriptive words about the little flying bull in my post, Anatomy of a HotHolder. http://mountainashdesign.blogspot.com/2006/12/anatomy-of-hotholder.html.

This colorful off-kilter grid is from a woman's blazer - very 1980's I think. It had big shoulder pads and everything. A bit more vintage bark cloth in the upper left paired with a lovely vintage-looking blue print with daisys. It gets a loop with polka dots. Surrounded by green with white dots is a large pink and orange phychelic print. And on the bottom: some strawberries from an Orvis skirt with red bandana fabric around: wholesome/preppy/outdoorsy.

Oh the Kittens. They have been very popular. And with some unlikely demographics. I used to have HotHolders with pictures of 1940's guys at the beach - snuggling up to their surfboards, strumming ukuleles, or holding giant lobsters at arm's length. They sold out, of course, to a lot to women buying them for themselves or their gay male friends. I don't know if the gay men liked the retro beefcake, but they certainly liked the Kittens at the Bazaar Bizarre. And my funnest customer at the Burlington Handmade show was a 20 year old manboy shopping with his mother. He was crazy about the kittens. If you can't tell, the kittens are hanging out on lily pads, interacting with colorful koi fish in the water and surrounded by pink water lily flowers. The other fabric with water lily flowers is a bark cloth. Both are new designer fabrics from Japan.

Next post: florals