MMoCA Art & Gift Fair
Apprenticeship Day 8
This is a little late in coming. I only did a morning's work with Jarrod on Thursday before hitting the road. I spent Thursday night and all day Friday preparing for the MMoCA Art and Gift Fair. Now I've got some time to do a bit of a write-up.
Jarrod showed me how he wanted the end grain cups roughing out on the lathe. He demonstrated on a handled blank, while I would be working on the unhandled varieties. The technique is pretty much the same as mandrel making, expect the wood's green and you have a better gear ratio due to the work being mounted on a thinner mandrel.
I managed to rough turn the outside of two cups before running out of mandrels. I then switched to axing out a few more cup blanks. Jarrod and I also had a fantastic, albeit meandering, conversation about being professional craftsmen, running a small business, blogging, social media and a few other things. I had to grab my notebook to jot down a few key points after our conversation. It's very refreshing to be able to candidly talk about this kind of work with a fellow maker. It's especially useful for me as Jarrod is further along this journey than I am.
As mentioned, this past weekend was the MMoCA Gift and Art Fair. It's great to have a show 15 minutes down the road from where I live. My good friend Derek Brabender was kind enough to help me with the setup of my stall. He also noticed the colour drain from my face when I saw how low my inventory was after I stocked my shelves, so he invited himself back to my place to help me finish off a few more spoons.
The show itself was a great success. I sold a lot of spoons, met a whole bunch of interesting folks. I carved several spoons while I was there. I was surprised by how many people came to see me because they follow me on Instagram. I had one woman come because her son lives in California but wanted a spoon, and another gentleman was pointed in my direction by a friend living in Hawaii. So my mucking about on social media is useful!
This week won't be spending any time with Jarrod. I've got another show in Madison to prepare for and it's Thanksgiving on Thursday. So I'm going to head off to my shed and crank out some more stock ready for the 8th of December.
