Copper Dancer Designs

Atlanta’s weather in June can be a real gam­ble. Some­times it’s just pleas­antly warm, other years things turn bru­tal early. 2010 is an exam­ple of the lat­ter, which meant there was only one word to describe the Avon­dale Estates 2010 Art-B-Que on June 12 – 13: HOT.

Let me repeat that. HOT!!!

Cop­per Dancer Designs was assigned a spot on one of the side streets, about halfway down the row. We had some shade in the morn­ing, but dur­ing the after­noon we got more sun than we really needed or wanted. Stay­ing hydrated and not too over­heated was our real chal­lenge that week­end. Sadly, the heat was so extreme that atten­dance was way down — not that many peo­ple wanted to come out to eat really good bar-b-que, lis­ten to a wide vari­ety of music rang­ing from pretty darn good to pos­i­tively awful, and shop for funky arts and crafts. We got a lit­tle relief from the heat on Sun­day, as we were able to move into a much shadier vacated spot right next to the Smoothie Cart, hee hee. Even so, the theme remained broil, baby, broil.

Sales were dis­ap­point­ing for pretty much every­body, except pos­si­bly the King of Pops — a very pop­u­lar man, espe­cially when he came around in the after­noons with his lit­tle push­cart. Sunday’s Mimosa pop (con­tains Real Cham­pagne!!) was superb, but Saturday’s Grape­fruit Mint pop with REAL mint leaves was the most exquis­ite thing I had tasted since I don’t know when.

The week­end was cer­tainly not a total loss, though. We met some won­der­ful artists, par­tic­u­larly Cindy Sheffield Michaels, a Decatur pho­tog­ra­pher who does mar­velous abstract work. Scha­dia and Nazeem came by our tent, bought a bracelet, and pro­nounced our work a per­fect fit for their upcom­ing Haflanta event in August. The bar-b-que we ate for lunch both days was utterly tasty, even though to Andrea’s dis­ap­point­ment only pulled pork was avail­able. The peo­ple who did ven­ture out into the heat were quite com­pli­men­tary of our work. We enjoyed our smooth­ies and pops immensely!! And we finally, finally were able to get pho­tos of our booth setup so that we can apply to some of the upcom­ing fall shows!

Really, the only hor­ri­ble neg­a­tive was the weather, and that’s some­thing no one can con­trol. Rumor has it that Bart Webb, who puts on the event, is con­sid­er­ing an ear­lier week­end for Art-B-Que next year, and if so we will cer­tainly give it another shot.

Yes­ter­day was a warm, sticky kind of typ­i­cal June day in Atlanta as Cop­per Dancer Designs set up at its first ever show (and our first ever out­door show) at ART­lantis, put on by Beep Beep Gallery and billed as “Atlanta’s Sub­ter­ranean Music and Arts Fes­ti­val.” We both felt like this show was some­thing of a gam­ble, since it was only the sec­ond year of the show and we had no idea what the show or the spon­sor­ing gallery were actu­ally like. We weren’t cer­tain that the demo­graphic was “our” demo­graphic, so to speak, but we were able to get into the Crafters’ Mar­ket from the wait­ing list and the entry fee was quite rea­son­able, so we fig­ured “what the heck, let’s give it a shot.”

Things didn’t get off to a good start when Andrea found that she’d left a crit­i­cal box at home — the one con­tain­ing the four roof cor­ner pieces for the tent frame, not to men­tion the tent instruc­tions! As she dashed home to get it, Gary & I tried to fig­ure out what went where from our mem­ory of the dry run assem­bly the week before. That was the only real glitch of the day, though. Once all the parts were there every­thing went up and into place smoothly, hur­rah! Our new screen dis­plays worked fab­u­lously; we fig­ured out the booth lay­out on the fly with­out dif­fi­culty; the impro­vised tent weight sys­tem (ankle weights & a weight vest, LOL) han­dled the job just fine.

There was a nice steady flow of traf­fic through the mar­ket area through­out the day. As the after­noon wore on, we started see­ing a lull every time a new band started play­ing. Things would pick up between sets, then another lull. Sales-wise it was kind of so-so much of the day. I don’t really think that many peo­ple had come plan­ning to buy art or craft, but many seemed intrigued by what they saw. I do think that we did bet­ter than many of the craft ven­dors, though. There didn’t seem to be many buy­ers at the booths on either side of us, and at least one craft ven­dor packed up and left sev­eral hours before the show ended (very unprofessional!).

Even though it was pretty steamy out there, we lucked out in that our booth was per­fectly sit­u­ated to catch what breezes came by, and Andrea had made up for for­get­ting the tent parts by bring­ing an ice chest and a LARGE water con­tainer. Shar­ing those with our ven­dor neigh­bors was a good way to break the ice, so to speak. Plus we sen­si­bly came pre­pared with sun­screen and bug spray (note: it’s wise to make SURE you hit all the exposed spots with the sun­screen spray), and an indoor restroom and water foun­tain were close by inside Druid Hills Bap­tist Church.

Two of my all-time favorite pieces sold yesterday:

Plus we were for­tu­nate enough to be right across from Brenda Marsh, an Atlanta area jew­elry designer who uses a lot of lam­p­work beads in her pieces. For­tu­nately, we had brought beads even though we didn’t put them out, so she was able to look through some of our sup­ply and pick out a nice assort­ment for her future pieces. Brenda, we thank you and hope to work with you in the future!

Our thanks also go to Mark Base­hore and the ART­lantis vol­un­teers for an excel­lent event, and our ven­dor neigh­bors for being good company!