Shopping Around

Here's a rather bad photo of patio in front of my studio. The coil of light on the right is a strand of lights encased in plastic that I wrapped around one of the three trees in front of my studio for the festivities last night. One of the artists in the studio across from me stayed for the evening as well. He put a light in the little alcove of their studio. That's the lit area you see on the left.

We put a table cloth on my work table and put food out for passersby. I sat and worked on a necklace and he sat on the bench near me. It definitely helped attract attention to our studios by our sitting outside. We spent the evening talking to each other and to visitors, a pleasant past time. Also, we agreed by the end of the evening that we did have more foot traffic through the Village than we had last month. That was encouraging. Our advertising chairperson put an ad in the local free newspaper and several people said they saw it. Advertising is a large portion of the Spanish Village budget and it's nice to know that it helps let people know where we are. There are still people all the time who say they've lived in San Diego all their lives and they've never been to Spanish Village, never knew it even existed.

Today I went to buy gold-filled wire to finish a necklace. I'm determined to start ordering it online, because it's less expensive, but in the meantime I needed some. I happened to go to a different store to look for vintage crystal beads and while I was there I asked about wire. I discovered their wire is less expensive than where I had been buying, in fact a lot less expensive. So I've solved my problem for now. The only disadvantage is that they were out of the gauge of wire I use the most often. So that could be a problem. But I could restrict myself to making pieces with the smaller gauge wire. I've certainly got lots of really tiny beads. I tend to gravitate toward them.

My plan is to sit at my work table outside this weekend. I need to make sure I take my sweater with me in case the weather is chilly. It can be at this time of the year. We have what's called "May Gray" and then "June Gloom" before we actually get our sunny summer weather. Fortunately we're a little ways away from the coast at the Village so that we don't get the marine layer that the beaches sometimes experience in the summer, but we're close enough to get a breeze and not suffer from the really warm inland temperatures.