A Crafty Wonderland for the road

Come one, come all to Crafty Wonderland tomorrow (Sunday!) at the Doug Fir in Portland!  This is the last regular monthly show of the year and the last regular monthly show at the Doug Fir period.  It'll be a bittersweet day.  Our pals Torie and Cathy have been running the monthly show for the past three and half years and they made the decision this month to transition into two larger shows per year.  

 

We are really excited about the move because it's going to be a for buyers and sellers alike.  Still, we'll be a little sad doing this version of the show for the last time.  We were vendors at the very first Crafty Wonderland.  In fact, that fateful day was our first craft show or real Berkley Illustration event ever (and it would be a year and a half after that when we finally joined Etsy).

It was at the first Crafty Wonderland that Ryan's animals in suits appeared...

 

Back then each one of those little pieces was an original and they went for around $20/pop.  We decided before the show that each month we did Crafty Wonderland, we would produce items within a rotating theme.  For this first month we chose the theme of ancestry and that decision was 80% of the genesis of the Berkley animal portrait.  We never did end up doing another theme month.  

So many things have changed since then.  Perhaps most notably, we now have better cameras.  Ouch, looking at that photo above is painful.

One of my favorite animals Ryan ever did was sold at that first show:

 

I say that it's time to bring back the bow-tied ventriloquist Chameleon!  And what of poor Marcel?  There is a very lucky person out there in the world who owns this little slice of history.

To honor the spirit of that first show, we've created a few print versions of the same thing to sell tomorrow:

 

(Obviously we still have a bit of work to do tonight.)

Speaking of work, my face is half painted right now because we have to take a pause in production to attend a paint-your-face Bunco birthday party for our friend Chad.  I've been typing this entire blog post while looking something like this:

 

If you are in Portland, we hope to see you tomorrow at the show!  If you're lucky, we won't have slept and our faces will still be painted.  If we're lucky, our faces will be clean.

Comments

[Alicia]

I have that little owl on the right side of your first CW display board! His name is Felix Derbyshire. Come visit any time you want.

[a Cagey Bee]

$20 for an original?! Wow. Those are some lucky shoppers!

Glad you're charging more now so you can afford to keep making art. :)

[phreadi]

Check it out. Eight ball beb.

[Brandy Von Doeren]

i just love finding out the backgroud to little success stories. It's fun to see where it all started. thanks for sharing.