Spring Projects

Though the bitter cold is insisting that winter has much fight left in it, nevertheless it is time to be preparing for spring projects. In addition to orders, I'm getting the ball rolling on two big events: Mug Season, and the Maine Pottery Tour.

Mug Season is coming up first: an annual fundraiser in conjunction with local coffee shops. A clay group I belong to (Central Maine Clay Artists - check us out here!) organizes this every year. It works like this: we potters offer mugs for sale for short money (only $18!) at participating coffee shops. The shops provide free coffee for anyone who buys a mug. We give half the proceeds to local arts program and spend the rest on beer. (J/K, really it's wine. Or Fireball.) It's my favorite kind of transaction: win-win-win-win. 😃Tomorrow we potters will meet and bring our mugs; next week we'll each deliver a mix of mugs to various coffee shops, who will begin selling them April 1. Mug Season, a play on Mainers' name for early spring (or, alternatively, any season that isn't winter.)

A more labor intensive project for me is the Maine Pottery Tour. When I switched over to my new laptop, I lost much of my email contact list, and all my old emails. (No, there's no way to get it back. 😕) So I've been trying like hell to reconstruct it, but every couple of days I remember someone I should have contacted. If you were supposed to be on the Pottery Tour & you haven't heard from me, email me right away! I started putting the map together today. Here's how it's shaping up so far:

I took advice I got from several people and switched to Google Maps, which I'm told are more user friendly, and also have the advantage of being free; but I am still figuring out aspects of them, like how to number the markers, or how to include a list.

With regard to the pottery tour this year, I am sorely tempted to make it an extravaganza, and invite like 5 other artists to join me and put up tables and tents in my yard - have a little mini art fair. My hesitation is that I then feel guilty if other people don't do well; that, and I am such an extreme introvert that spending the day with 5 other people no matter how much I like them is FAR more exhausting than just hanging out, waiting for visitors. Hmm. I'll cogitate on it a bit longer.

In other news, my truck surprised me by inspiring a name within a week of joining me: she is the Gray Lady. She has two namesakes; one is the ghost of Ravenclaw Tower, who all you Harry Potter fans out there sill remember from The Deathly Hallows.

The other is the venerable New York Times, which has long worn the same nickname, in the hope that my truck will share some of the newspaper's longevity and reliability.

Since it is named in part for a ghost, let us hope Helena Ravenclaw will forgive me for saying: long live the Gray Lady!