It's that special time of year in the South when the outdoors beckon and nature "teases" with alternating days of gentle warmth and the last vestiges of cold. The daffodils have put on their early show, as well as the forsythia and Bradford pear trees, while the dogwood and azalea are preparing for their stage entrance. We have bleeding heart in our garden which is like the "trumpeter" of Spring .... emerging from the ground and offering it's pink blossoms in what seems like a matter of days... Following closely behind, the hosta starts to emerge from the ground And the Dogwoods prepare to join the azaleas in their floral display Besides the urge to go outside and "play...
This past weekend we enjoyed the sights, sounds and smells of festival life as we took our woodworking products for the first time to the Fall Fest at Candler Park located in Atlanta, GA. The weather was gorgeous, which is typical for this time of year in North Georgia; our sales were good and we received a lot of positive feedback about our work. Combining this with several folks inquiring about our online store in preparation for the upcoming Christmas holidays led us to deem the weekend a success ,and the festival one we would gladly return to. For those who have attended festival’s, it all looks pretty routine as you encounter one canopy tent after another stocked full of...
It's Fall.........officially.....and as we eye our calendars most of us are filled with a sense of invigoration this time of year brings ,coupled with a vague sense that things are about to get a "little bit crazy". The Holidays are careening toward us ,causing us to long to savor a few of the crisp, nostalgic days of Fall that hint at promises of football games, chilly nights, pumpkin pie and apple cider. Here in the South Fall is a fickle thing... teasing us with crisp days here and there, then sending the temperature back up into the 80s to remind us that perhaps it's a little premature to be packing away the shorts and breaking out the sweaters. But we live for those...
The path to selling our wares is not usually a straight line for a craftsman. Generally we start out making things we enjoy.... discover others seem to like what we're doing.... perhaps sticking our toe in the marketplace via an occasional weekend market..... when it dawns on us "hey, people seriously might be willing to buy what I make on a larger scale". Hence The Prodigal Carpenter's recent foray into the world of retail interior marketplaces..... We recently contracted for a 8' x 10" space in a local interior marketplace known as Woodstock Market http://woodstockmarket.com We considered the environment and other vendors ( This is a large interior market with multitudes of vendors offering their wares) and were impressed, discussed their contract...
