The Yorkshire Artspace Open Studios event was a great success and as usual, a fantastic experience. It’s been a couple of years since I’ve been able to take part, last year I was ill and the year before I was in-between studios, so it was great to be back chatting to all the visitors and fellow studio holders. It was also wonderful to be featured on Our Favourite Places, a website dedicated to all the wonderful things about Sheffield. I was chosen along with some of my fellow YAS artists, we all had a mini interviewed and were photographed in our studios. Being photographed is always a painful experience for me but Nigel Barker was brilliant and really put me at ease.
The preparation for the event starts months in advance but as usual is always a little bit of a rush in the last few weeks, especially as I knew that November was going to prove a very busy month for me. I knew I wanted to be able to get a few pieces of furniture covered and so I was very glad to be able to get the Ercol sofa and 2 of the G Plan chairs finished. They were all the stars of the event with lots of people saying such wonderful things about them so the effort was definitely worth it.
The only disappointment for me was that I wasn’t able to get the new table fitted in time so the studio was crammed full of table parts which we managed to sneakily hide underneath and behind as many things as we could, luckily I don’t think many people noticed.
Another of the big-hits of the event was the Sheffieldish tea towel, I had hoped to sell a few on the night but they positively flew out of the door! I think I was lucky that the event is so close to Christmas as many people were buying them as gifts, it was great to hear visitors reading out the many words and trying to figure out what they meant. Many people told me who the tea towel would make the perfect gift for, or where in the world they were going to send it. It makes me happy to know that there will be quite a few Christmas pots and pans being dried with Sheffieldish tea towels.
Now with my last event of the year out of the way, the next month will be spent doing nothing but printing as I catch up with wholesale orders. I can’t wait to do all of this printing on the new table – watch out for a post next week on the set up which will no doubt be full of photos of my messy dismantled studio.
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