April 14 is the cut off this year for applying to the local Garlic & Arts Festival. Once again this year it will be the last weekend in September. When I was accepted last year, the artist coordinator gave me some feed back about my application. Most people on the jury obviously have seen my work since part of the feed back was that the photos I included did not do my work justice. I was very thankful for this comment. On the application, there is a place for applicants to write about their process. I had no idea what they were looking for so I ignored it so the second bit of feed back I got said that in spite of me not filling this in that they would accept my application AND my work but that next time, PLEASE, fill this in. Throughout this past the year when I managed to take a decent photo, I put it in it's own separate file. In January, I put them on a disk and headed down to Walmart and printed up what I hoped were some fairly decent pictures. Now, it was time to deal with this whole writing about my process. I sell MANY different items (bowl, aprons, bibs, totes, purses, table runner, quilts and balsam gifts) and they all have their own process....this was going to be a real CHORE. My dear sweet husband, Tim helped me out by getting me started with description of making an apron. Once he wrote that up, I edited it and this gave me a clue as to what I might include when writing up the rest of the items. My friend Lydia was the previous artist coordinator for the festival so who better to have edit what we had written. She was sweet enough to do this for me and made a wonderful suggestion to combine the explanation for similar item which would shorten this 2 page missive even more and she strongly suggested that it all needed to fit on one page. I did what she suggested and MISSION ACCOMPLISHED - WHEW! The application, photos AND a one page process description got mailed out this week.
I was so relieved in getting the application off and also some lovely Spring weather, I made a few seasonal hot pads to celebrate. The top two in the photo were made from the left over fabric from the apron on the left which was included in a blog entry a couple of weeks ago. I then pulled out this fabulous butterfly fabric by Laurel Burch's and made a hot pad. It SCREAMED Spring has sprung and I liked it so well, I decided to make another appliqued butterfly block and turn that into a purse. I think they will make a wonderful addition to my Spring collection...8 days and counting!!!