Our town has a yearly “fine arts festival”, where they shut down three or four streets in the heart of town, invite a hundred or so artists in a wide variety of mediums to set up booths, then sit back and wait for thousands and thousands of people to herd through the narrow streets.  Apparently, enough people buy things from the booths and the local businesses get enough business from the hoard of people passing by, that this thing is likely to continue.  Each time I’ve gone, I ask myself why I subject myself to the experience.  I’ve never liked big crowds, especially when the crowd is made up of people who are trying to one-up their co-meandering partner with their advanced knowledge of art theory, art history, the use of negative space, and the essentials of “form”.  It’s always in mid July, so it is certain to be very hot, very humid, and very sweaty.  I see the old folks lumbering behind their  walkers and make a mental not to brush up on my CPR skills.  Small babies cooking in their strollers makes my heart skip a beat and I have to stifle the urge to confront the parents.  There is one booth that sells pointy, stained glass creations, meticulously hung from clear fishing line about five feet off the ground, appropriately called “eye catchers”.  I saw a kid, about 6 years old, pick up  a huge ceramic bowl that had a $450 price tag on it and cringed as his parents continued to ignore what he was doing.  It’s only a matter of time until something really bad happens…

On the way home, I realized that like many, many other weekend crafters and would be artists who go to this thing, the reason I went was to see if there was any ideas I could “incorporate” and to look for “inspiration”.  That’s a kind way of saying “anyone else’s creativity that I can steal”.  This year I found a ceramics shop that was selling these little houses, kinda shaped like mushrooms, that actually looked cute when they were arranged together like a miniature village.  I listened to the ceramicist/artist explain that each 3″ tall house took hours of painstaking skill, painting, and molding to create, obviously trying to justify the $35/each price tag that went with each one.  Free enterprise is a wonderful thing, but the smell of BS was suddenly wafting through the crowd and I felt the urge to keep moving.  When I got home, I took some scrap wood and turned out these little copies.  It took longer to dye the wood and burn in the doors and windows than it did to do the actual turning, which I suspect is pretty consistent to the time and effort spent by the ceramicist on the originals.

Here is the first batch.  I have a shelf that these will likely go on or maybe my desk at work, along with the others that I intend to make.  After looking at these all together, it seems pretty clear that using wood without a lot of knots is a must!  I’ve also come to realize the village they live in could use a good contractor.  Seems like some pretty shoddy building methods and a total failure on the part of the building inspector…