1st Day of the Open Studio, September 26th, 2010

Another event I had together with my art club.
After having had markets so often now, we wanted to do something different again.
So we came up with the idea to have a day on which we open our art studios and show our visitors how and where we work. Some of us though, were not so eager to show their private places. Quickly, we decided to have two artists present their things together and came up with five places to do so.

There is a hiking path for breweries in our area and thus many hikers also pass close to our "studios"on a regular basis. This we took as an example and made a small hiking path to join the studios. The visitors would have the flyers marked for each studio they visited and when completed, would get a small present as a "Thank You" for visiting all of us. Those presents were individually created by each artist and thus not every visitor would get the same.

Planning for this event already in May (before we had our Summer festival), we picked a Sunday afternoon for this event; hoping that the weather would still be fine enough at this early Autumn time for many to come for the little hike.

Having so much time until then, I worked intensly to get my SF-novel finished to present then. And I did - one month ahead of the set date!

Also, this time I wanted to be able to present some other things besides the books and the drawings. So I took the month left until the "big" day to do some sewing - using leftover material I had kept in my attic for years.
Knowing that plastic shopping bags, like they are right now sold enmass in grocery stores and then just thrown away, would soon be prohibited for selling in the EU, I made cloth ones - re-usable many times! I took some more material to the event - different colours and textures, offering to sew them to the wishes of my visitors right there.

As presents to give away, I made some textile flowers. This is a handicraft done a lot in the 1970ies, but seemingly forgotten by now. At the event, I had the material to make some more to pass the waiting time and maybe even sell them.

I shared the double garage of another artist, Christiane Rethmeier, who presented her watercolour and acrylic paintings and her photobook of our village.

Looking back on this day, it was a success. The weather had turned to drizzling, fogging rain and cold just the day before. No late summer warmth left. But to our surprise, we had much more visitors than expected. The studios were open for five hours, the first three of them well visited; nearly overcrowding the garage. After that, only some came. Now though, I was able to talk with each for longer than a few minutes.

There was a boy of about ten years, that saw the textile flowers and wanted to have one. So I made one right there - he waited for about fifteen minutes with big eyes and smile getting even bigger the more the flower shaped into it's final form.
And he felt so proud to own it - taking care not to squezze it out of shape when putting it into his pocket.
It sure made me smile too :D

Below some impressions of my part of the garage: