Industrial Sized Spider (325/365)

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November 21, 2015 – We went to the Eastside Culture Crawl for the first time today. How have we missed this local art event for so many years!?!

Embarrassingly, we hadn’t even heard of it until last year when we were talking to an artist at the Circle Craft Christmas Market. This year, and the Christmas Market again, I was speaking with the same leather artist and was waxing wistfully about a bag he’d made a few years ago and which he no longer offered. He said he didn’t make that one anymore because it was extremely hard to construct, but that he’d be willing to make me one as he still had the pattern, but the machine he needed was on loan to another artist for awhile.

So this week we decided to kill two birds with one stone. Finally visit the Culture Crawl and wander through some of the most amazing local artist’s studios, and find the fiveleft leather studio to take him the image of the finish I coveted, and commission its construction.

We wandered through two of the larger studio complexes and then went back to the truck to peruse the map and try to figure out where the fiveleft artist was located. Turned out that he was…somewhere… in the building we’d just left… so back in we went, through a different entrance, and above this new entrance was the most amazing, massive, looming, spider. We found him, he remembered our conversation as soon as he saw us squeeze our way into his studio, and he was only too happy to make the bag for me, pointing into a dark corner to show me that he’d just received the specialized machine back, the one he needed to make the bag, and that he wanted to try and get it to me before Christmas. 🙂

I also wanted to find another artist in the area, a potter whose works I’d seen in the summer at another show. I’d been kicking myself for not buying a teapot of hers there, and then she wasn’t at the Harmony Art Festival. I had my fingers crossed that she’d be displaying her works today, and she was. I bought a beautiful little pottery pitcher, and commissioned one of her teapots since she didn’t have one the likes of which I was after on display, she’d already sold it. She said she;d be happy to make it for me, but that it would be after the holidays. Perfect.

Ah well, it made the day a little less expensive and helped spread the costs out over the next month or two until the two items are made.

The problems is…we are planning on going back to explore more artist’s studios tomorrow….

There are 400+ artists who have opened their studios to the public this weekend.

That’s just not good for the bank account :-/