Slooowwww Sunday in Harwich

The reason we do these craft fairs this time of year is to take our pots to the people and hope that they connect with them and decide to trade money for them. So that we can buy more clay, or food, or paper towels ... or whatever.

Or, that's the reason I do the shows. Who knows why other people do them. I was in Harwich Sunday in the hopes that the August Cranberry Fesival show would be more productive than the July Cranberry Festival. (There are, by the way, no cranberries in evidence in the summer; they come in the fall.) Summer mythology among Cape Cod retailers holds that August people have more money than July people, or at least spend it more freely. Yesterday was abundant with evidence to the contrary of that theory, which I will add to my slowly-building store of local craft fair lore.

I sold precisely four pots, which I agree is four pots better than selling none. And one tiny soda-glazed vase sold for half-price to a young buyer (she might have been 10 years old) who came into the tent by herself, picked up lots of pots and then went off to get her mother. When she returned, she went directly to a little shell-stamped ink pot and picked it off the shelf. I took five dollars off the price, just to encourage the next generation to appreciate handmade things, and she went off happy. So, I struck a blow for handcraft if nothing else. And it was very nearly nothing else. That's how you learn what shows work and what shows don't, I guess.

And the possibility always remains that I just don't make appealing pots, or I don't know how to sell the ones I do make. That possibility is always on my mind. But the moaning from other craftspeople yesterday at least implied that buyers weren't buying much of anything, not just my pots.

Anyway, some photos are attached. The shiny teabowls in the photos are refired pots from the recent Harvard soda firing and Castle Hill salt firing.