Dueling Events in a Transformative State

What's better than friends and flowers?! My friend Lynette and I at the Festival of Flowers on Saturday. Town Square, Anchorage.

Dual outdoor events this weekend took some major planning at our house and A LOT of (art)work. Daddy-O and Gus worked our booth at the Spenard Farmers Market and I worked my booth at the Anchorage Festival of Flowers. All three of us, helped get both venues set-up plus Willie

helped after he got off work. Since the Market ended at 3:00 pm, Derek and Gus rode their bikes to the Town Square to help me take-down at 6:00 p.m. We’re just starting to find our groove with the Saturday Farmer’s Market commitment but having committed to the Festival of Flowers meant doubling up on several items like purchasing another credit card machine, misc. sales and display items, printing additional business cards, price tags, signage

and most importantly creating enough artwork to sell at BOTH events. The good news/bad news is both events were relative slow sales-wise (Derek and Gus sold way more than I did –great job boys!) and I’ll have plenty of art to roll into next Saturday’s Farmers Market –yippee! Thanks to Kim (Will’s girlfriend) I even had a great sales assistant, Tiffany to help me at the Festival but we ended up taking turns getting hot coffee & tea (it was really chilly under cool, gray skies), visiting and shopping for flowers more than making sales. I’m

glad she was there because she was fun to visit with and she kept me company. Not to take anything away from the first annual Festival of Flowers but sales and traffic were really s-l-o-w. Since the event was a fundraising event to establish an endowment fund for the City of Flowers Program I hope enough plants and raffle tickets were sold. I definitely contributed by purchasing beautiful hanging baskets and potted flowers for our house.

Another bright spot in the day was my longtime friend Lynette purchasing one of my garden sculptures. She is one of the most sunshiny-cheeriest people I know, her voice is even velvety happy, ALWAYS. It’s easy to think how long Lynette and I have been friends. She was Gus’ kindergarten

teacher and before that, she and her husband Dan were my parent’s next door neighbors, and even longer ago (when we were mere babes ourselves –ha!) she and I were in a Lamaze class together expecting our first babies! Our daughters were born one day apart and we were even in the hospital together! Today our daughters are beautiful, young adults and most people call Lynette “Mrs. Mayor” as her husband Dan is now the Mayor of Anchorage. I still know her as one of the sweetest people I have ever met.

Being around all of the colorful flowers this weekend and watching our trees and garden literally transform this week, I was

inspired to work on my latest project… Rather than take today off Derek helped me make my Topiary Sheep for the upcoming Alaska Botanical Garden Art Show… you are not going to believe how COOL IT LOOKS! I love having another Blog post just waiting to be posted! The Spaghnum Moss Sheep is being watered right now in the yard –we took pictures so stay tuned….

We have two trees in our front yard that are over 50 years old (which is old, for a house in Anchorage) and over 25' tall, that transform with the seasons. The picture on the left in the 3 seasons group shot was taken this afternoon with the trees in full bloom! I think they are Corneliancherry Dogwoods(?) and had Gus glowing pink as he ate his breakfast by the window this morning -which he wasn't too happy about!