Sunday, July 12, 2009

International Folk Art Market in Santa Fe





My friend Mary and I met up on Saturday night in Santa Fe, to get a bit of an early start on getting to the Market. (See Mary's take on our motel room here.) We were also spending some time going through a bonanza of beads my friend Steve sent me from the Pacific NW. I wanted to share some of the bounty with Mary (and will share more of it with my bead retreat group this fall), and we also picked out a fairly large bag of beads to donate to OffCenter Community Arts Project in Albuquerque. That done,after a good night's rest for me (Mary said the running toilet woke her up and she couldn't get back to sleep-I'm still in the sleep anytime/anywhere mode of the long time night worker) we made our way up Museum Hill in Santa Fe and were promptly turned back to go down the hill to the park and shuttle area. When we made it back by shuttle to Museum hill, we saw why. All available parking lots had been turned into an enormous bazaar of artists, craftspeople and their wares. Many of the artists had set up little areas where they showed how they made their beautiful goods. It was sensory overload from the first step, extremely well attended (translate that to WAY CROWDED!). We probably didn't see more than a third of all the vendors before we'd had enough of the crowds and made our ways home. I stupidly forgot my camera in my car, but Mary took tons of pictures of many of the artists, and I'm betting she'll be posting them to her blog. We saw a metal worker from Haiti making cunning metal decorative hangings, weavers and basketmakers from different countries, textile artists of all sorts, carvers, potters, leather workers. You name it, they had it. A gamelon group played, there were Balinese dancers, an Andean flautist. We brunched on gyros and dolmas. I bought a clever little Day of the Dead guitarrista from Peru for myself and an Blessed Virgin retablo for a friend. All in all a wonderful little mini vacation.

Monday, July 6, 2009

graphics manipulation








Ok...I'm trying to learn how to a) work with pictures on my new macbook and b) find the pictures to link to them when blogging. It's confusing, having been a PC user for so many years. For one thing, I'm so used to using Paintshop Pro to edit and manipulate my pictures. On the macbook, I've been trying to learn the open source program GIMP to play with my pictures. I think I'll learn this program eventually, but the learning curve seems a bit steep. Then finding the picture after I stash it away seems a bit cumbersome. Probably I'll get used to it, too. Anyway, I'm attempting to upload a couple of simple pics of earrings I just played with for a bit.