Porter Flea just keeps on getting bigger and better. The summer market included the art show's best ever Friday night preview market, with great art, music, and beer. Saturday began with a delightful breakfast for all the artists. And the big, blowout show on Saturday brought so many friendly shoppers and close friends.
Here are a few of my favorite photos, pulled from Instagram and Twitter with the hashtag #pfsummer. I recommend you click to see them fullscreen!
I'll be selling my handmade books today at the Thistle Stop Marketplace in Nashville. This handmade marketplace will be a fundraiser for Thistle Farms, a social enterprise that is run by women who have survived lives of prostitution, trafficking, or addiction.
There will be about 20 other crafty vendors there (all of whom are either Thistle Farms volunteers or employees) selling their creations, and 50% of all sales will go towards supporting their papermaking, bookbinding, and sewing studios.
This will be a great place to do some Mother's Day shopping, grab a tasty treat in the Thistle Stop Cafe, and support a wonderful organization all at the same time. Get a sneak peek at some of the handmade goods you'll find at the event here, and then come to Thistle Farms today between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.
If you are still looking for last-minute gifts — especially handmade goods — then the West Elm Holiday Maker Market has arrived just in time.
Conveniently scheduled for Saturday the 21st, just a few days before Christmas, this Maker Market will welcome independent artists into the West Elm furniture and home goods store at the H.G. Hill Center in Green Hills for the fourth time.
This cool partnership allows artists to display their work on, in, and around West Elm's hip furnishings. You can count on seeing handmade jewelry, custom furniture, printmaking, and artisanal foods.
I showcased my work inside the store for the first time this fall. My husband and I already own quite a few pieces from West Elm, so it was a cool opportunity to arrange my books on one of their chic desks. All of the artists find ways to play off the store's design sensibilities, making for a unique event.
Just look at that poster. You know you can't wait for Nashville's best holiday market, Porter Flea! If you recall from a year ago, just about everyone seemed to show up for the last holiday market. I tried to capture the excitement in a write-up at the time.
The show is on the move again this season, setting up at Track 1, just south of downtown at the corner of Chestnut and 4th Avenue South.
This Porter Flea begins with a ticketed preview party on Friday, Dec. 6. Limited tickets are still available at Grimey's on 8th Ave and Hey Rooster General Store in East Nashville, so if you want to get first dibs on the handmade goods and beat the crowds, pick up your tickets soon. On Saturday, Dec. 7, the market is free and open to all ages from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. I hope to see you there!
Nashville's one and only festival for the book arts keeps on evolving. In its third year, I was proud to participate in the Handmade & Bound artists' market, and to take part in a bigger way in its annual gallery show.
The gallery show went in a fresh direction this year, showcasing the sketchbooks of local artists, architects, fashion designers, puppeteers, and children. I was also among local book artists who created interactive sketchbooks that attendees responded to, filling in with writings and drawings. Here's a look at some of the dozens of sketchbooks in the show, and you can see another 200 photos in an event photo album here.
The show, The Sketchbook Collective, actually got underway a few months in advance of its opening, with a series of art workshops all across Nashville.
With a mission of bringing art to underserved communities, myself and other book artists led classes teaching simple book structures and encouraging participants to fill them as sketchbooks and memory books. We taught children, senior citizens, and recent immigrants to Nashville. Our goal was to bring art to those who don't have access to art materials or the chance to explore the arts in their daily lives.
I taught several classes, including for children in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program and at the Looby Center in North Nashville.
In another class, at Casa Azafran, we got to know a few mostly Spanish-speaking families from the center's parenting and English classes. (My husband got to test out his Spanish, including creating a cheat sheet of bookbinding terms.) Together, we bound simple, two-signature pamphlet stitch books. The covers of the books were made with watercolor paper, and students got to personalize their books, inside and out. The families took them home to fill them with personal stories, photographs, and other clippings that I think really helped them to stand out in the gallery.
On the night of the opening, I loved the chance to see workshop participants standing proudly near their books. One senior citizen set up shop in a chair near hers and spoke with most every passer-by.
Hundreds came through the gallery during the weekend, including quite a few who invested real time and effort into the interactive sketchbooks that called for their participation. Those four books, arranged on pedestals, called for all sorts of expressions.
In my book, "A Collection of Lines," I encouraged people to experiment with line drawings and patterns, as well as trying blind contour drawings of their friends. Another book asked them to share childhood memories, another invited collage work with provided magazine and newspaper clippings. I noticed one couple dedicate more than 20 minutes to doodling in the book I had bound!
Good news! I've recently learned that I've been accepted into the Artclectic art show, Oct. 24 - 27, at the University School of Nashville. This unique four-day show begins with preview parties the first two nights, and then general admission showings over a weekend.
I participated last year for the first time, and I found every aspect of the experience rewarding. Because the show is hosted at a K-12 school, organizers emphasize art education. Last fall, I taught a bookbinding workshop to a class. And then I answered many questions from inquisitive students when they got their advanced showing of the entire show.
As you can see below, the show has an interesting look and feel. Every artist gets assistance from carpenters to build hanging displays. I'd never shown my work in quite this way.
I'll share more information about Artclectic as the show approaches. In the meantime, you can learn about the show at these two sites: on the web and on Facebook.
And I want to share photos from last fall. I was just too busy to get them posted at the time, but three favorites follow below, and you can find dozens more at this Facebook album: Artclectic 2012 Photos
One of the best parts of attending art shows is having a reason to reflect on all the work that goes into each one, and to get to see all of my newest books in one place. Inevitably, I stay busy in the weeks before a show, and the recent Porter Flea was no different.
What was unique, as captured in the brief behind-the-scenes video above, was how many completely new styles of books I got to debut at the show. I'll be sharing more about those in the coming days here on the blog, as well as posting more books in my Etsy shop.
Until then, please let me know, in the comments, what you think about this video. It's a little different for the blog, I know, but my husband and I couldn't resist capturing some images at the show!
I have always loved the Porter Flea show in Nashville, even before I took part. In fact, the first ever Porter Flea took place on the first weekend we moved to the city. Since I have been participating, the show has gotten bigger and better, and this time around I was especially excited to debut a lot of fresh work. Most of what I showed was new, and after a very busy week, I got to display everything in a completely new booth setup, with new signage, shelving and tablecloths.
In my latest work, I've been incorporating screenprinting, including for my "Up, Up, and Away" line of travel journals. The idea for these little journals was jumpstarted by the show's organizers, who asked that each returning artist create an "exclusive" product for the show. A few of us chose aviation themes because the event was hosted in our neighborhood's former airport. My travel journals (above) were screenprinted with an original illustration of a Beechcraft airplane.
I also finished a few Coptic bound books with screenprinted covers. For these (see the magenta patterned book below), I began with sketches from a trip to the Frist Center, which inspired the repeating patterns that I screenprinted onto a variety of handmade lokta papers, and used to wrap the book covers. I'll share more about this process soon.
And I can't forget to mention my new Instagram photo albums. These square format leather books are perfect for Instagram and Polaroid prints. I've bound one for my husband's photos and one for mine, and I proudly displayed those as examples, garnering many excited responses. I was also happy to meet show-goers who also believe in printing out their digital photos, which really does make the images more special.
I've mentioned that the show took place at Cornelia Fort Airpark, a place with a very interesting history. I think the venue worked really well. Lots of space, wide aisles, and a playful setup allowed people to enjoy the art and have a chance to visit one of the most unusual, little-known places in the neighborhood.
We did get some rain — two short downpours and a third lengthy one — but the hangars held up well, and people were able to flock indoors with plenty of space.
I enjoyed seeing some of my Porter Flea friends, including Simon & Ruby, 400 Moons, and Monday Mint, as well as a new art show friend, Allison, of Shutters and Shuttles, with whom I've been recently collaborating.
It was also great to see Dolan Geiman at the Flea for the first time. Lucky for us, we were positioned within sight of his work, including some of his latest monumental collages.
Finally, as always, there are tons of other great photos from the event. I've shared only a few of my own here, but you can see more at these links:
Porter Flea AirCraft 2013, featuring 80 artists, began with a Friday night preview party, yielding tons of amazing photos. I'll post more about the show soon — I've still got the main show on Saturday to come — but for now, I've pulled together my favorite images by crowdsourcing from Instagram and Twitter in this Storify gallery. Enjoy!
Update: Saturday was a big success, with thousands of festival-goers descending on East Nashville for the market. I've enjoyed looking through the two most-used hashtags, #aircraft2013 and #porterflea, and have pulled together my absolute favorite photos from Instagram. Click through the slideshow below to see the best of the best from AirCraft 2013.
I'll be debuting leather Instagram photo albums this weekend at Porter Flea AirCraft here in Nashville, and I want to share with you my guide on how to print Instagrams — everyone's favorite square format photos.
The first Instagram album that I made was an anniversary gift for my husband, who uses Instagram often while reporting for the newspaper and to capture odd things around Nashville. Once the book was finished, it was exciting to see the images printed out and so much larger than we typically see them on an iPhone screen. The book that I handbound for him worked out so well that I decided to make more. Each of my albums has leather covers and 48 pages, made of thick watercolor paper. I have since been making two sizes, each designed to hold the most common square-format photo sizes available.
My large books are 7 x 7, which holds square images as large as 6 x 6, and standard 4 x 6 photos. The smaller books are 4 x 4 and hold 2.5 x 2.5 square photos.
There are many printing options out there, so I think it will help for me to share what I've learned about Instagram printing. Some services are user-friendly and simple, while others may require you to do more of the work in exchange for saving some money on each print.
Note: For 2.5 x 2.5 images, you'll need to use photo editing software to set up a 5 x 5 document with 4 photos in a grid. Once printed, you'll need to trim them.
I've found other options as well, but these seem to be the easiest to use and most affordable. Another option would be placing your square images on 4 x 6 prints and then trimming them. For more information, check out this tutorial. If you go this route, you could print one 4 x 4 or six 2 x 2 images per 4 x 6 print, but you'll need photo editing software to set up the files.
I know that my husband and I have found it extremely satisfying to finally print our photos — somewhat of a lost art, these days. And I hope my new square-format leather photo albums can be another encouragement that will save more photos from collecting digital dust.
The artists attending Porter Flea this spring are likely excited by the unique venue — Cornelia Fort Airpark in East Nashville — but I doubt they're as excited by the venue choice as my husband. Because he's a reporter at the local newspaper, he knows quite a bit about the quirky airpark, so this guest post is all his — a departure from the normal posts here and a bit longer, but worth it, I think.
Katie is right. I've become somewhat obsessed with the airpark, East Nashville's cozy home with ties to cocaine smuggling, a famous female military pilot, and the May 2010 flood. What more tease do you need than that?
The upcoming Porter Flea AirCraft event will be the first at the airpark since the flood closed it for good to air travel in 2010 (except for one infamous flight, but we'll get to that). The flood caused millions of dollars in damage to buildings and about 20 planes, as various YouTube videos have memorialized.
The city of Nashville bought the space in 2011 to add it to the Shelby Bottoms park system.
But its history reaches further back, to the airpark's opening in 1944. The year before, the airport's namesake, World War II pilot Cornelia Fort, became the first female American pilot to die while on war duty.
According to a Tennessean history article, Cornelia Fort grew up a southern debutante and learned to fly in 1940, after graduating from college. While she was a civilian pilot in Honolulu she had a close encounter with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. She survived that. But in March 1943, Fort collided in midair while ferrying a military plane over Texas.
Not a bad tale. But it'd be easy to argue that Fort ranks as the second most famous pilot associated with the airpark, at least in recent memory.
Last year, longtime airpark flyer Russell Brothers made national news by landing his powerless and malfunctioning 1961 Beechcraft 18 (think shiny aluminum and twin engines) on its belly in the grass alongside the strip. He did so, unscathed, in the middle of the night. Then he left the plane behind, called only his wife for a ride, and went home.
Police found the plane later, triggering an investigation that led to federal firearms charges against Brothers this year. He'd said at the time that he left his plane in the park because, well, it wasn't in the way of anything.
The firearms charges came down because felons cannot own guns — and Brothers was a felon. He had served 11 years in federal prison for international cocaine smuggling, using the same airplane, back in the 80s. The newspaper keeps a fat envelope of clippings from the trial, during which a judge referred to him as a "giant among giants" in smuggling.
I wouldn't normally do this, but if you want to learn more, I'd encourage you to splurge a couple dollars to read the whole story in the newspaper's archives ("Elderly pilot with criminal past explains East Nashville emergency landing"). Also, it appears, the plane could be rigged up for skydiving — with Brothers serving as "captain adventure."
Suffice it to say, I was intrigued when Porter Flea announced Cornelia Fort as the next craft show venue. When organizers invited artists to come help clean the place, which was still cluttered from the flood, we were probably first to volunteer.
The mission was simple: mop it out and clear out the hunks of junk. There was also a possible reward: any interesting finds were up for grabs, because the city had already cleared out what it considered worth keeping. Spoiler: they weren't scrappers at heart.
Our best find came from an airpark office. Behind a dingy desk, I found a large binder, splayed open and holding plastic ... somethings ... in small folder pockets. It was then that we learned a new word: aerofiche.
In all their glory, hundreds of sheets of translucent aerofiche were still intact, capturing the mechanical diagrams and parts inventories for dozens of airplanes. They could be enlarged and read by a projector. It's an obsolete technology — one that carries an aura of another era of recordkeeping. I've snapped photos of our aerofiche cleanup, but we haven't determined what to do with them yet. Incorporating them into bookbinding, if I can convince Katie, could be a leading contender.
Here's a peek at what we found — but stick with me, because there was another thing that we were able to glimpse that day as well.
If it's not already clear, we had a lot of fun at the airpark that day. We also sweated it out among a couple dozen volunteers. We also got to look around the grounds a bit, which are mostly uninteresting, except for two things: One, a sort of birdhouse graveyard behind a hangar, and another something only partially visible inside that hangar.
Just like last year, it still doesn't seem to be in the way of anything.
Porter Flea Handmade Market — Nashville's best handmade craft show — lifts off soon, promising to be bigger and better than ever. And I do mean bigger. More vendors than any of the first four Porter Flea events will come together June 1 in an unimaginably large venue: three airplane hangars!
I've been busy preparing, because this show has done nothing more than grow in popularity. This time around, the market extends beyond a one-day show, kicking off on Friday night, May 31, with a preview party. Tickets are limited, and about 40 remain, so please jet over to the Porter Flea tickets page to pick yours up. (It's 21 and up that night, with the show featuring local beers, artisan cheeses, and baked goods from the incredible Sweet Betweens.)
Also new this year, each returning artist will be featuring an AirCraft exclusive item. The theme plays up the unique venue, Cornelia Fort Airpark, a small landing strip in East Nashville with a colorful history, but which was closed to air traffic by the May 2010 Nashville flood. Still, the spirit of flight will live on with this event, and I've been busy screenprinting and binding a series of books that feature a vintage Beechcraft airplane.
Please check out the Porter Flea vendor page to learn more about the 80 great artists who will be in attendance. You can also set yourself a reminder, show your support, and invite friends at the event page on Facebook.
And if you're still wanting more, please look back at my postings and photo albums from the previous Porter Flea shows. You can follow these links:
When you have a newspaper reporter for a husband, art shows get covered in a whole new way. We just wrapped up Porter Flea a few hours ago, and he was still so motivated after an incredible show that he went ahead and compiled Instagrams and tweets from the artists and shoppers who attended and we're sharing them below.
He used Storify, which is a really convenient tool for crowdsourcing and compiling social media when lots of people come together in one place — and especially when those people are snapping tons of photos and tweeting their thoughts.
Porter Flea Holiday Market has finally arrived — 11 to 6 on Saturday — capping off a great wave of positive publicity in recent weeks, including a handful of features that included photos and write-ups of my handmade books.
Nashville's newest magazine, Native, got things started with a photoshoot of Porter Flea artisan items. For the photos, I brought my books to Moonbase, which is a quirky collaborative work space inside one of Nashville's coolest renovated buildings, Marathon Village, which once was an auto manufacturing plant (pre-1920s). That's also where Porter Flea will take place.
As you can see, three of my little red suede books, with vintage map pages, made it into the magazine.
It wasn't long before my books appeared in three other magazines, starting with Nashville Lifestyles, which kindly described each of my custom books as "an honest-to-goodness work of art." So kind of them.
Amid all of my busy preparations for Porter Flea, I have also been teaching, which caught the attention of another of Nashville's magazines, The East Nashvillian, which featured my handmade book ornament class in its December issue.
In mid-November, The City Paper published a feature story, "A better brand of Flea," in which I helped to explain what has made Porter Flea such a unique and successful show:
"Unlike most other craft fairs," I told the paper, "Porter Flea includes a strong showing from male artists, bringing diversity to the show with handmade wood furniture, letterpress posters, screen-printed T-shirts, and leather goods."
My husband and I have spoken often about the particular flair of the Flea, and diversity of talents is really one of its strongest attributes. I'll be excited to see some of the new participants on Saturday.
It was also a welcome surprise to see Porter Flea noticed beyond Nashville. Southern Living was "buzzing" about the event on their website and posted a link to my shop, among others.
The popularity of the show has given its organizers a chance to put the spotlight on local artists. It's been great to be a part of the positive energy. We've got great momentum, at just the right time.
That's right, this Nashville indie craft show is so popular that a line forms for the 11 a.m. opening. And once it starts, this show has a pulse like no other that I've done. Hosted in Marathon Music Works, a recently renovated concert venue, the show gets all of the little details just right: the music, the food trucks and coffee treats, and, of course, a great mix of artists.
This year's vendor list includes specialists in vintage glasses, handmade furniture, printmaking, awesome lighting design, and one of my husband's personal favorites — Thump Trunks, these great suitcases converted into boombox stereos. Oh! And I can't forget to mention that a great ceramics artist, Anderson Bailey, will be taking part for the first time.
It's the best show around and we love the venue. And, just two years in, Porter Flea has begun to get some good press. In the past month, the show and my work got mentions in a Nashville City Paper story, in Native Magazine and in Nashville Lifestyles. The Nashville Scene named it the city's "best artisan market." Not bad at all for a show that got its start in July 2011.
I'm working hard to prepare a great new line of leather journals and handbound book Christmas ornaments for what will be my third Porter Flea. To see more great photos and read about the previous shows, you can follow these links:
Yesterday was the second annual Handmade & Bound book arts and zine festival in Nashville, and it proved to be just as inspiring as the inaugural event. I took a moment today to look back at my review of the festival from last year, and it helped me realize that I've become closely connected to the city's book arts community.
Back then, I had just to moved to the city and was still wondering what a book arts festival would even look like. This time around, I literally saw dozens of familiar faces, including students I've taught, bookbinding friends, and even some strangers who knew all about my work. We're not strangers anymore, and Handmade & Bound is the reason. There's such an energy to the festival. I found myself buying other artists books and getting inspired all over again.
And be sure to check out the 2-minute video at the bottom. You can hear from some of the festival organizers and take a sneak peek at letterpress printing and bookbinding in action.
I'm a cardigan-wearing bookbinder living and working in Nashville, Tennessee with my husband and my dog. I studied the art of bookmaking in Cortona, Italy during the summer of 2006. My work channels traditional techniques into bright, contemporary books that emphasize textures, colors, and patterns. Archival materials make these books — whether journals, photo albums, guest books, or sculptural expressions — into long-lasting works of art. I want to share my works in progress and the photography, sewing, printmaking, and other arts that inspire me.
.JPG "Instagram photo album")
.JPG "leather Instagram photo album (handmade)")
.JPG "linenlaidfelt AirCraft exclusive book")
.JPG "up up and away")
