Show prep, show prep, show prep...

I'm about two and a half weeks out from the Hilton Indoor Summer Art Festival (i.e. my first JURIED art/craft fair, with the most traffic of any craft fair I've done so far), and a little less than two weeks out from exhibiting at the Southern Arizona Watercolor Guild. So...cue the panicking?

"Hurricane Panic," painted in 2006 when I lived in Florida.  Appropriate to many life situations other than hurricanes, however.

Surprisingly, I'm not panicked about it, though!  I've just been doing a couple little show-prep things every day, here and there, in addition to my everyday chores.  It's been fun, and in getting things together I unearthed some hidden gems.  Like...
...these!  I found these while I was digging out art from storage in my garage.

 I didn't paint them; two of them are pieces of art I bought on my trip to Panama several years ago (oh gosh...I'm now realizing it was NINE years ago, and that time, she is a-flyin').  They're watercolors that I bought from a woman selling her art on the street in Panama City, and the women in the paintings are dressed in typical indigenous dress of the different tribes of Panama (in the group picture, the one on the right is Guna...I wish I remembered the rest). 

 The cactus lady is a mini-print that the owners of a house I lived in in college left behind when they moved (they left a lot of stuff...I got some cool art pieces and furniture that I "inherited" from that house!).  I had forgotten I owned any of these...aren't they cool?

I dug these up while I was looking for paintings that I'm going to exhibit, which I also need to photograph at 300 DPI so that in case they sell (knock on wood!) I still have a high-res copy for prints and stuff.  

Like this!  This will be a print soon.  I love this piece...

 In going through my big box of paintings, I'd found some that I had never photographed or scanned at ALL!  So there will be some new-to-you, old-to-me pieces going up on the website and on here soon...it was really interesting to see old pieces that I hadn't seen probably since I first finished them.  Maybe I should go digging in my garage more often...

Yesterday I packaged up the rest of the greeting cards I got back from the printer, and I went to the store and display fixture place and got this neat little stand to put them in:

The word art cards are new, and I have one more new set that'll be coming from the printer soon...I'll need more ribbon to package all the new cards with.

Also found a necklace stand at the display fixtures place...

I thought this was a better way of displaying my pendants than one of those bust displays...this one fits seven necklaces at a time on it, so it's easy to see everything at a glance, and pick them up to try on.  You can see a few of the painted stone pendants I recently made are displayed on there, looking pretty good...closeups and Etsy listings coming in a few days!

I'm also trying to get pieces matted and framed...I will basically live at Michael's for the next week or so, as I go back there to pick up more mat board, hanging hardware, and frames as I need them.  Oy.  That's five pieces to be framed and three canvases to be wired for hanging, just for the Watercolor Guild show...and more to be matted for the Hilton Festival.

I'm just really excited for these shows, though.  I can't wait for people to see my work, to see how they react to it, and to meet all the other artists.  But of course I also want to have a Grade-A display put together, and bring my best work...I admit, I want to impress everyone too. ;)