Going to the Fair 2008

What a lovely weekend to be out in Grant Park! Beth and I had a great time at the Country Fair in Galena. Here are some pictures of our booth this year. We moved down the row to a corner spot, with amazing views of the town just behind us.
I think my favorite moment of the weekend was when a customer couldn't decide on a design, but she was attracted to the Dirty Martini olive bag because as a child she had drawn a picture of a landscape and it was raining olives!

We want to thank the fair organizers for another smooth year and congratulations...next year will be 30 years!



The countryside really stepped up and provided amazing color for the thousands of visitors to our little town. It was spectacular!

Galena Country Fair, October 11 & 12

• It was so nice of the fair organizers to feature us on their homepage! We are still pretty new to the fair and it was a huge honor! www.galenacountryfair.org
  

• Visit our new booth location...#130. We are down our original row, on the corner! Don't worry, we're still near the funnel cakes!

• Look for our new wallets, pillows, note cards, baby onesies and brand new handmade bags! Also our older designs are on sale...you don't want to miss it!

• Our exclusive designs for Vintaj Earth are still available in their beautiful store on Main St. They still have some of our new 12 x 16 bags...get them while you can!

What's New for Country Fair

Introducing our new onesies AND our new bags. Each onesie is hand painted with non-toxic paint and is machine washable. Our bags are now completely handmade, with a pocket and a closure AND they are also machine washable!!

We will have 5 designs in our onesie collection and 3 designs of our new bags in our booth at the Galena Country Fair. We will also have new handmade wallets and painted, fabric holiday ornaments.

Our original hand painted canvas bags will be on sale...you don't want to miss it!!

Work in Progress

We are gearing up for our busy Fall season. On the left is a picture of me in my studio, painting 2 yards of our Falling Leaves design. The picture on the right shows one of our new products...a cute little wallet with a velcro closure. This Cherry Blossom design is from our exclusive line at vintajearth. In the future we are planning to sell our painted yardage to you for your own projects.


If you are planning a trip to Galena, we will be at the Galena Country Fair on October 11 and 12. We are working hard to get these new products in our booth!

Kids Workshop at the Galena Arts and Recreation Center

Thank you to Sarah and the gang at the ARC for inviting us to teach a painting workshop today. We had a great time with all three age groups and we were very impressed with their talents. The number one topic that we wanted to get across today was that there isn't a wrong answer here, each kid will have their own favorite color, their own interests and ideas that they could express using the tools we gathered on these colorful bags!

A glimpse of what is to come...

This is our first step into the future of graceEmae...we painted the yardage and constructed our own bag! The cherry blossom design is one of our exclusive lines with vintajearth. It has a pocket inside and a magnetic closure. The antique brass rings complement the Vintaj jewelry perfectly. We are still talking to manufacturers about having a bag made that is similar to our old tote design. This completely handmade bag could be one of the directions we take...out of many!


Let us know what you think! Leave a comment here or email us at graceEmae@mchsi.com.

Technology is catching up!

Thanks to our friend Lisa Lam at Craftboom for introducing us to Artflock.com. When we started this business I found it extremely frustrating...I had to learn how to create a website, keep a blog updated and we had to spend a lot of time in Etsy, listing and reading forums to keep current. Now there is a place where we can do all of this and have it in one place and they've made it easy to use.

We would like to present our new website/blog/online marketplace...www.graceEmaestudio.com.

We love Etsy, and we love our blog on Blogger so we will probably keep those going for a while, but we will be eliminating www.graceEmae.com at the moment. We're going to try this out, please give us any feedback if you have a sec!