Boise Open Studios (BOSCO) 2011 weekend wrap-up

Pam, Geoff and Nancy working on their art.

 This past Saturday and Sunday was the big event. Now you might ask yourself why has my studio been relocated to the front yard. Well for  several reasons. One my studio is too small for three of us plus guests. Second, last year Marianne and I were set up in the back and we had a total of 15 visitors over 2 days, and since I live on a busy street...I thought this way we would get people that wouldn't normally stop (more visibility and not as wierd as going around into someone's back yard that you don't know) and 3rd reason was when I went to Open Studios out in Lake Tahoe this was how one house was set up and that was were I got the idea.

Well this set up worked very well for the first day. We had a lovely warm fall day! By afternoon you can see I was down to a sleeveless shirt. My theory was correct about better traffic up front. We had many people stop by that were not doing the tour but were just driving by and wanted to see what we were up to...plus lots of neighbors. I didn't count how many people came by on Saturday but at least 45, if not more and almost that many on Sunday. I sure wish I had thought to count.  We had a constant stream of people until 4pm when the Football game started. It got so eerily quiet that we thought maybe the rapture had taken place. No cars, nothing...just silence.

 And for people wanting to see my studio- they got a private tour, so all worked out well. I had many comments about how calm and tranquil and zen like my studio area was. That made me happy. That must mean I did a good job of cleaning up the usual jumble of stuff!

Nancy worked on staining old letters with coffee and burning their edges to add to her moth painting. Geoff is seen working on his cartoons.

Here I am gluing buttons and adding paint and glitter to a project.

Day 2: Sunday we awoke to pouring rain and dropping temperatures! The tent had pools of water on the awning! Time to re-adjust. Bill moved the truck out of the garage and we turned that into a working studio for 3! We did such a convincing job of that- ( in only 30 minutes!) that we had a quite a few people comment that it was nice that 3 of us could share this studio space (all the time). We laughed and said no we didn't usually work in the garage and then I would show them my studio. Which is just through the door in the garage, so this arrangement actually worked out really well. And I told them that Nancy and I actually would go work once a week in Marianne's studio which was also open and then we would send them over there to go see.

We also had comments from folks that were happy to actually get to see us working, they said that at some of the other studios they went to the artists were not actually working on something.

At first the rain was a dampener on traffic but as the day went on the people came out, at one point we had a bottle neck in the garage it was so full of people. I think the other factors in such a good response was the insert in the Boise Weekly, the cards promoting our website (a lot of the folks I talked to had just printed the map off the website and didn't even have the one from the paper) and the opening at the Boise Art Museum.