The Showdown!

The story begins like this…

This is our Mom, Carla.

When you hear the phrase “good things come in small packages” you should think of her. But don’t be fooled by her size. She’s tough and feisty and never met a problem she couldn’t solve. She’s been a jeweler for more than 15 years with the help of our Dad…

This is our Dad, David.

If chef Julia Childs and that handyman guy from This Old House were to have a kid, he’d probably be a lot like our dad. David’s the kind of guy who’ll go outside at 6:30am, build a deck, transplant a tree, move some rocks and then come inside and whip up an amazing dinner. Along with Mom, they make a pretty good team when it comes to this jewelry business…

They went to Des Moines, Iowa…

Mom and Dad do shows all over the country. It’s a long ways from Oregon to Iowa, but the Des Moines show is one of their favorites. When you’re a working artist like they are, you have to apply to shows. You compete with artists from all over the country and if your work is selected by the jury then you get to go to the show.

More than meets the eye...

When you arrive at a show you need to set up your tent and displays. In just a few hours an artist must create a fully-functioning 10’x10’ retail space. Artists spend lots of time and money creating their booths to look and feel as if you’ve walked into any professional retail store.

Glass cases, signage, professional photos, custom-built displays, and the list goes on. A show may only be 3 days long, but it can be months and years of work that lead up to those events.

Not their first time…

We tried to count how many shows Mom and Dad have done and we stopped at about 2 bazillion. They know how to pack the minivan perfectly. They have labeled Tupperware bins and set-up systems. Maps drawn for different layouts. Needless to say, when it comes to show set-up and running, they’ve got it down. Hail storms, thunder and lightening, pouring rain, blazing sun, gusting wind, Mom and Dad have been through it all with a few bumps and bruises, but otherwise unscathed, until now…

The Showdown! Mother Nature vs. The Booth…

Mom and Dad had arrived in Des Moines, set up their booth, made it through the first day of the show and gone to bed when they received a phone call at midnight. A wet and windy storm had ripped through the event site! There was booth carnage and their booth was one of the casualties!

It must’ve been a pretty good storm, because artists weight their booths to avoid this sort of thing. One of the neighboring booths had their weight broken in half! Yikes, that’s a serious storm!

The booth lost this time…

With their booth-sashimi stuffed into the minivan Mom and Dad head home early. They’ve got some scrambling to do to get everything back together, fixed, buy a new tent and be ready for two upcoming shows in just two weeks.(The picture below is what it looks like when big tent tube get ripped apart. That’s gonna take more than duct tape to fix!)

They’re in pretty good spirits - we all agreed it’d make a pretty cool entry for Mom’s blog - but we thought it’d be nice to try to do a little more to help get them back on track.

(This zipper used to be attached to their tent, but got ripped off in the wind. Yowsers!)