All Set Up

The booth is set up now. Booth 141, Main Arena Alley, right in the middle of the Harford Fair with the rest of the Northeast PA Artist Collective around me. Tables are level. Pots are arranged. Square is running on every member’s phone. The pricing is done. There is nothing left to do now but wait for the gates to open and see who walks through.

The rush of loading crates and leveling shelves and figuring out where the raku pieces catch the light best is over. For a few minutes you get to stand back and look at what you made, arranged the way you chose to arrange it, and just see it. Not as inventory. Not as a number on a spreadsheet. As the work. That quiet stretch before the first visitor walks up is worth something on its own, even before a single sale happens.

I always forget how good it feels to see some of the season’s work laid out together in one place. The wood-fired shave brushes next to the raku vases next to the mugs from the reclaim clay, all of it under one tent, all of it representing months of throwing after night shifts and firing through thunderstorms and catching thin bottoms six mugs in instead of twenty. Standing in a finished booth is the one moment where all that scattered effort looks like a single thing instead of a hundred separate tasks.

Being set up next to the other members of the collective adds something a solo booth never has. Members are not competing for the same customer. We are showing a whole range of what handmade work in this area actually looks like, which gives visitors more reasons to stop and more chances to find something that speaks to them specifically. A shared booth is its own small act of the generosity I keep coming back to in these posts. None of us are trying to outsell each other. We are trying to make sure the fair still has real handmade work in it, at a time when that is getting harder to find at a county fair.

Now it’s just a matter of waiting, coffee in hand, for the first person to walk up and pick something off the table. That waiting is its own kind of practice. You cannot rush it and you cannot force it. You can only be ready, be present, and be willing to say the same thing I keep coming back to. Look, I made this for you.

If I were living yesterday a second time: The work was already ready. I just needed a minute to see it that way.

Things I am grateful for: A season’s worth of work finally out where people who might care can actually see it.

If I get to live to be 86, I might only have: 12,593 days left. One of them starts with a booth fully set up,

Connect with Creek Road Pottery LLC:

Website | Shop | Collectors Club | The Pin Tool Podcast | Instagram | Bluesky