Demo at the Salmon Festival

We had a full day last week at the Salmon Festival helping out at the Artisan Market and doing a demo.  We met a lot of tourists from various parts of Canada visiting along with some from the U.S. and as far away as Australia.

Artisan Market tent with demo out front

Table with clay items for demo

Dave and I later discovered this photo prop and were goofing off a bit.  That was Dave's Yogi the Bear pose (I think?).  lol

It's All in the Package

Now that our sockeye salmon pieces are done, we have been busy packaging them all.  Sometimes it seems as much time and work go into this part as making the items themselves.  We design and print all our own labels to accommodate each item.  It takes a bit of work setting up the original templates and then afterwards they are ready to print anytime we need more.

The switch plate cover was a little tricky to figure out how to make and took a little bit of engineering on our part.  We wanted to hang them on our pegboard display but also show them off nicely.

Sockeye Salmon are Coming!

It has been an unusually busy summer for us as we have the Salmon Festival coming up in October which happens only every 4th year.  The salmon are already arriving but the great event starts October 3rd and will run for 3 weeks.  This means we have had to work on creating our salmon pieces in between our regular shows and filling store orders.

In order to do this, we had set aside several hours each day to work on our salmon fish pieces.  So far we have made more than 1000 clay "fish" which are then attached to various findings and made into items such as key chains, zipper pulls, cell phone charms, necklaces, earrings, tie bars, fridge magnets and even switch plate covers.

Salmon earring beads ready to bake

Finished salmon pieces

Salmon Festival is Now Over

The Salmon Festival is now over and it was a extremely successful this year.  They had a count of more than 160,000 visitors over the three week period which is a lot of people for a town of a population of only 3000.

I want to thank Lynn Erin for the wonderful job she did of running the gift shop set up in the log cabin.  She was there every day, rain or shine, and worked tirelessly with always a cheerful smile.  Lynn has the Fireweed Art Studio in the area and this is an example of one of her gorgeous paintings:

Salmon Festival is Almost Over

These last three weeks seem to have been a blur and now this Sunday will be the final day to the end of the Salmon Festival.  We went out again this morning to add a few more salmon pieces to our display and hopefully there will be enough to last the weekend but if they sell out, that will be all right too!

I thought I would show you some more photos of the area since it wasn't too crowded with people this time.

One of the main focuses of the Salmon Festival is education and so every student from every school in the whole surrounding area comes to this event.  The other day we counted 11 school buses lined up and there were more arriving on a steady basis.

Another main attraction there was all the food.  There was everything from salmon burgers to salmon chowder with other types of goodies.  This booth shown here was extremely popular with their traditional native cuisine including delicious home made bannock.

The salmon society partners with First Nations People and this authentic TeePee was one of their displays.

Today was much quieter than other days but I know it will be busy again over the weekend.

More Salmon for the Festival

We left a nicely filled display in the gift shop at the Salmon Festival last week hoping there would be enough stock to last over the weekend.  But with over 100,000 people so far, we weren't surprised when we got a call Sunday morning to come out and refill our display again.  So I'm back to making up another batch of red and green salmon in pins, magnets, earrings, pendants, pens and switchplate covers.

This event has been so overwhelming, yet successful - but I really am ready to turn in my fishing license after it is over!  lol!

One thing this event has taught me is how to speed up my production time. Instead of creating individual clay pieces one at a time, I found myself working in batches of a dozen or so at a time.

This is a new salmon design I created by carving out a template from my own drawing and then stamping it into clay.  The pieces are then colored with gold mica powders and alcohol inks.

I also apply these fish pieces to other items like pens and switchplate covers.