A view from my chair...

a note from the Sale Chairman

CONGRATULATIONS to all Guild artists on the success of both our Sale Preview Fashion Show and our 26th Annual Weavers’ Guild Sale!

Our Fashion Show was held the week before our Sale at the St. Louis Woman’s Club again this year and it was another huge success! It was great fun to watch the audience descend on our racks of garments and tables of accessories to start their shopping before we’d even had a chance to model for them! We had such a wonderful time doing this event. It’s an amazing experience because the lovely women of the Woman’s Club truly appreciate the workmanship and artistic quality of our artwork ... as well as the original, "one of a kind" nature of our designs! We sold 26 items for a sales total of over three thousand dollars!

THANK YOU to the wonderful fashion show models, announcers, and sales people for your help with the event! I know we’re all looking forward to doing it again next year. And, if anyone is interested in doing a spring fashion show let me know! It might be fun to produce some spring/summer fashions and accessories for a change of pace and I’m also sure they would love to see us again in the spring!

Our 26th Annual Guild Sale was another successful event again this year! While our final totals were down from last year when we sold over forty-eight thousand, we did sell just over thirty eight thousand this year ... and it was actually very close to our totals from 2006.

While examining the sales data, I noticed a few interesting details. We had a larger than normal rotation of artists this year with seven of our regular artists not participating this year. Together, those seven artists accounted for almost six thousand dollars in sales last year. But the good news was that we also had twelve brand new or returning artists this year who accounted for almost five thousand in sales!

Unfortunately, while many of our artists experienced a drop in their sales this year, we did have ten artists who saw their sales increase this year by as much as 30%! The Sale data is very interesting to look over and can be very helpful with pricing your work. Copies of the data will be available at our guild meetings and if you contact me by email (gaglidden@aol.com) I can send it to you as an email attachment to download.

Many thanks to everyone who helped with this year’s Guild Sale! It truly requires a collective effort from SO many guild members to make this event a success each year! Every job is so important and greatly appreciated!

• Thank you to everyone who helped as demonstrators, salespeople, or helping at the sales table!
• Thank you to everyone who helped unload and re-load the POD!
• Thank you to everyone who helped sort through the stacks of "stuff" and created the beautiful displays of artwork!
• Thank you, Dee Felt for the beautiful postcard designs you produce each year!
• Thank you, Karen Kelley Schultz for your help with the publicity each year!
• Thank you, Kay Baranowski and the other members of the Jury committee, Marggy Grace, Kay Delassus, Tina Broderson, Dale Pessin, Karen Kelley Schultz, and Sue Brown for your dedication throughout the year and especially on Sale check in day!
• Thank you, Shanna Suttner for coming back to St. Louis for the Sale weekend and passing on your "POD-craft" to our new member, Norah Ryan, who volunteered to learn the secrets of the POD! Thank you both!
• Thank you, Marti Arnold, Amy Norris, Kay Delassus, and Kalene Zerkel for your time consuming task of typing our growing inventory lists into the computer each year! (We’re exploring a way to make your jobs a little easier by encouraging our artists to send their inventories as excel spreadsheets next year.)
• Thank you, Tina Broderson and Marggy Grace for handling the finances throughout the Sale and Thank you, Karen Kelley Schultz for taking on the new duties of Sale Treasurer!!
• Thank you, Kaye Shumate and each member of your Check-in Committee for your meticulous attention to the details involved with the check-in process!
• Thank you, Mary Quinn for your incomparable hostess skills and your ability to make our Guild Reception look like a caterer’s dream!
• Finally ... THANK YOU ALL ... it’s a pleasure to work with each one of you again this year, and we should all be very proud of this wonderful Sale we’ve put together these last 26 years!

MARK YOUR CALENDARS NOW for our Sales dates in 2009 - we are scheduled for the first weekend in November with our Sale dates on November 6th & 7th, 2009!

Jane Glidden