Gathering of the Guilds – Another Successful Year

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This year’s show was a huge success with 23 artists, lots of dedicated volunteers, many, many compliments from the people who attended and really well crafted booth layouts. People should be very proud of their participation based on compliments on the wonderful artwork and that people who attended were so very grateful we had the show again this year.

Linda Roman

Attendance for this year was 13,526 people coming in the hall. The majority of the people came in the afternoon of each day, which jives with the unexpected first day of sunshine and hot weather we had on Saturday with people doing outdoor activities in the morning and then coming to the show and cooling off and shopping. Compared to previous years, we did well, surpassing the 13,077 of 2022 and 12,334 of 2019 and moving toward the high we had in 2018 of 18,048.

Carlyne Lynch
Rosalind Cooper
Lynn Kennison

Every guild reported increased sales from previous years. We are still waiting for three bills to come from the LLC, the convention center and the furniture company before we know how much the guild made, but overall, sales were higher than last year. Our group booth which also included New and Emerging Artist members had total sales of $7500!

One interesting observation was that each guild reported items sold this year were primarily smaller items, art cards, and products that could be worn or put outside. The potters were especially surprised that a lot of their larger pieces didn’t sell this year as they have in the past.

Greta Schneider
Mitzi Kugler
Kylea LeMond

Thanks to everyone who took the time to fill out the Survey Monkey survey. The results will be compiled in time for the June board meeting and the June general meeting, but generally, there were concerns with the booth layouts, the load out process, how the demos were announced and providing a schedule beforehand, and the volunteer sign up system. Except for problems with the AC temps, people enjoyed meeting and working with the artists and vendors, talking to the visitors and reconnecting.

Dijenaire Frazier
Sharon Dunham
Jennifer Hart
Terry Thomas
Happy Shoppers
Debbie Vourlas
Kory Dollar

PNWGG Winners May 2023 – The award winners are as follows:

Best Booth in Show: Marvelous Mosaics
Best demonstration: Barb Kienle
Best Overall in Show: Tie between Mitzi Kugler and Barbara Wells
Most Creative Use of Glass: Mari Aoki Knight
Beat Overall in Show: Tie between Mitzi Kugler and Barbara Wells
Best Non-Fused Glass: Gerald and Rose McBride

Our Demonstration Area: An exciting attraction at this years show was return of our demonstration area. Several artists took time away from their booths to show attendees many aspects of how we create beautiful art. Barbara Kienle won as the best demonstration of how to make cute suncatchers with framed scenes. She let visitors make their own and then she took them to her studio and fired them. Other fun demonstrations included: Carlyne Lynch / vitrigraph, Greta Schneider / dichroic glass jewelry, Kathie Wise / mosaics, Gerald McBride / his water attachment for grinders, Roz Cooper / vases and Lyn Kennison / lanterns.

Roz Cooper glass vase demo
Gerald Mc Bride tool demo

Greta Schneider dichroic glass

To Our volunteers – We couldn’t do it without you!!!

THANK YOU SO MUCH to everyone who volunteered and helped before, after and during the show this year! Events like GotG which are a huge benefit to us as individual artists, the art and glass community in general and also our glass guild…cannot happen without volunteers! We realize some of you may want to volunteer mostly to get the reduced commission…..and some of you are in a booth by yourselves and have to work before or after the show or have friends or family help out to some extent during the show and we tried to make at least some workable hours available to everyone. We would also like to give a special thanks to people we know came and gave their time either to help someone earn a lower commission or just came and helped because they want to support the guild and the artists who were there.

Rae Williamson and Mitzi Kugler
Ken Hashagen

Whatever motivated you…..that time spent benefits all of us and makes the show run so much more smoothly. We had some new and unique situations and booth set ups this year and it was much more complicated than in the past to find out how many people we might have signing up and to figure out how many volunteer hours were needed, and available, and how to make them available to the artists in a fair manner….so everyone could take advantage of the commission reduction to some extent. We will probably do a few things differently next time but considering all the new people we had, and the variations on types of booths and numbers of artists in the different configurations, it went pretty smoothly.

Also, a special thanks also to those who helped get the gallery display pieces picked up and delivered to the show and even more…..helped get all of it back to the storage unit in the relatively short time span that we had on Sunday afternoon. That is an extremely important job and we know it occurs when everyone is tired and ready to just pack up and go home! There was a little confusion about the Airtable and the Sign Up Genius… Airtable only gave us an idea how many people might be available for certain types of jobs, not actual shifts. Sign up Genius, which Mitzi was thankfully able to set up online, made it much easier for people to get their actual shifts in and know what was still available. We will all be discussing ways to make the sign up system plus actually keeping track of hours done more efficiently next year. There was definitely a bit of a learning curve on volunteer hours this year….but all in all it went well.

Volunteered, Voluntold Volunteers – Member Janet Van Fleets’ Grandson and Husband.
Lesley Kelly, PNWGG Coordinator for GOTG

On behalf of the Pacific Northwest Glass Guild we would like to extend a HUGE thank you to our Lesley Kelly who coordinated our participation in this year’s Gathering of Guilds…a job well done!!!

Our artist/vendors thank you for your unending patience, encouragement and problem solving…you are the perfect person for the job.

Considerations for next year.

The demonstration area in the lobby area was a huge hit with attendees, and demo areas created by the individual guilds were extremely popular. There is a lot of interest from all the guilds in having a joint demo area up in the front of the hall, and we will be working on putting a proposal together for that.

The show will be on April 19-21, 2024, and will be in Hall D of the convention center. This is great news for us as Hall D is bigger, has two dedicated loading docks, and also is the first area that everyone who parks below the convention center comes to as they come off the elevators. This will be important as the I5 parking won’t be available due to construction and the only place to park will be in the lots under the center. The expanded space in the hall and a joint demo space could free up space for more booths and possibly more options for sizes of booths.

See you there!!!