Jewellery Quarter Arts and Designer Crafts Festival

Because of the trials and tribulations that I have experienced during the last few weeks with posting to the blog, I'm just updating some that have been missed in that time. This post should have been posted on:
Saturday 5th July 2008

I booked a stall at the Arts and Designer Crafts Festival at St Paul’s Square in the famous Birmingham Jewellery Quarter.

I have never done a market stall before but I have often thought about using this method to promote my art work to generate sales, clicks on my website and interest, normally I play cricket on Saturdays but an injury to my elbow seems to be stretching out for the whole season and this gives me the opportunity to test the water.

I spent a great deal of time leading up to Saturday making display stands for the work and portfolio books to illustrate all the images that I now offer so you can imagine my disappointment when I woke early on the morning to find heavy rain falling and a look on the weather forecast www made me think is it worth going. If I can keep dry can I keep my photos dry and with a forecast like this is anybody going to turn up.


The event was scheduled between 10am and 4pm and you notice from the trusted BBC Weather page that 4 o’clock is when the rain and showers would break up to give a reasonable dry early evening.

Suddenly there was a complete change in the weather, the rain stopped and the sun came out, so I pack everything into the car and away I go. There was a very gusty wind so I decided not to put the work on glass onto the stands (the very stands that I had spent so much time building) I decided just to spread them out flat on the table.

Glad I had my little compact camera on hand to take shots of the people who came to my stand.


It was great to see some old friends that I haven’t seen for some time.

This is Brod we go back a long long way to when we were just out of school in the 60s working at the fan engineering company Alldays and Onions in Small Heath, while I supplemented my apprentice wage of £2.50 a week as a DJ in night clubs, Brod was playing drums in various bands, I’m very thankful to him for getting me in to the then obscure Tamla Motown, Atlantic and Stax sound. From time to time we bump into one and other. Brod if your reading this send us an email and we can get together for a pint.


This is Asma (with glasses) with here two boys and her sister. Asma was on the same Fine Art Degree course as me at Solihull College. She now has a day job and with a family too its hard for her to do art. I wish she was still producing the lovely paintings that she did, of course she can always go back to it some day. Who am I to speak some say (including my son) that I should still do the old paintings I did before I did my degree.