Too much Needlepoint at one TIME !

In 2000 a new wholesale company called ,The Point Of It All Designs , with 75 of my designs signed , POIAD by Gail , later Gail Hendrix , was launched at the annual TNNA trade show in January in California, I can't remember which city, but it is always in California. This is the biggest trade show that TNNA has in the year. For years I had only designed for the POIA a DC shop . I did all there custom work and had designed a line of canvases under the name Festival Designs by Gail, many of which went into the new wholesale line. After deciding to enter into this new venture , I madly started to create new designs at a manic pace to be ready, and at the same time do my custom work. When I saw the pictures (top picture) of the first booth in this very big show, I was taken back by the shear volume of my designs, all in one spot at one time.

Of course I had seen a shop wall filled with my designs, but this was something different. It was quite a satisfying site for an artist, like my first one woman show at the Watergate Gallery, when I was first out of college. That show consisted of my silk screens . I had a little studio , I shared with two other artists on the corner of Calvert Street and Connecticut Avenue. I was working at American Needlework Center on M st. in Georgetown, apprenticing to become a needlepoint painter . The studio keep me centered and my hand in the art world before I decided to throw myself in the world of needlepoint designing as a career. It was very unexpected, frankly I took the position at the ANC to have a job, other than a department store clerk , that i had been doing while in college par time. You never know.

Anyway....4 years later , I opened an envelop and to my horror, were pictures of the 2004 TNNA
show in California. Now I know I had been designing at fever pitch, but there is something really different about seeing the shear volume at one time( bottom photo). This photo and others panned the booths , for now my designs filled 2 or three spaces and a couch..lol. The above photo only shows a third of the both, it had two walls on either side just packed with canvases...wall to wall Gaily. I stared at these photos , and the only thing I could think of was , how can on person create all that in such a short time. It seemed impossible to me, and made me feel tired all of a sudden, I needed to sit down and have a cup of coffee. What is really amazing, is these trade shows have booth after booth of canvases...from soup to nuts...how anyone can look at all that at one time is beyond me. I like my needlepoint , in small portions I decided. This is one time when , I personally felt, this is way too much...lol

This is however is what the trade likes .....there needlepoint, a mass.....so many canvases that the shear weight would sink a boat if piled on top.....

I really love what I do, and the variety I am able to achieve, but it might just make me have the big one and drop dead if I ever saw all the canvases that I had painted over my long career, in one spot. I could fill a warehouse...it is just too much !! ..... and it is just not me...my husband watched the canvases go out of the studio for four years for the wholesale line, and when I showed him the pictures ...he said, sh-t Muffy, that is a lot of needlepoint ..... maybe we are strange , but there you go. Proud of an achievement, and aghast at the same time....the stuff life is made of......no one can say I am lazy, for sure........lol