Started out with an email making me aware of what I hadn’t done properly.

I wonder if I used up all my “on track” focus last year when I relocated the Commonwheel Art Festival in just 3 weeks due to flooding.

I wanted to enter a contest for the Festival Poster and missed the deadline last week. But sent in a digital entry. For some reason I thought that would work. But in an email today, I was forgiven for the late entry, and he was looking for the physical poster. Oops! Packaged it up and mailed it off to arrive hopefully on Wednesday. Sent an email request for forgiveness and joked a bit of my loss of focus. Left it up to them if they will accept the entry. Last year’s poster was exceptionally beautifully done, so hope it does get a chance to compete . . .

At 7:35 my phone rang. I was sound asleep. I work into the midnight hour, so to get 8 hours of sleep, need to sleep past 8am. This client had an appointment tomorrow, but wanted to come today instead. She was suppose to be still camping on Pikes Peak last night, but with the threat of snow had headed down a day early. So I groggily said fine, see you in a bit, but someone else who is coming to help me with a big project may show up and I would have to work with her. This client arrived  bit later than she had thought, so we started on the first piece. Computer training on how to find her downloads, or save them in a place she could find again. Her email account did this a bit differently than mine, but I figured it out. Then showed her the easiest way to find them doing a search if she just couldn’t find them any other way.

Then she wanted help ordering business cards from Vista Prints. We got that process started. She wanted a different color paper than white, so we called in to get help with that. When we saw the proof the person helping us saw a problem of a white box around the image. Not sure how that would happen in a pdf. She asked us to hold while she talked to a tech and came back and told us he fixed the problem and to proceed to checking out. So we did.

While we were on hold, my friend who was coming to help was calling in. I grabbed my cell phone to call her back. A bit of cross calling and we did connect. She was headed my way after one stop of dropping off cookies to a sick friend.

So the timing was pretty perfect. But I hadn’t gotten much of anything done that I needed to do today.

Commonwheel’s scrapbooks with history of many years in photographs, past ads for gallery shows and articles about us had been in the basement when it flooded August 8, 2014. I had collected them and put them in a big green tub, not wanting to tackle looking at them alone. My friend not only was willing to help with this project, but wants to help us get more attention for it being our 40th year in business. We laughed, and cried a bit, while working on these scrapbooks. Some pages were just not salvageable, but some were almost untouched by water. Crazy!

She began working on the one that was pretty old and cleaned up many pages. I worked on ones that were not too badly damaged and moved the pages from their ruined notebooks into cleaner notebooks. Shaking the dirt off and carefully separating pages stuck together.

There was one flyer from the first Mardi Gras, not Carnivale, that I helped create many years ago. It had the most actual floats, horses and bands of any parade Manitou Springs has ever hosted. Commonwheel had helped with some pieces of this event, and I was on City Council that year. But many of the other promoters had grandiose ideas about how many t-shirts, hurricane glasses and beads we could sell. They over reached, and it lost the enthusiasm of these folks, so there was never another Mardi Gras in Manitou Springs. Yet a few years later, a Commonwheel member engaged other artists in the community and we had the first Carnivale parade on the sidewalks. (That is another story to tell.)

So many memories . . .

We realized what a rich history Commonwheel has had in this community. Members of Commonwheel also started ClayFest. Other community members took both of these events over. Currently Carnivale is thriving and a fun event that happens in the winter to enliven our merchants and bars. Whereas ClayFest is just a ghost of its grand beginning, but still limping along as an event. The Chamber may be involved with it this year to breath new life into it.

In the first years we put on three summer art festivals and a Christmas show. Ambitious and young we were. There were awards we won, some really memorable Gallery shows and lovely articles written about our members and gallery.

A 1977 newspaper story and picture of the first gallery space with us looking like hippies and surrounded by art at our monthly meeting brings up lots of memories. Thoughts of past members, some we know where they are, some we have no idea where the are, and some have passed on. I doubt that any of us back then had the slightest idea that this group of young artists who came together to create a co-op gallery with little business sense among us would see this gallery thriving 40 years later. Or that some of us would still be a part of us. Two members in the picture are myself and Roger Tolzman who are still members of Commonwheel now.

My friend took home the oldest, most damaged and most artistic scrapbook to see what she could do to save this heirloom of Commmonwheel’s past. It has wooden covers and is an unusual size. The artist in who created it back then shines through now.

I had created a notebook for our 25th Old Spokes show which has copies of many of the really old items from the two scrapbooks she was willing to work on to save what she could. We would stop and look to see if something she found that was really damaged was in the 25th year book. Many were, which made us both smile.

I was inspired to send out an email to the membership to try and engage some more people to help Celebrate our 4oth year. I had some very clearly formed suggestions and asked for specific types of help, including helping with the scrapbook project. We have an opportunity to show in a space where financially savvy and secure people would see the work. I asked for someone to head up that show, as my hands are very full right now with the Old Spokes show in April and the Festival’s extra needs this year.

Doing my two blog posts so I can maybe make some progress on the agenda for the Festival meeting on Wednesday and have that done before tomorrow.