I am on my way to the First State Mini Club 37th Annual  Show and Sale in Delaware.

If you are curious about miniatures, this is a great place to get started. It is a friendly, smaller show with wonderful vendors and lots of people willing to talk to you about miniatures and answer your questions. Some of the exhibits from the Philadelphia Flower Show are being shown there. Since my exhibit from they year, The Birds, is already being prepared for shipment to Singapore, I am bringing two other exhibits to the show: the Spooky Mini-Golf course (you can see it here) and my version of the “Cart for All Reasons,” a national group project of NAME (National Association of Miniature Enthusiasts).  On NAME Day, miniaturists around the country work on the same kit, in different scales (see some of the projects done in St. Louis at the miniature museum there). It’s a very interesting way to create and sustain a miniature community.

I, of course, never do anything normal in miniatures so my cart was “van Helsing’s Vampire Hunting Supplies” with some other magical objects and tools thrown in, just in case. I have never done a project with set parameters before (you had a pre-cut kit) but as I always say to my students, (quoting filmmaker Orson Welles), “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.” It takes a minute to get the message there, but I have found the restrictions help push me to be more creative  So here is what my cart looks like: