Hello Indie Greensboro!
Hello! We’re This Paper Ship, and we’ll be contributing to the IndieNC Blog all week! Our first post comes a little later in the day than we had originally intended, but the reason for it is a great one: we just finished moving our household, three cats, and studio into our new apartment in downtown Greensboro, NC. We’ve fallen so in love with the growing vibrant crafts/arts community in the city that we decided to move closer to it rather than take day jobs anywhere else! We admit we’re still very new to the area, having moved to a little town in the Piedmont just last summer, but we already take enough pride in our community that we’ll be focusing mostly on sharing with the rest of this great state the coolest stuff and people in Greensboro and the Piedmont that we’ve found thus far.
(Photo courtesy of Zeke Vantreese)
Our first highlight is an unabashed shout-out to a superb local Greensboro artisan/organizer/catalyst, Zeke Vantreese, and his creation, the Greensboro Indie Market. We must state from the beginning that we’re totally biased about how cool he is, because two weeks before we even met him in person at his booth at the first Indie Market in September and handed him our business card, he had commissioned us to design the banner and poster for the October market and had given us a free booth in return. Ever since then he’s been a really big supporter of ours and has been a big contributing factor for us to even be able to stay afloat as freelancer designers/illustrators in a depressed economy. (Another key example: giving us a shout-out in his interview on Etsy’s blog. Hello increased traffic!)
(Photo courtesy of Zeke Vantreese)
His big public contribution has been the Greensboro Indie Market, which ran monthly on Elm St. in conjunction with Greensboro’s First Fridays from September to December 2009, and which will continue with a big event downtown in May 2010. (Watch the Indie Market blog very soon for updates!) We were blessed to witness it grow from its beginning as a smaller gathering into an entity with a strong local following; not to mention it allowed us to meet artists from other NC art communities, such as Jody Cedzidlo of Flytrap Studios in Carrboro. Ever since we moved here, we’ve been hearing talk of Greensboro having started to come up in the world in the last couple of years; the Indie Market seems to us to be a prime example of talented members in the local crafts/arts community starting to talk to one another and help create a thriving scene to share with the other wicked scenes in the rest of the state. We’re excited about being a part of it all!
(Photo courtesy of Zeke Vantreese)
And, of course, we mentioned that Zeke is not only an organizer and catalyst, but an artisan. He’s the proud hands behind Rewined Recycled Glassware, his studio that takes used glass bottles from restaurants around town and refurbishes them into drinking glasses. (We’re going to have to propose a trade with him sometime soon, because we have yet to procure a set for ourselves.) His standard stylish sets have dealt mostly with classic green wine glasses, but we’ve seen him use beer bottles and Boylan’s soda bottles with their labels intact, and we’ve also seen him create mini-planters out of old Jägermeister bottles. Do your dining room/breakfast nook/kitchen table a favor and pick up a set!
Stay tuned for more! We’re having a lot of fun with this so far…
—Joel and Ashley, This Paper Ship
Glad to have you all this week! Great post!