May Day, May Day we have two kilns down!

We just returned from an event in Standardsville, Virginia at a beautiful campsite called Heavenly Acres just outside the Shenendoah National Park. This was a small camping event. A Spring Festival, Beltane, or Mayday Festival. Yes, there was a Maypole. These types of events are really fun for us because it involves a weekend locked away from most of our work. I'll admit, we cheat. I have a smartphone and can tether my laptop to it and we were able to do a little bit on facebook and a little bit with the Etsy Store.
As an event, this type of thing is pretty fun, and lower pressure than the average art fair. We're set up in a 10x20 garage style tent with part of it blocked off for us to sleep in. Pretty convenient eh? Roll out of bed, and open the shop :) It was also very convenient that the hospitality tent was right next door so I could toddle over at anytime day or night for coffee, cookies or other delightful snacks. The flush toilets were also directly behind us. Overall, I'd say we were in as much comfort as was available..

Directly in front of us was a big sand circle for a bonfire where there was drumming and dancing till the wee hours and just past that was a stage where we were treated to nightly concerts, all from the comfort of our booth.

The weather was nearly perfect, though it did get into the 40's at night and it did rain a bit during pack-down, but we didn't mind too much since we had to come home and set up the tent for our annual Mother's Day Home Studio Sale. It was a damn fine weekend, and sales were above average..just like the show :) Which was a good thing because we had kiln problems awaiting us when we got home.
I don't want to go into it too much because I made the problem worse, but the basics are that I lost an element in a glaze fire last week. Then in our other newly repaired kiln I lost another one. Now There are two kilns down, and while trying to jury-rig one of them I broke the new element. So now I am down 3 elements and have to try to get them here from Canada in under a week. In the meantime I wired together the ends of a burned out element to try to squeeze one more glaze fire out of this kiln before the sale this weekend.