Is it quiet or is it me?
I’m not complaining because it did work in rather well with my social life, my sister and family visited - with new baby - and loads of friends popping in, but there were definitely not hoards of people up and down the road, just a steady trickle. I suppose the ‘footie’ didn’t help but I had been rather hoping that it would have worked in our favour.
I’ve been hearing lots of murmurs, though, about the brochure not being distributed as widely as last year due to the open houses splitting from the Fringe… idle tittle-tattle or acute comment… I don’t know?
Certainly I have to question whether being an independent – i.e. not part of an established trail – is a good idea. The number of people I’ve seen walk past my front door, peering at the Fiveways fold-out brochure and ignoring the fact that we have a giant banner outside the house saying ‘Open House’ is becoming very dispiriting.
As I’ve said in earlier entries, I think I’ll have one or two more artists in the house next year. I know that Bill, whose house I had shown in for three years before I opened my own, used to use the number of artists as a rule of thumb for the number of projected visitors. I’m pretty sure that - before you’ve been running long enough to be considered an ‘established’ house, anyway – a visitor will look more favourably on a house with more artists exhibiting in it than one with less, simply because it improves the odds of seeing something they like.

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