Homestyle trends: Lots 'o' pots

Updated: August 28, 2007 - 4:46 PM

Lots o' pots

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Lots o' pots

Mark your calendars for the Northern Clay Center's American Pottery Festival, Sept. 7-9, featuring 24 regional and national potters and their work, including Warren MacKenzie of Stillwater and Pete Scherzer of St. Paul.

A benefit sale and party open Friday evening for a $20 ticket; sales and slide talks continue throughout the weekend. MacKenzie pots will be available daily, with drawings for a place in line to buy them, and a daily silent auction for the pots. The Clay Center represents MacKenzie's sales in this area. Marketing coordinator Erin Cole said the drawings help keep sale prices flat -- his pots run in the $8 to $400 range -- and prevent "flipping" of the artist's work on eBay for sizable markup.

There is a full slate of workshops, demonstrations, tours, a collector's weekend package and prefestival events; see details at www.northernclaycenter.org or check with the center, 2424 E. Franklin Av., Minneapolis; 612-339-8007.

KIM YEAGER

Feathers and froth

"Feather Your Nest: It's All in the Details" (Andrews McMeel Publishing, $29.95) is the latest installment in author Mary Carol Garrity's cottage industry.

A Kansas home furnishings retailer and self-made decorating source, Garrity has pumped out five previous tomes on subjects from home to holidays, weddings to entertaining. Her breezy manner, as if conspiring over coffee with a gal pal, has sold plenty of books. But her latest effort -- in which she compares restoring and decorating a home to that of a bird building a nest ("step by step and twig by twig") -- strains the patience of a busy reader.

It's not that the metaphor isn't apt, but the execution falls short. There's useful advice to be extracted -- for those who can grit their way through the chirpy text.

KIM YEAGER