I did it. I tabled at my first market.

A friend asked me how I'd measure success at the market. I had a number in my head—$1,000 would feel like success, though I had no idea if that was realistic. “In this economy?”

So I started thinking about how I wanted to feel instead. I wanted to feel good about selling things. To be motivated to keep going. Feels more important than any metric.

The day before, I was at the Potters Guild helping set up. We lifted pottery wheels onto rolling platforms and wheeled them into the clay alley. Mopped the floors. Drank wine, and snacked on cheddar and chocolate babka. Robin brought challah bread from Motzi. Freshly made, soft and just a little sweet.

Setting up.

Vianney Paul’s multi-tiered display.

I set up my table. Laid out the linen tablecloth, wrapped it in bunting, arranged my pieces. I watched other people set up and I examined their displays. I definitely needed risers. My bowls needed height or no one would be able to see the detail on the sides.

Looking a little samey.

At home I pulled an old wine crate and vintage wooden cheese boxes out of the basement. Dusty and unused since our move from San Francisco, but I couldn’t part with them. I dusted them off, then grabbed a few tins to use as platforms. I went on a shopping spree through my house, picking up little things that felt like me. Mise en scène. Goose feathers I brought home from Buenos Aires. Tiny plastic woodland animals because I like them. An old brass dog I call Chester. First ever market support animals.

Ready for orders.

I still needed signage. The morning of the market I somehow managed to whip up a semi-professional sign for the table, an email signup sheet, and small place cards for pricing. Putting those old graphic design skills to the test. Luckily I had all the paper I needed and my printer just worked.

I was going to make sandwiches but forgot to take the bread out of the freezer. Just have to figure something else out. Maybe I’ll be too busy to be hungry.

I got to the space at 10am. Doors at 11. Got the signs and risers sorted. Not enough time to put out the flowers I'd bought, but everything else was in order. There was a line of people waiting outside!

A little more lifted.

Need to invest in a necklace stand, but this mirror I swiped off my dresser works for now.

They opened the door and it stayed open. So cold! I made a couple of sales right away—very new to the Square system, to making transactions and packaging things up, but it worked. After I think the third sale, Van—who I was sharing a table with—told me I was supposed to take the price tags off before boxing my ceramics. “Because they’re gifts.”

After half an hour I had to put on my parka. I wanted to wear my mittens too, but I needed my hands.

Jesse sold refreshments at her table. She hooked me up with a cup of hot chai and it was exactly what I needed. Warm, sweet, cozy. Then Barb closed the door and we warmed up again.

Jen of Yummy & Company. The best teacher and mentor! I wrote about her here.

The next few hours were slower. There were always customers milling about but nothing like that 11am rush. My neighbor stopped by. My father-in-law. My husband. Van's husband offered to pick up lunch for us at Ekiben. I got the tofu bao. My favorite. They make the best tofu, crispy on the outside, soft on the inside. As it should be. I didn't love eating while people were shopping, but I just had to say it was Ekiben and they understood.

Phillip Klassen (right) and his partner, Abe (center).

I made my biggest sale toward the end of the day. A $190 vase. Most of what sold was smaller—porcelain watercolor palettes at $18, trinket dishes at $68. But that one $190 sale felt pretty good. I probably could have undercut myself and sold more pieces. But I knew that if someone connected with my work, they'd want to pay what it cost. Hand made, hand illustrated. Functional, sure, but also art.

I didn't hit $1,000, but I didn't lose money either. I sold some stuff and learned a ton. And I came out of it feeling pretty good. So I guess I hit one goal.

Time to research markets for 2026.

I've been sitting at the dining table with a sheet of price stickers, trying to figure out how to price the ceramics I'm taking to the market this weekend.

It's harder than I thought it would be. I keep starting with time. How long did it take me? Three hours? Five? When I was consulting as a creative director in San Francisco, I got paid $150 an hour. Is that what my time is worth? If so that's $750 on labor alone. But I can't sell a small dish for $750. At the other end, minimum wage would put it at $75—still a lot, and that's without materials. That feels depressing. I don't want to make minimum wage. I have way more specialized knowledge now than I did then.

When someone commissions an illustration, I still think in hourly rates. It's how I know what's fair. But I'm learning that making products is different.

Because I'm two people now. I'm the labor, and I'm the business owner. Worker Jennifer can make $15 an hour. But Entrepreneur Jennifer takes the whole piece—materials and labor—and marks it up to cover overhead and profit. Overhead isn't just clay and glaze. It's market fees, hosting fees, transaction fees, broken pieces, kiln fails, experiments that don't work out, shipping materials, photography, the time spent writing numbers on pricing stickers. If the dish costs $75 in parts and labor, that's just production. Running a business costs more.

Worker Jennifer might get minimum wage right now. But Entrepreneur Jennifer needs to take home a profit on top of that, because maybe someday I'll want to hire help—hopefully for more than minimum wage—and still be able to do things like go out to eat on occasion and buy Christmas presents.

Hiring help! I haven’t done a single market yet and already I’m getting ahead of myself.

I'm a complete noob at this. My business has always been commission-focused, so I've never managed sales and inventory. Many illustrators deal with products and overhead—prints, notebooks, cards, pins. You spend ten hours on an illustration and make infinite prints from it. But you spend ten hours on a pot and you've got…one pot.

But I'm getting more comfortable with it. With the idea that pricing isn't about what I used to make or what feels fair compared to my old life. It's about what it costs to make this thing and run this business and still have something left over.

The market is Saturday. I'll let you know how it goes.

The ferry from Montevideo to Buenos Aires had very dirty windows. We couldn't look out on the Rio de la Plata, so I pulled out my sketchbook and drew something from the previous day instead—the café at Alliance Française where we'd stopped for croissants. Saint Germain, it's called. I had a delicious pistachio croissant. The jasmine was blooming outside and there were kids playing in a fountain.

The second sketch happened on our third day in Buenos Aires. We were about to move from our interim hotel to the one Paul's company had booked, but Paul wasn't feeling well so he stayed back to rest. I wanted to walk around a bit, explore the Retiro neighborhood. I found a shady spot with a view of this ornate rooftop—lots of detail, beautiful architecture. Later I learned it was the Palacio San Martín.

The third sketch was done a few days later in El Jardín Botánico. We'd spent the previous day at the Ecoparque seeing animals, which was wonderful but hot hot hot. The botanical garden was shady and cool. I took pictures of a flame tree with red flowers scattered on the ground beneath it, and right after, a group of school kids arrived and got excited about the same flowers, picking them up off the ground. It was really cute.

I sketched the greenhouse—wrought iron and glass, very ornate, housing tropical plants. It was a lovely spot to sit for a while.

I did the fourth sketch near the rose garden in Parque 3 de Febrero. After visiting the rose garden, I went to lunch to get gnocchi at a place I'd read about. Paul was doing work stuff, so I was on my own. While I waited for my food, I pulled out the sketchbook again and drew the alliums surrounding the patio.

I enjoyed a spritz with my gnocchi. Not a bad way to spend an afternoon.

I photograph the paintings I want to remember. The full piece, the museum label, closeups of the surface. I’m collecting information to pore over later, to remind myself how someone achieved a particular effect.

Detail of La dama del abanico by Carlos Alberto Castellanos

At museums here in South America, I’ve been watching other people take pictures, too. Sometimes we’re photographing the same pieces, sometimes completely different ones. I’ve started wondering what lens they’re looking through. Are they studying technique like me? Sharing proof they were here, that they saw this? Trying not to forget they felt something? Or maybe they don’t know how else to interact with art—these days snapping a picture is a way to preserve something’s essence. A bookmark in a passage. A licked and sealed envelope.

Left: La dama del abanico by Carlos Alberto Castellanos; Right: A woman taking a photo of the painting

I try not to photograph everything that catches my eye. Sometimes I just sit with it, let it be ephemeral. It comes with a sense of unease. What if I forget how wonderful it was?

It's easier with famous pieces, since I know I’ll encounter them again sometime. (This is where I'd include pics of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera paintings had I chosen to photograph them.)

But here's a Kahlo drawing I thought you might like to see. For your particular lens.

Untitled by Frida Kahlo

At the Museum of Latin American Art in Buenos Aires, there was a provocative piece—a grid on the floor with a label that read: DO IT YOURSELF: FREEDOM TERRITORY. I almost walked around it like everyone else. Then I considered that passive viewing was a kind of prison. It's the norm to not touch the art—rightfully so. But I could see this was meant to be interacted with. An invitation to defy convention. Stepping inside was a kind of freedom.

So I did. I walked a few grids forward, up a few, over a few. Hopped to one. I was aware the whole time that the docent and other patrons could see me choose to engage while everyone else skirted around it. An outsider inside the art. A little self-conscious, I suppose, but at least I was free.

Then I stepped out and took a picture. So I’ll remember being free.

Do it yourself: Freedom Territory by Antonio Dias

Speaking of touching the art, at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam a few years ago, I watched a family—a mother and two teenage daughters—taking selfies with the art. We'll, not with the art, but in front of it. Glamour shots of themselves posing with a crown of flowers exquisitely rendered in oil by some Dutch master. Priceless art reduced to little more than wallpaper. In an attempt to get the perfect shot, one of the teens backed into a canvas, hitting it with her (unchecked) backpack. I was horrified. They heard me gasp. They looked chagrined but it didn't stop them taking more shots for the ‘gram.

Detail of Garland of Flowers by Jan Philip van Thielen

This morning at breakfast I spoke with a man who said he won't be going to any art museums in Buenos Aires because he doesn’t like art. That’s a lens too. I wonder if he means he doesn’t like art with a capital A, art that takes context and possibly a bit of pretension to parse. Would he like the art I like? The seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century stuff, the beauty and craftsmanship? Maybe he'd find the portraits stuffy and the pastoral scenes banal. We'll never know. He’ll take his pics at the Railway Museum instead.

I'm in the hotel looking through photos from the museums we've visited in Montevideo and Buenos Aires. We're in South America while my husband attends a work conference, and I've been spending days wandering through galleries—four museums so far.

I keep returning to the same periods. Seventeenth and nineteenth century work. The Dutch masters with their impossible observation. The Impressionists with their perfect reductive form. I could stand for hours looking at how they recreated the translucency in a halved orange, the sheen of silk embroidery against a velvet frock coat, light passing through trees to bounce off a stream and highlight a cart horse. Petals in mud. Wisps of clouds. Distant hills.

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I see these things through an artist's eyes. I study them. I think about what it must have been like to recreate the image and how I can use that information. Sometimes I'll see a simpler, more modern painting and think—that's almost like a picture book illustration, how could I adapt that approach?

Pelando la pava by Pedro Figari

Which makes me wonder: do I appreciate these pieces for what they are, or do I just like what I can learn from them? Is there a difference? Does it matter?

My taste has changed completely since high school. Back then I liked modern art—Warhol, Pollock, Lichtenstein. I think I was drawn to work that looked simple, easy to create. I was impatient and impulsive. Dalí was my first step toward appreciating real craftsmanship. I got to see his work at the Salvador Dalí Museum in Florida. I went for the melting clocks and stayed for "The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus." The man could draw.

The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus by Salvador Dalí

I've been thinking about this in relation to my art. With illustration and licensing, I don't have much control over price—the market decides what a book should cost. With fine art, if a piece takes a hundred hours, I can price it accordingly. Theoretically. In practice, that means choosing between functional work priced for everyday use (books, cards, dishes) and art pieces priced for collectors. Functional has limits. Art doesn't, or at least less so.

Part of being an artist is navigating that tension—straddling the line between the time you want to spend on a piece and the time you can afford to spend on it. There's no one right path. Quick and affordable or slow and expensive. I think an artist can find success in either.

I wonder how many hours went into these pieces I admire.

Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes

I'm drawn to the slow path, toward craftsmanship that takes time. I'll experiment with techniques to speed up the process, but I don't think I'll ever abandon the detail I love. All these details I get lost in. Maybe someday someone will get lost in my work the same way.

Detail of a tile mural by Jorge Colaço

I've been stressing about sixteen-hour vases that need to cost what they cost. But at least the choice exists.