Event offers wares by local artists and crafters
By Michele Alperin
What started two decades ago as an Arts Council of Princeton party and holiday sale for ceramic artists has grown into a much larger annual event. The Council’s “Sauce For the Goose” sale, to be held from Dec. 5 to 20, now offers artists and crafters an opportunity to sell their wares in a boutique-like setting.
The event’s name comes from an old Mother Goose rhyme, “what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander,” said artist and teacher Libby Ramage. “They tried to change the name a couple times, but it’s like when you misname a pet — it’s already ingrained. The sauce is that little extra-special thing.”
Planning for “the Sauce,” as the artists call it, starts in September when Arts Council artistic director Maria Evans sends an invitation to the previous year’s exhibitors, expecting about 15 to 20 to return. After the Oct. 30 deadline, aiming for 5 to 10 new exhibitors, she puts a call out on the Arts Council’s website inviting other artists to upload photos of their work.
“I like to pepper the sale with new people to keep it fresh,” Evans said. If it looks like something that will do well, and the sale doesn’t already have a similar item, she will often invite the artist to bring in work so that she can take a closer look.
For the opening reception, which will be held on Dec. 5, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at the Paul Robeson Center for the Arts, the gallery is usually decorated in a festive holiday theme, and the Princeton Boy Choir performs as an added treat. Adding to the holiday feel is some holiday-based art for sale, like Christmas cards and ornaments.
Space in the gallery is limited, and the lower-priced items move most quickly, Evans said. She urges artists to bring maybe one or two higher-end items, to show their range, but mostly to offer lower-priced pieces. For example, a quilter will often not sell a quilt, but may do well with quilted birds that can be used as an ornament or Christmas banners that drape across the room and can be sold for $15 or $20.
Ceramics are a big seller. “Ceramics is our niche here in this arts center; we have the only public ceramics studio in Princeton,” Evans said. “We have a lot of ceramics teachers who are good, accomplished artists so this is a good venue for them to display their work.”
The sale also includes a rack of seconds that may, for example, have a glaze that didn’t come out exactly as the artist wanted, and the money collected from the sale of these donated seconds goes directly back into the ceramics studio.
Recently Evans has been collecting chairs she finds on the curb that she revamps and reupholsters into “a one-of-a-kind artistically inspired chair.”
For example, on a kids’ chair she found, she replaced the chewed-up legs, redid the binding and the seat cushion, and then covered the chair in black faux leather. The final step was appending cutout white patent-leather spots that she had embroidered with images from at 1940s/50s stencil kit. Last year she included a chair with a cowboy theme in the Sauce and was surprised that it sold it within 20 minutes on opening night.
Evans grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan, earned a bachelor of fine arts in studio arts at Humboldt State, and studied sculpture at the University of Alabama. She moved to Princeton when her husband was offered a job as rare books conservator at Princeton University.
At the very first Sauce for the Goose sale, someone was looking for a ceramics teacher, and Evans ended up teaching ceramics to 8 to 10 year olds. Today, as artistic director, she works with the artists in residence, runs the gallery and the Sauce, and runs outreach programs like the Arts Exchange for Homefront kids, the Halloween Parade, and Day of the Dead.
The Goose usually earns from $3,000 to $6,000 for the Arts Council, which goes into the gallery and ceramic programming. “And it is also supporting the artists, which is a great thing to do,” Evans said.
Nancy Troske, a Princeton goldsmith, works mostly in 22 carat gold using ancient Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan and Roman jewelry-making techniques, involving the fusing of tiny gold balls. The work she exhibits at the Sauce is similar to her goldsmithing but in silver.
“For that kind of show people want to make a quick Christmas holiday gift purchase,” she said. “They are not going to spend hundreds or thousands.” So she makes hammered earrings; stacking bracelets and rings; and little necklaces, what she calls “impulse-buy type pieces.”
Troske also designs engagement rings and wedding rings, she said, “for people who would like something a little unique.”
At the Arts Council, Troske teaches basic metal smithing techniques with torches and soldering, used to make rings, earring, and little pendants. “I try to give people a taste of where you can go with jewelry making,” she said. “You can start with something really simple and get a lot of satisfaction.”
Piroska Toth is a Princeton fiber artist, whose focus is felting, with wool and silk, which began with a course she took in her native Hungary about 15 years ago.
Felt, she explains, is a nonstructural fabric, based on carded wool that is machine-combed to straighten out the fibers. “You layer it and manipulate it — rub it, roll it and the fibers tangle up together and hold a shape; the second stage is to shrink it into a smaller size, and that is what keeps it in place and makes felt strong and stiff,” Toth said.
Toth mostly makes scarves, often incorporating silk, which makes them lighter and more drapable. In addition to the scarves, she also sells at the show soap wrapped in felt for use as an exfoliant, cellphone containers and coin purses, and sometimes rugs and wall hangings. She has been teaching felt-making at the Arts Council for about five years.
Libby Ramage’s connection with the Arts Council goes back about 20 years, when she started teaching children’s art classes and also began using abandoned kid art and scraps of fabric from her own house to make cards that she would sell at the Sauce. She also used to run the New Year’s Eve Curtain Calls program.
Today she puts in the show ink-jet prints of her paintings, and also leftover voodoo dolls from when she worked with fabric.
Carolina Firbash, who teaches sewing classes at the Arts Council for “little girls, medium girls [middle schoolers] and grownups,” characterizes herself as a compulsive knitter, who learned at age 8 or 9 in her native Peru from both of her grandmothers.
“Everybody in my family knits,” she said, adding, “I love patterns and lace; when you get a new lace pattern, you get kind of addicted to it.”
As she would knit with her mother, sister, and aunt, they would get magazines from France and Spain, including magazines for children’s sweaters. A preschool teacher at University League, these were a natural for her, and she would accumulate suitcases full of kids’ sweaters. About eight years ago when friends encouraged her to bring some knitted items to the Sauce, she said, the items she brought were popular and went fast.
This year she will be bringing mostly scarves, short tunic dresses, little ponchos, shrugs, and kids’ sweaters. “Since I’m an addictive knitter, I think that’s the best way,” she said. “Otherwise I’ll end up with a house full of sweaters.”
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