Life As A Cotten: A new tradition has started...

Over the past few years I have grown to be a lover & collector of McCarty pottery. McCarty pottery is made in a tiny town in the Mississippi Delta called Merigold. This summer Milam and I had a family occasion to go to in Indianola, MS. See my father grew up in Indianola and I have a found place in my heart for it as i spent many summers and New Years there as child with my grandmother. When i found out we would be traveling near Merigold I immediately insisted to Milam that we make a detour and stop by the McCarty Barn/Store. I had heard stories from other people who had been there and was really excited about going. We had a wonderful time seeing a variety of pieces that we had seen and had not seen before. We bought two pieces that day to commemorate our first trip.

Here is what the inside of the store looks like. The plate with the "river" running through it is one of the pieces we took home.

The best part of my love for this pottery is that I luckily get to share it with my friends! I have long known that McCarty has a sale once a year called their seconds sale and it is held the first Sunday & Monday of March. This year my friends Kelly and Laura decided we should make the journey down to Merigold to check out the sale. About a week before the sale I started to do a little more research on exactly what this sale was since there was no in depth information on McCarty's website. I stumbled upon a blog that a lady had written about her and her girlfriends going the year prior, boy was i surprised to see her say that there was a long waiting line and people bringing laundry baskets to hold their stuff. So we revised our plan and decided that maybe we should leave a little earlier than we had originally planned. So this past Sunday Kelly, Laura, and I set off on our journey and took short drive to the Delta. Upon arriving there at 10:30 the blog was confirmed as we pulled up we could see the long line of people & their laundry baskets and garbage cans sitting around waiting for the sale to start.

This is the beginning of the line. Just to the left is the door where you enter into the sale. I do not know if you can tell from this picture but there were people with rolling garbage cans and wagons to hold all of their pottery. (i would later realize this people were genius for doing this)

The line wraps around the building and goes down the street. This was are starting point at 10:30 that morning.

We quickly made friends with the people in line beside us and they offered their spare chairs for us to sit in while we waited. This was there first time to come to the sale as well. While waiting for the sale to start a worker came through the line to say Hello and thanks for coming. Since none of us had been there before we asked a few questions. One in particular question we asked was "Based on our spot in line when did she think we would get in?" Her response was in the past she had seen people in our spot get in around 6-7 PM!! But she told us to not to worry it was worth the wait and there would be plenty of stuff for everyone. She walked away and we all laughed and said surely she is mistaken and we will be in by 4-4:30 at the latest. As the afternoon went on we were in high spirits. We even decided to have a few beverages & our new friends had brought food so we pretty much had ourselves a tailgate in the middle of the street.

Our make shift tailgate....

Kelly, Laura, & I waiting in line.

Well the worker was right after we finally rounded the building it had turned dark and cold. At this point we were all a little delirious, hungry, and ready to shop. We pulled out our bags and were ready to go inside...

Kelly was ready to go!!

We finally crossed the threshold of the door at around 7:45pm...Once we entered what did we see but more people standing around waiting...

Our view when we entered...more waiting in line...

Once we were inside the wait was a thing of the past! We were so excited to see all of the wonderful pottery just waiting for us. People were passing items back to other people and it was somewhat of mad chaos but an exciting Chaos. Some pieces you could tell why they were on sale and some you could not. There were wonderful deals and beautiful pieces... We finally emerged at 9:45 with our loot in tow and ready to head back to Memphis...

Here is all 3 of our treasures waiting to be packed into the car.

We finally arrived back in Memphis around 12:30pm...Some people say we were crazy to stand in line all day and for doing this but honestly I could not have imagined it any other way! It was a gorgeous day filled with great memories between friends and the start of a yearly tradition (with some minor tweaks to our game plan).

Here are a few pictures of everything i came home with:

This is everything I came home with minus the glass bowl in the middle...

Jade bowl

Side detail of the Jade bowl

Large bunny, Pitcher, Bamboo vase

Nutmeg Bowl- this is the only piece with a noticeable flaw. However, I love the line in the middle of the bowl i think it adds character. Also i was able to get some plates you can see them in the bottom left corner...