I did a craft show!

I did my very first craft show this weekend, at my son's elementary school.  It felt like a pretty good way to give it a try--I had a reason to be involved, a portion of my sales were donated to the school, it wasn't a huge event.  I was really excited and nervous when I was accepted, but I am so glad I did it!

There was very little information about how much traffic would be at this fair, so my main concern was inventory.  I had pretty much NOTHING when I found out I was doing the show, 4 weeks exactly before the event.  I spent all of my spare time shopping and sewing up until the week before the show, when I started tagging and figuring out a display.  I am so lucky that I have a mom and MIL who also do art shows, because they hooked me up when it came to the booth.  Oh, AND I'm lucky that neither of them were doing a show last weekend!  If I'm going to do more shows (which I think I will), I'm going to need to buy some stuff for displays because I probably won't always be able to borrow their stuff!

Speaking of which, here's how my display turned out:

Fleece hats up on the left, coloring wallets down on the table, headbands in the middle,
and upcycled scarves and armwarmers on the right.  

Ignore the stuff stacked up on the stage behind me--even though it was kind of an ugly backdrop for my booth, I actually loved my spot because the stage functioned as an extra counter space behind my booth for me to spread out my stuff!  I will definitely need to be more organized next time when I don't have that luxury.  I was shuffling bags/stickers/receipts and stuff more than I wanted to be since I didn't have a great system in place.

I felt really good during the show.  There was constant traffic, and because it was a fundraiser for the school people were in a generous mood, and there were a lot of familiar faces of parents I'd seen around the school.  I'm not sure if I would feel more awkward at a show in a less-familiar venue, but I was surprised that I didn't feel more weird about hawking my wares to strangers.

One of the reasons I wanted to do the show was to see how people responded to the different products I have.  I mean, I think it's all cool, but you never know what the people are going to want.  So I learned a lot about where to put my time when creating inventory, and also I have some ideas for how to rework the displays to allow customers a better look at things.

Now that I've started looking into other events, I realize how spoiled I was at this one--the event was one day only, just 5 hours!  Now I've been looking at other applications and finding out that they are two 9 hour days, and thinking, Nope!  I don't want to give up my whole weekend sitting at a table!  But I will probably have to just bite the bullet and do it--I still have a lot of inventory to sell!

Speaking of inventory, I'm planning on juicing up my poor forlorn Etsy site with some of the leftover product.  Which means I'll have to cross my fingers for cooperative young heads to model some hats and headbands.  Not sure if that will be happening this week!  But when it does, I will update my link.  The photos, aarrrgh--that is the reason why I just can't keep my Etsy site up to date!  Anybody else have that problem?