Thursday, September 30, 2010

Getting ready for Vending at Stitch Rock

A little background:  I've been sewing since I was a kid, I can't remember when, I've just always made things.  I started selling things that I made (at the time... costumes) sometime in college and jumped onto eBay back in the days when you actually had to get pictures developed & scanned in order to get them on the internet.  Then, of course, natural progression... started selling on etsy.  I did my first craft show in the fall of '08 just after I joined the Craft Mafia.  Since then, I've done 7 events.  Only 1 of these events was a big one, 2 were medium size and the rest, kinda a waste of time.  So, basically, I'm still new at this and very nervous for vending at Stitch Rock on Saturday.
After each show, I get ideas for the next.  Each time I've re-built my display and re-done my hangtags and everything.  I haven't really ever been happy with my area.  I see so many amazing show setups and each time I think my new setup is going to be worth all the work because I'm gonna use it over and over.  Well... that hasn't happened yet.  Firstly, Aprons are hard.  They don't look good on a table no matter what you do and I hate the squished up look of a standard clothing rack.  The aprons that I make are very girlie.  That means they are form fitting and therefore, only really look great on a real person.  A real person with shape.  Most craft show spaces are about 6' x 6'.  How the heck am I gonna fit 30-some-odd manequins into a 6' x 6' space?  Ain't gonna happen.
So, before Odd Duck last year I built this huge rack thingy that hold 5 half rounds and has waterfall arms for hanging hangers.
I'm semi-happy with this display but I'm a real doh-doh-head because I went completely overboard on the sturdy-ness because each of the poles are mounted in 30lbs of concrete.  That means that Saturday morning I'll be lugging 2 30+ pound buckets of 6' tall pole up to the 2nd floor of a vintage gymnasium!
But one thing I am excited about is my oh-so-very-green new hangtags.
I donate 10% of the purchase price of everything that I sell (year around!) to the Susan G. Komen breast cancer foundation and I really wanted to make sure that this is something that people know about.  So, I re-designed the tags and instead of having them printed professionally, I printed them myself on regular paper.  Then, I cut up some cereal boxes, cracker boxes and out of date postcards from past events and used that for backing.

  Then, I stitched them together with a zig zag stitch.  I kinda like sewing cardboard... not sure why.
The funny part is that some of the backs of them have a silly picture of me that was on the Craft Mafia's summer calendar.  Because of the size I needed and the size of the original postcard, it just ended up that way, but it cracks me up.
I also made new signs out of foam and mod podge.

I like the way they feel, but not real excited about the way they look.  I sure hope all this work ends up making a nice looking space at Stitch Rock.  One that I'm happy with and won't feel compelled to re-design before my next big show, Odd Duck in April.
I guess we'll see....

No comments:

Post a Comment