Dress Rehearsal by Starla

I'm so excited to offer you a post today by my friend and "partner in crime," Starla of ReFashioned Threads. She has graciously offered to write this review of the craft show we did this past Saturday, November 14th. After reading the post, head over to her blog and check out the great things she has going on.

Thanks for the post Starla, you did a great job!

It was the nightmare before the craft show and we were in it for the long haul.  Cindi and I knew that this was going to be hard and was it ever.  We are basically starting our little cottage businesses from the ground floor - many decisions were to be made - from pricing, business cards, signs, staging and more.  We knew when we put ourselves out there we needed to make a good impression.  Our first sale, well, it didn't go too smoothly, however we learned a lot! That story is here.

Even though this craft sale was like cramming for a final, I think we did a wonderful job. *high five to Cindi*

We went Friday night to set up our tables with linens, put up our "fence" displays and made notes to bring other things we were going to need.

We were set up in the Veterans Memorial Building in our little town of Fortuna.  This is a broad view of our area.  We had 2 tables with an area to walk in, like a booth.

We were located by the entrance and this was one of our tables, which we sat behind - Cindi crocheted a scarf and I worked on our snakesssssss. Behind us on the walls we have some of our products on display - pennants, tutus, wreaths,  and our Fairy Wands.  On the table were Book Purses,  a parliament of owls and our newest product  "a little saying".

This was the walk-in booth area.  On our two-tiered table were more owls, cats, snakes, scarves and snowmen to keep everyone cool. The "fence" displays are against the walls.

This dispaly was closest to us and on it we had the tutus and beautiful autumn pennant banners.

This was the other "fence" display located in the corner and on which were purses and butterfly button fairies.

We felt we did had excellent improvement from our last event, however the people were not coming in and those that were coming in were not really buying anything.  This is something that has us scratching our heads and wondering "How come?".  We have many guesses... Is it our area?  Is it the economy? Was it because the craft show wasn't sponsored by a group or organization? 

In the end we did barter with other vendors and that was fun in itself. 

We are not giving up though - we are scheduled to be at 3 more craft shows and one will take us out of our area.  That will give us a chance to compare and see what is going on.

This Sauturday we will be at the Simpson College in Redding, CA

Then we will be at the Runeberg Lodge in Eureka, Ca for the three days following Turkey Day.  On December 3 we will be at a school-sponsored craft show at Freshwater Elementary School, Eureka.

I have considered this last weekend's show to be a dress rehearsal, which has made us even more ready for these future events.  Next time hopfully we won't have any "butterflies" in our tummies and we can "break a leg"!