Luna Arts Festival, a Summation

I've been non-vocal for an entire week because I've been working like a dog for the Luna Arts Festival, which was yesterday, and which was actually pretty awesome. I'm much more pleased with the display I worked out for the festival--it wasn't professional-looking by any means, but it did look much more put together and appealing. I need a better eye for details, now, and a more polished infrastructure, but I think the dinosaur theme was well-visualized, and the photographs went over especially well.

We just had the one table, which turned out to be only 6 feet long, not the promised 8 feet, so the sign the girls and I made didn't quite fit, and we made the sign a little big for a craft fair taking place along the narrowish hallways of a building, but it's legible, the colors are bright and appealing, and it's a good name, I think. I think a plain tablecloth would have been better, though--the one here is distracting--and it certainly should have reached to the floor in the front. The back of the display is also a little distracting, and if I'd had some clothespins I would have draped fabric over that railing behind the table. I like how the table is pretty uncluttered, however. The solution most crafters at the festival seemed to apply to the very small space was to completely cram their tables up with product--things stacked upon things, and not a bare space in sight. I'm not sure what other shoppers think about that tactic, but I find it really unappealing--it's hard to focus on one thing that I might be interested in, it's hard to find a price or even an identification of what I'm looking at, and it reminds me of a cheap, tacky fleamarket. I absolutely adore craft fairs as a rule, but when Matt sat at the table while I took the girls around, I really didn't see many tables that looked appetizing enough to stop and browse at, and it was pretty much just because of how they looked.

I'm very happy with my fatty stegasaurus display--the signs were a little unstable, but they're nice and clear and attractive, and the stegasauruses themselves had a nice display in that a good selection froliced on the table next to the sign, and the surplus peeped out from the basket behind the signs, and everybody was able to easily sort through them and had enough space to lay them out and really look through them. I sold all but two of these, and I'm thinking that I underpriced them. For the next craft fair, I'm debating $12-$15.

Matt and I worked really, really hard creating this display board from scratch, and although there are several improvements I want to make, I'm quite pleased with it. First of all, I'm going to paint the whole thing, maybe green, which I think will dramatically improve its appearance. I also think we'll build several sets of these, at least one of each of all pegboard or all quilt hangers, which will be nicer for big outdoor booths as I can hang my record bowls vertically and give people better access and immediate selection while using a lot less space, and the same for the quilts. The design is a big improvement, with the accordion style making the display much more stable--I used to make tabletop displays from foamboard for my necklaces, but they were so front-heavy that I had to tape them down to the table and to something really heavy that I had to bring and hide right behind them. The height of the signs is good, since they're big and legible, but their placement looks messy--I'm thinking some Velcro arrangment to hold them neat and stable. I'm also so short that I overestimate how tall everyone else is, and I hung all my pendants way too high. They didn't sell, and the few people who really browsed them had to crane their heads. The quilts also didn't sell, and really didn't get much more interest than the pendants, which I was surprised by since I thought they were cute and reasonably priced. Too quirky, maybe? I'm hoping these things will do better on etsy. Willow had an awesome time at the craft fair, too--here she's rocking her free lipstick sample from Mary Kay. She's wearing one of the Girls Love Dinosaurs pins we made; these sold really well, too. She was good advertising by playing with her dinosaur toys behind my table, and looking all cute and dinosaur-loving.

I'd bought real bags for putting purchases in, and stamped them with Pumpkinbear, but I could only get one person to take a bag. It was good, though, because several people came searching for me, apparently, after seeing someone else holding a fatty stegasaurus or rocking a button and asking directions to my booth. I also gave away every single one of my business cards, which was a big improvement since I usually forget to offer them.

I'll be putting the rest of my dino stuff up on my etsy shop this coming week--come and buy it all from me, because you love dinosaurs, too.