A Fair of the Arts in June

I had a nice, long break for myself after last year's holiday markets, but on Saturday I celebrated my first craft fair of what will hopefully be a long and illustrious season:

It's nice and peaceful about a half-hour before the fair opens, when I've just about finished setting up. I had a prime location right by the fountain and miniature wading stream this month--I could sell my stuff and supervise the girls having a blast while getting wet.

Like my MUSIC sign? It's not backwards to the customers, you know! You can find my tutorial on vinyl record album stencils over at Crafting a Green World.

There's yet another craft fair application that I ought to be filling out this evening, but I'm tired, and the wren shouting at the cat outside the study window is driving me nuts, so I'm thinking that a beer and a re-read of HP1 is just the thing for tonight. Besides, what would a craft fair application be if it wasn't done at the last stinkin' minute?

It wouldn't be a craft fair application of mine, that's for sure!

2010 Holiday Market

My fingers and toes went numb, but at least it wasn't sleeting or anything, and it was a GREAT day to go holiday shopping in the freezing sunshine:

 
 
 
 
And I didn't even get pictures of the reindeer and the carolers and the TubaSantas and the chestnuts roasting over an open fire and the sock monkey hats...

A Fair of the Arts in August

Dinosaurs!

More Dinosaurs!

New Signs!

More New Signs!

Rainbows! And Colored Pencils!

And Buttons!

And More Buttons! On My Favorite Find!

Good Company

And good times.

The next A Fair of the Arts craft fair is the second Saturday in September. Be there, or you know what you're gonna be.

A Fair of the Arts in June

An early thunderstorm made sure that Saturday's craft fair won't go down in history as one of the all-time greatest craft fairs EVAH, but it still beat the hell out of the May fair, when it was inexplicably FREEZING.

And thus, a good-ish time was had by all:

Earlier in the day, this disaffected teen homeschool kid that I've chatted with at craft fairs for years slouched over with her disaffected teen homeschool buddies and bought up all my 1" comic book pinbacks that speak to the disaffected teen--"NO!" and "I hate you," and "You are nothing in my eyes," etc. So LATER in the day, this other bookish little teen homeschool kid that I have occasional bookish conversations with at the craft fair comes by and asks me if I can help her find any comic book pinbacks that have comebacks on them.

"Well," I say, "your buddies were by earlier and bought up just about anything that might help reflect their negative worldview."

"I know!" she said. "They were buying them about me!"

So I said, "Don't worry, kiddo. I always have a plan." The kiddo paid for five buttons, and then I gave her some Strathmore paper, a pen, and the one-inch hole punch, and instructed her to write her own comebacks and we'd make them into buttons for her.

While we were working, this other woman came up to get the 411 about being in the craft fair, on account of her group sells calendars. I told her that it's a juried fair, and apps for the season go out the previous winter, and the emphasis is on handicraft, prob not Kinko's calendars. So then, and this is a TOTAL pet peeve  since it happens all the time, most recently with a woman who wanted to rent half my booth from me to sell bellydancing swag, she goes ahead and gives me her entire spiel about why her group should totally be able to sell its calendars in the fair, like next month, and it's totally a handicraft. Fine by me, only I'm not, you know, actually in charge of anything, and when people get that frenzied look in their eyes while they're trying to make their case, it really creeps me out. Thank gawd Matt was there and smoothly segued a convo hand-off to himself, so I could devote all my attention to my VIP client there.

My kiddo made herself some AWESOME comeback buttons. Among the comebacks were "You went to LIE school," "I don't care," and "The feeling is mutual." She told me that she was especially proud of that latter button because when you say it, people don't know what it means and so they don't know if you're complimenting them or insulting them. So true, right?

So, low sales but high drama:

Good day, overall.

Vinyl of the Weird and the Awesome

I know, I know--all I do is talk about vinyl records. Obsessions are healthy, though, right?

Um, right?

And what with our family's inability to do away with any record that isn't completely scratched into oblivion (in heavy rotation on our current playlist--a scratchy record consisting solely of wolf calls), and the fact that I need a whole new batch of record bowls for my farmer's market craft fair every month, AND the fact that I'm doing Strange Folk again this fall (yay!) and will need a whole new big batch of bowls for that, I'm already starting to freak out that I don't have enough vinyl to get me through to October and free day at the Red Cross Book Fair.

That being said, since I'm skipping out on the August farmer's market craft fair, I've got a little extra time this month to make some undies for the girls, applique them some shirts, alter a couple of dresses for myself, sew buttons back on Matt's pants (what is it with that man and buttons?), and update my pumpkinbear etsy shop with some of these record bowls I've been slaving over. Along with, you know, making spin art and very large maps with the girls and eating lots of tomato-bread salad and visiting the library every single wet day and Bryan Park pool every single dry day. I'm busy, you know?

I generally only make record bowls out of albums that are not only too scratched to play but that are also albums that I, personally, think are awesome--awesome awesome or awful awesome, doesn't matter, but it has to be something that I really dig. So when you visit my booth you get a lot of eighties stuff, soundtracks, children's music, esoteric junk, heavy metal--basically a soundtrack of my life as I know it to this point. Here are some of my very favorite favorites that I put on my pumpkinbear etsy shop today:

Santa Claus is Coming to Town

The best thing about this record, all Santa songs, is that I recognize, oh, ONE of them. Seriously, how many Santa songs are there in the world? Although, some of these do look pretty forgettable--The Weatherman's Christmas Prayer? Ech.

Neil Diamond's Hot August Night

Sweet Caroline. 'Nuff said. Okay, but have you ever heard the Langley Schools Music Project cover of Sweet Caroline? Also awesome. And their cover of Space Oddity.

Flintstones

The album says it's the Flintstones, but it doesn't include the theme song or anything as a track, and unfortunately the vinyl was too damaged for me to play at all to figure out what's going on here, so I just have in my head this idea that for this album, they got together all the voices of the Flintstones characters, and made them sing all these random songs in character? Like the Brady Bunch? Or in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, when the guy gets up to do his song from Dracula the Musical, and he does it in a Transylvanian accent? Which made me laugh so hard I woke the babies.

Annie Get Your Gun

I'm a sucker for soundtracks in general, although Annie Get Your Gun isn't one of my favorites. Whenever I see it, however, I always flash back to watching Soleil Moon Frye on Carson or something as a kid, promo-ing Punky Brewster, which I LOVED (the episode when one kid got trapped in a refrigerator and Punky had to do CPR? Priceless), and Carson asks her how she got her name, and she's all, "It's from Annie Get Your Gun--'I've got the sun in the morning and the moon at night.'"

In other news, the girlies have been rocking themselves some British Soccer Camp this week--these guys who play professional soccer in England for some reason spend part of their summer here in Bloomington, and they teach soccer to the baby townies. I already mentioned this on my Facebook, but my absolute favorite thing about British soccer camp is the athletic young men with British accents playfully and nurturingly interacting with small children. Swoon?
Swoon. Not the best photo, mind you, but my Syd, she's not too team-oriented, and this is about the billionth time that one of the coaches loped over to where Sydney had wandered off and jollied her back to the group--lots of "Come on, love," etc.

My least favorite thing about soccer camp is my introduction to Soccer Mom. Soccer Mom sits next to me when my mom friend doesn't show up one day. We're sitting against the gym wall in the REALLY crowded gym because it's storming outside, so with the noise of the storm on the metal roof, the noise of four soccer teams all playing different games on basketball court, the noise of the YMCA day camps over on the other court, and the generic noise of the random people working out in the Y to begin with, it's deafening in there. And yet, for the entire hour, Soccer Mom sideline coaches her kid. The WHOLE hour. I read the same sentence in my book about one thousand times.

But the weirdest thing is, there's no way her soccer kid could have heard a thing she said. She was talking in a loud conversational tone, I guess--the kid could have heard her from that distance if we'd been in the library, but the crowded gym? Not a chance. Nor, of course, did he acknowledge or respond to any of her admonitions--he couldn't hear her, you know. But still she kept it up, this constant patter, and even though he couldn't hear her, it was really loud in MY ear--everything from "That's great, buddy, run! Oops, you lost your ball, go get it, now run! Yay, good job!" to "Sit up, buddy! Keep your hands to yourself! No, no, get away from the orange cone! Hurry, find your spot!"

W. T. F?

Fortunately, Willow went from resolutely sitting on her soccer ball and picking clover for the whole hour on Monday to being all soccer, all the time by the end of the hour on Tuesday:

She is particularly good at a little tracking game they play called Cats and Dogs. And there's none of this American everybody did just as well as the other person because we're all special crap at British soccer camp. At British soccer camp, if your name is Willow and you are REALLY good at Cats and Dogs, you get to hear a coach shout "Willow is the winner!" and then everybody gives you a high five.

I tell you, this living vicariously through your kids business might have something going for it.

Thank Goodness for Record Bowls

A lot of factors combined to make today's craft fair far more successful than May's craft fair--rain was forecast but never came, which always makes people happy; I was in a REALLY good location; there weren't any other major events (such as IU graduation) to compete with the day; and due to some long and hard thinking and some lucky garage sale scores, I've managed to put together a much nicer and more distinctive booth display.

Remember my dressmaker's dummies? They helped a lot:
Miss Dilley is sporting my vinyl record pendant necklaces (put together with a lark's head knot and a fisherman's knot, thank you very much) and my comic book pinback buttons:
Little John has the monograms over book pages pinback buttons----and Scrabble tile pendant necklaces: I haven't made the time in my schedule to go thrifting often enough to add to my T-shirt stash, so I wasn't offering many T-shirt quilts, but I did have the printouts of my digital button monograms displayed in the gaps where I didn't have quilts: The big winner, however, is always record bowls, and I finally got my act together enough to display them in an accessible and attractive manner: Let me tell you, that scavenged shopping cart is worth its weight in gold. It holds as much as a big Rubbermaid bin, but you can push it, not tote it; you can haul extra stuff to your both site there at the bottom; and once you get there, it's also its own display, so it saved a ton of time, too.

But where did it originally come from? No telling...My dear friend Betsy and I gossipped away happily while I took money and she crocheted plastic bags into other plastic bags (she gets a lot of sightseers when she does that craft in public), Matt eavesdropped on our gossip and read the newspaper and took the girls on trips to get honey sticks, and the girls played in the water fountain and small stream just behind my booth (perfect location!), colored with the special markers-- --and played with some AWESOME stuff that my blog friend Anna gave them. Check OUT these masks!

Sydney's channeling Picasso with this one:

I'm in such a good mood after that craft fair that I might get ice cream later AND try my hand at making jam.

End of the Season

And almost before it began, it seems, the entire season of craft fairs at the farmer's market is over:

Until next year...

June Fair of the Arts

Whew--I'm exhausted! Today was the June edition of A Fair of the Arts, our local monthy craft fair attached to our farmer's market. Great weather, great people, no weirdos, and lots of love--a fun time was had by all.

Here's my booth this month: It's the first time I've actually been pleased with my display; it's organized, visible, reasonably attractive, especially if you look back on the blog and compare it to my other displays in past craft fairs. It could still look much more put together, such as with matching colors, more well-constructed signs, and a professional-looking quilt rack, but that's a job for another day.

The woman at the left of my photo is my awesome friend Betsy, and here's what awesome Betsy is awesomely busy doing:

Bags of bags! Betsy folds, cuts up, ties together, and crochets those vile plastic bags from our local stores into these handsome, sturdy, washable, and non-vile totes. Betsy didn't sell any of them today (I might maybe have over-priced them on account of I think they're so terrific, but I seriously think they're cheap at twice the price), but man, she got the love. She kept me company from 8:00 am until we closed at 1:00 pm, crocheting the whole time, and I can't even tell you how many people she had to explain her work process to, and happily so, because she's Betsy, and she likes to teach. This one mom brought up something like four kids and had Betsy explain the whole thing, how she got from bag to bag, with visual aids, and even after the mom wandered off to look at record bowls, the kids all still stood around our table, just staring at Betsy, maybe a foot away from her. "Keep talking," I whispered to her out of the side of my mouth. Anyway, I think Betsy's going to try to make a couple of items at lower price points for next time, so we'll see how the love pays out then.The fatty stegs also got a lot of the love today. A representative from the Waldron Arts Center asked if I'd bring some into their gallery shop to sell this summer--um, yeah! Only thing is, now I've got to spend the week working in my one-woman fatty steg sweat shoppe instead of decompressing, because I sold most of these, including the vinyl steg. It's very nice, because being represented in some local stores is one of my goals, and I managed to partly achieve it today without actually having to get off my butt. Yay.I spent most of the rainy day yesterday making this display on the living room floor, specifically to hold these record bowls, and it paid off nicely. People really like record bowls, and they have a great profit margin. I actually collect pretty specifically--I like showtunes/musicals; children's music; music I remember from when I was a kid (Peter, Paul and Mary, anyone? I sold my entire collection of them today); and weird self-improvement or instructional recordings--so often people will browse all the titles, and then pick a bowl based on what speaks to them. One guy today said to his wife, "Oh, my god, honey! She's got The Lettermen!" It's fun to sell to people when they do stuff like that.

And what else did we do today, you ask? Well, there was this little thing today that I like to call...THE GOODWILL 50%-OFF STOREWIDE SALE! But that's a story for another post.

Fair of the Arts Begins

Today was an awesome day. Yesterday, not so much. A rep from A Fair of the Arts, our local monthly craft fair at the farmer's market, called yesterday morning and asked if I'd like to sub in an open vendor spot at the first fair today. Heck yeah, I'd like to. Of course, then I had to make signs and craft a few last-minute items (last-minute like 11:00 last night!) and figure out a display and buy some stuff from Lowe's to manufacture said display and pick up some change and clean out the car and load up the car, etc. I generally like to get most of this stuff done earlier than 12 hours before the craft fair begins, but what can you do.

Good thing, then, that it was an awesome day to vend at a craft fair. It's been a miserable, rainy week, but today was calm and clear, and tomorrow is set to be miserable as well, so everyone scurried out of their houses like a break in the storm to indulge in a little retail therapy before scurrying back in. Once it stopped freezing, it was nice to sit in the sun and people-watch and chit-chat with passers-by. It was also nice to make some hard-earned money.

Here are most of my quilts--denim and khaki, Incredible Hulk, two dinosaur quilts, and the world travelers quilt:

This is the best and most terrific display that Matt designed and we made and I painted in two shades of purple. It faces the outside, so it's got photos and display stuff. You can see the IU quilt and the Superman quilt, which got bought for a little boy's bed, although the dad seemed awfully happy about it, too:Here's the business side of the display. I'm really proud of the signs I made last night--I utilized my newfound scrapbooking skills! My pendants are on the left, including the one that I later bartered for eggs and watercress with a little girl at the farmer's market. The backside of my front-facing quilts are on the right, and the felt flower pins, including the red-buttoned one (it's also the one in the photo) that two women wanted at the same time. I reassured the loser that I have more red buttons for next time:I had to put out an extra sign for these soaps a little later--the weird combination of direct sunlight and extra humidity caused moisture to condense on them, but happily people still seemed to like them anyway. Essential oils are always so tempting:Record bowls rock, as always, even though I was up until 11:00 pm cooking these:
And the buttons--it's a really eclectic mix, I admit, mostly culled from the pages of Entertainment Weekly, so that when someone finds a button they adore, they tend to act as delighted as if they'd just rediscovered a part of their own head:The weather was so, so nice, that after tear-down and the celebratory very large meal (being from the South, the buffet is the traditional food of my people), we had the whole rest of the day to slave outside in the yard and do this: Awesome day.