Luna? Not So Much.

Ominously, the first craft fair of the season was quite...eh.

Mind you, all the stuff was there. Quilts:
Pinback buttons: Gift Tags: And some new stuff that I've been making with these terrific upholstery remnants that I scored a few weeks ago:

There was even my own personal troll-girl who crouched under the table and played with stuff for five hours:

Customers, though? Not so much. And customers wishing to purchase things? Um, there were even fewer of those, at least for me--the hallway where we set up is kind of narrow, so vendors could have been making a killing just three tables down and I wouldn't have known. There wasn't so much being killed right near me.

The experience was educational, however. All of my sales were very small--I didn't sell any item that cost over $5--so that tells me that I'll likely need to bone up on a LOT of really small items for my craft fairs this summer. Of course, it's actually harder to make a good profit if you're selling really small items, because you obviously have to sell 60 $1 buttons to make the same amount of money as you can from one $60 T-shirt quilt, but whatever a girl's gotta do, I guess.

People seemed to like the belly dancers. Perhaps I could belly dance just inside my booth? Draw in the customers? Earn some extra singles?

Day in the Sun

It was the best sunny, warm, breezy, cloudless day yet! I know I was pretty stressed at times in the past few months (what odd freshman comp classes I've had this year...), but it must have been a harder winter than I thought, because I never remember being this ridiculously stoked for Spring!

But finally, finally, the lilac is in bloom right outside our front door:
And although I did spend much of the day at a cloth diapering class and the Montessori Garage Sale (I bought a lathe! A LATHE!!! For $15!!! I can't even let myself think about it until my semester's officially over, but I'm so excited), much more of the day was spent outside, at the park, in the sunny, cloudless, warm, breezy air.

I finished my last photo shoot for my book proposal:
One awesome kid permitted me to join her high, high up in her favorite climbing tree:
While the other kid stayed on the ground, enjoying some watercolors al fresco:
And now the babies are asleep, although the sun is barely down (thank you, day full of fresh air and tree climbing), and my Matt is at a Flight of the Conchords concert (I can't stand them, so thank you as well, small children in need of a mother's care), leaving me to happily blog away and craft a few last-minute things for tomorrow:

If only it wasn't Little 500 weekend, causing the emanations from my open windows to sound more like a zombie invasion (sirens, wordless screams, drumbeats, squealing tires) and less like a peaceful warm spring night...

Eh. As long as Matt makes it home tonight without getting a "walking drunk" violation, which my students tell me totally exists, but if you have $265 in cash you can pay your fine right then and avoid being sent to jail (what these kids are doing here without their mothers, I'll never know), it'll all be good.

P.S. Check out my post about crafting with wood over at Crafting a Green World.

In Between Teaching, Writing, and Parenting...

I sewed:
So refreshing.

I tend to have a lot of irons in the fire, with a lot of plans for far more irons, so it's easy for me to let myself get really panicky about all that I have to do, and all that I haven't yet done, if I'm not careful:

• LOTS of homework papers that I *should* grade and alphabetize to pass back to my students on Wednesday. It will give me less to do when I'm trying to grade and record final papers, and my students will appreciate knowing their grades up to the final--of course, it will also give them more scope for pestering me with whining...
• LOTS of things that I *should* craft for Luna Fest on Sunday--one set of button alphabets to finish and another that I could sell as a set; several sets of crayon rolls, marker rolls, and colored pencil rolls, allowing me to sell them individually or as gift sets; melted crayons; doily pinbacks, etc.
• A couple of last tutorials, some photos, and a LOT of proofreading and design work on my book proposal, and then having it copied and bound and sending it--I really, really wanted to send it this week. Sigh.
• How great would it be to write a couple of pattern zines to have ready at Luna Fest, and also for my pumpkinbear etsy shop? Wouldn't you totally want a hip, indie zine that would tell you how to make a superhero T-shirt dress?
• If I don't post regularly on Crafting a Green World and Eco Child's Play, then I don't earn my craft supplies budget for the next month. No craft supplies=suckage.
• The Montessori Parents' Library, for whom I am the Parents' Library librarian, could use a Wish List, written self check-out instructions, signage, and CD copies of all the expert lectures that are on--ugh--cassette tapes.
• Speaking of...when did I last update my pumpkinbear etsy shop?

On the plus side, the kiddos are happy and engaged (barring some minor drama with Music Day--how did I manage to convince Will's teachers that I am some kind of rabid stage mom, when the truth is that I don't give a flying flip whether or not she performs the bumblebee song in front of her classmates and parents?), with a mama who helps them put together the velociraptor puzzle and reads the dinosaur encyclopedia to them for one solid hour and makes gluten-free brownies with them in the morning.

Come to think of it, did I eat anything today other than a butt-load of gluten-free brownies? Maybe that explains it...

P.S. Check out my list of eco-crafting tutorials for Earth Day over at Crafting a Green World.

Come to the Moon

The moon, like Spanish: la luna? Old English: mona. Greek: mene. Latin: mens, mensis (literally, "month"). Welsh: mis. Like, you know, Luna Festival?

I'm so absurdly over-educated that I can't tell if my jokes are actually funny.

Anyway...come to Luna Festival!

Come to buy or come to sell--there are actually still a couple of tables open, and I can forward you the pdf application if you're feeling a little crafty. Otherwise, definitely come to buy.

I really like Luna Festival because it's like a craft fair pre-game--I signed up for five(?) sessions at A Fair of the Arts, and one of my New Year's Resolutions (oh, man, I just re-read those and noticed the "limit junk" one--whatev) was to get into some more national-level craft fairs this year, so Luna Fest is like my small, relaxed beginning to the season. I can try out some new stuff I've been working on all winter, test my pricing, have that extra time to work on signage--all that good money-making good stuff.

I also like to mix up my theme a little: last year I sold at Luna under Girls Love Dinosaurs, and this year I'm thinking of combining some kind of craft kit/rainbow thing. The girls have me unhealthily (unholily?) obsessed with rainbows, of all things----all those pretty colors! Lined up in a neat row! How organized! Fussy yet unfussy!

It's tiresome even for me to hear myself talk, sometimes.

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.

Girls Love Dinosaurs

As a sort of last-minute idea, I've decided to sell at a local craft fair on March 29. It's supposed to be a showcase of female artists and businesswomen, and my booth rental fee benefits, in part, a local support system serving women and children who are the victims of violence.

I'd almost decided against selling at local, smaller markets, partly because I think my work is pretty weird and not to the general taste, partly based on a very silly couple of tiny craft fairs I did around Christmastime, including one for Girls Inc. at which it turned out I was the only vendor (I still pulled a profit, but being the only vendor...just embarrassing), and partly based on this book I've been reading, Crafts and Craft Shows: How to Make Money, by Philip Kadubec. 

Kadubec isn't really my scene, since he describes his work as "country traditional," highlights booths that look like little general stores or post picket fences at their entrances, and might possibly think that the Internet is a fad, but he was a very successful crafter before retirement and is very insightful about the business of crafts. He prefers larger shows that are precisely targeted toward your particular craft, even though they have scary-large booth rental fees, over teeny-tiny little local fairs that are really cheap to enter. Teeny-tiny little local fairs, he argues, can also be pretty ticky-tacky, don't necessarily attract anyone who wants or can buy your stuff, and waste time better spent more professionally marketing your business or even just making stuff.

I think Kadubec is right on track with this, based on my small experience, and he's voiced the reasoning that will allow me to no longer waste my time at, say, the Christmas craft fair at Matt's office. I think this Luna Arts Festival is going to be awesome, though. From what I gather, it's an established fair with a history, which is a pro for selling at it. It's a craft fair/expo with nothing else distracting, like a chili cook-off or auction or something, tacked on, but with local musicians playing and drawing in their fan bases. It's woman-centered, which I'm always on board with, and I can use it as a dry-run for building a booth that actually looks really professional, before jumping into applying to any big shows.

That being said, I'm still not going to show my regular Pumpkin+Bear stuff. Kadubec also speaks about the possibility of saturating your local market, especially if you don't sell stuff you can use up, like soap, but stuff that sits around and stays stuff for the rest of your life, like record bowls and T-shirt quilts. So I think it is important that if I sell a lot locally, I do provide some significant variety in my work. And therefore, I've decided that for this fair, Pumpkin+Bear will be selling under the alias Girls Love Dinosaurs.

My concept is stuff, primarily recycled but not necessarily, that is thematically centered on dinosaurs--primarily for kids but not necessarily. I worked hard the whole weekend, took the kid out for a photo shoot this morning before it started snowing (something else Kadubec suggests--awesome photos of your stuff or your creation process displayed in your booth or in an album in your booth. It humanizes your creation and highlights its uniqueness and the handicraft aspect), and here's what I've got so far (I can't fix the dismal winter lighting on any of the photos, because my 8-year-old bootleg copy of Photoshop 6.0 finally crapped out on me, and my legitimate purchase of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is currently still winging its way to my door):

These are the Fatty Stegasauruses, made from recycled wool sweaters and polyester batting (I like the fact that I can upgrade the stuffing to make them really eco-friendly, and they're a possibility for selling in a local store or two here). If I have time to make another batch before the fair, I might make a different size or type...say, apatasaurus?

These are the dinosaur-themed "summer quilts," meaning they don't have any batting, per se, just either a fleece back and binding or a fleece middle and a flannel back and binding. I still machine-quilted them, though, which is awesome fun. I'm thinking three sizes--a "play" size, for doll blankets or what-have you, a "baby," size, which is a crib quilt, and a "kid" size, which is a twin.

And these are my soldered glass pendants, made from dinosaur stamps that I bought from Western Mountain Stamp and Coin, which sells packages of stamps sorted by theme--I also have the cats-themed one and the space-themed one, and I really want the maps one and the elephants one, too, only I'm already swimming in stamps. I'm particularly pleased with my soldering work since I bought grozing pliers that permit me to smash the little uneven bits off the edges of the glass that I can hardly ever cut evenly, and the joy of this has given me good-enough glass-cutting karma to actual make some pretty accurate cuts now, as well.

So I'm thinking this might be a sweet product line, because people tend to like dinosaurs. My kids are obsessed with them, as are a lot of kids, and they're also quirky enough to perhaps draw in the quirky crowd. If they're the next stuffed chicken or not, I don't know.