Part 1- Lemonade Art Fair
Lemonade Art Fair was a success last month!
I thought I would share with you my experience at the fair. I had such a great day. Thank you to everyone who stopped by. I’m so excited I got to meet some of my followers 😊 I wasn’t expecting that! They’re the coolest people and everyone is so kind. It just felt really good so thank you!
Also, what I wasn’t expecting was the amount of fair food I wanted. Earlier on I was like, I can’t eat all my profits. Then later I was like…or can I? Muhh haa haa haa. I mean I didn’t but I mentally spent all of it!
The night before the fair I had everything in my vehicle loaded like tables, chairs, tent, etc. I laid out my clothes. I decided to wear a light sun dress. It was going to be 94 degrees and sunny. It was so comfortable in the heat, a good choice. The morning of I just had to load my crates of pottery, cash box and cooler. I packed water, Gatorade, some pop and watermelon. I’m so glad because we needed it. My husband Aaron came with me to help me with the booth for the day. I’m so thankful he’s the one who encouraged me to do this art fair. We had a blast together.
We got there at 7am and made several trips to unload everything from the vehicle to my booth. Then we set up the tent, booth tables and unpacked the pottery. Something that I learned from a group I’m in was to make sure that you weigh down your tent/tables! It might not seem too windy but if you get a few good gusts, you could damage your own work or worse, someone else’s. Pretty sure there some paperwork that would say you’re liable to cover the damage or something, so better to be safe than sorry. You can buy weights, or sand bags online or I’ve found them at local hardware stores. I have sand bags in their original bags and I put them in a kitty litter bucket and then I just cover the bucket with pillowcases. Those go with the four posts of the tent. I also have other weights because at this venue it was no stakes in the ground because of their sprinkler system. After we set everything up, I went through and repriced all of my work.
At my first two sales (yard and flea market) I had dot stickers that were all different colors for pricing. I just didn’t like the look so much. So, I got little white labels and cut them so I could get 3 prices per label. I spent about an hour and a half replacing all of them. It was also a good time to adjust some prices. I lowered some of the smaller stuff because I wanted to move them a little quicker.
Vendors walked around just before the fair started. I had a potter stop by, she was super nice and encouraging. I was able to do a short lap around to see the other vendors. I think what I really liked about this fair is that everything was hand made. For the pottery category, you couldn’t use molds. Side note I’ll probably do a blog about that at some point. I don’t use them but I’m sure I’ll try it at some point. It’s just not a world I’m ready for yet.
The fair started at 11:00AM. There were people starting to trickle in. People mostly just walking by but some stopping at the front of the booth. I had a few people taking pictures of my work. I think probably just travel bloggers. There was a travel blog group in town from all over the US. I have a feeling some of them ended up at the fair.
I put some eye candy pieces up front and then some in the back of the booth to draw people in. My Poppy bowls were probably picked up the most if not it ties with the largest gnome home. I think it worked out ok. The booths are 10X10 but luckily, we had open lawn behind us. We made it so people could exit out the back as well.
How the rest of the fair went to be continued…
