Jewelry and things
Mar. 12th, 2007 08:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
featherynscaleSaturday, I packed up my stuff and went out to the Snake Saturday festival. They have a small arts and crafts show, and it was very inexpensive and easy to get into, so I figured I'd haul a table and some jewelry out there and see if I could make any money... It didn't go as well as I had hoped.
The festival has a lot of things associated with it. There's a parade, a barbecue competition, a kids' midway with rides and games, fair food, music, auto club exhibits, and this art/craft show. The arts and crafts tent is set up in a parking lot, between the barbecuers, the car exhibitors, and the midway. In my initial estimations, this was going to be perfect. People would be wandering through getting barbecue, and going to the midway, and then they'd see this art show and come over. This would have worked, except that the barbecue was not for general eating -- they are prohibited by Clay County Health from actually selling or giving away the barbecue to festivalgoers. So there's not really any point in walking through the barbecue tents and trailers, is there? You're just smelling something you can't have. The midway did attract some folks, but mostly only those with small children. The car people were not the sort of antique autos that I had imagined, the sort of thing that attracts people from the street -- they were ultralight racecars, which are probably very interesting to racecar people, but not so much to the average joe off the street. And then, the tent we were in had no signs or label or anything to indicate that there was anything of interest inside the tent.
The result of this is that I sold a handful of pieces, and made $80. It covered my table fee, so I did better than any of the other people in my part of the tent, but still was perhaps not worth dragging my arse up to North Kansas City early on a Saturday morning and sitting out in the cold all day. The only people in the show who seemed to be making any money were people who had kids' toys (one guy had marshmallow guns made of PVC pipe), and people who had ignored the "arts/crafts" requirement of having a table and were selling St. Pat's Day t-shirts, deelyboppers, mardi gras-style beads, and other green kitsch.
Also, and this is what makes me a bad person, every time I make jewelry specifically for a particular showing, I make a piece according to every principle of wretched taste, and I have a bet on with myself about whether or not it will sell. It always does. This weekend's shiny chunk of awful was a piece built around a pendant that I'd gotten in a random assortment -- it was a large chunky cross-shaped thing, with turquoise enamel and little tiny yellow and pink flowers on. I paired it with turquoise heishe beads, bright pinky-purple glass in the same shade as the flowers, and bright blue triangle glass. The overall effect was somewhere between "candy" and "vomit". Every person who passed my table in the first few hours of the show picked it up and told me how lovely it was. It finally sold about halfway through the day. On the one hand, I'm deeply offended. On the other, I have two more of those awful crosses in my stash, and I'm betting now that if I act quickly, I can get rid of them this season. It seems like at any given show, the two or three things on the table that I like least are what sells. I'm starting to think maybe it's me.
Anyway, the other thing is that I continue to have a large stock of jewelry available. I'm starting to put it online on Etsy, which is pretty cheap and easy to work with. I'm hoping that it's as easy to buy from as it is to list on, but I really don't know. There are only a few pieces up now, but I will be adding more as days go by. If you're interested, take a look at my shop. And feel free to let me know if it's my sense of aesthetics that's gone awry, or the rest of the world's. Knowing the answer to that question would save me a lot of trouble in the long run.
The festival has a lot of things associated with it. There's a parade, a barbecue competition, a kids' midway with rides and games, fair food, music, auto club exhibits, and this art/craft show. The arts and crafts tent is set up in a parking lot, between the barbecuers, the car exhibitors, and the midway. In my initial estimations, this was going to be perfect. People would be wandering through getting barbecue, and going to the midway, and then they'd see this art show and come over. This would have worked, except that the barbecue was not for general eating -- they are prohibited by Clay County Health from actually selling or giving away the barbecue to festivalgoers. So there's not really any point in walking through the barbecue tents and trailers, is there? You're just smelling something you can't have. The midway did attract some folks, but mostly only those with small children. The car people were not the sort of antique autos that I had imagined, the sort of thing that attracts people from the street -- they were ultralight racecars, which are probably very interesting to racecar people, but not so much to the average joe off the street. And then, the tent we were in had no signs or label or anything to indicate that there was anything of interest inside the tent.
The result of this is that I sold a handful of pieces, and made $80. It covered my table fee, so I did better than any of the other people in my part of the tent, but still was perhaps not worth dragging my arse up to North Kansas City early on a Saturday morning and sitting out in the cold all day. The only people in the show who seemed to be making any money were people who had kids' toys (one guy had marshmallow guns made of PVC pipe), and people who had ignored the "arts/crafts" requirement of having a table and were selling St. Pat's Day t-shirts, deelyboppers, mardi gras-style beads, and other green kitsch.
Also, and this is what makes me a bad person, every time I make jewelry specifically for a particular showing, I make a piece according to every principle of wretched taste, and I have a bet on with myself about whether or not it will sell. It always does. This weekend's shiny chunk of awful was a piece built around a pendant that I'd gotten in a random assortment -- it was a large chunky cross-shaped thing, with turquoise enamel and little tiny yellow and pink flowers on. I paired it with turquoise heishe beads, bright pinky-purple glass in the same shade as the flowers, and bright blue triangle glass. The overall effect was somewhere between "candy" and "vomit". Every person who passed my table in the first few hours of the show picked it up and told me how lovely it was. It finally sold about halfway through the day. On the one hand, I'm deeply offended. On the other, I have two more of those awful crosses in my stash, and I'm betting now that if I act quickly, I can get rid of them this season. It seems like at any given show, the two or three things on the table that I like least are what sells. I'm starting to think maybe it's me.
Anyway, the other thing is that I continue to have a large stock of jewelry available. I'm starting to put it online on Etsy, which is pretty cheap and easy to work with. I'm hoping that it's as easy to buy from as it is to list on, but I really don't know. There are only a few pieces up now, but I will be adding more as days go by. If you're interested, take a look at my shop. And feel free to let me know if it's my sense of aesthetics that's gone awry, or the rest of the world's. Knowing the answer to that question would save me a lot of trouble in the long run.
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no subject
Date: 2007-03-13 05:31 am (UTC)Now I just finish an item and put it in the *sell* pile and keep making!