SoapZone Community Message Board

As I mentioned in the last PP, bff, good church friend and I were going to try to sell stuff for the very first time, at a fairly new craft show/flea market at a nearby(ish) park. I'd had all these things I wanted to do leading up to the show, including making more product, but between working every single day last week, sometimes at weird hours (well, not so much weird hours as bouncing between shifts) and the power outage, suddenly it was Friday night and I wasn't nearly as ready as I wanted to be <g>. Then bff texted me; she'd been out running errands Friday for about 5 hours and her new dog destroyed her house. Shredded paper everywhere. He'd gotten into some powdered peanut butter, slobbered all over it, then left reconstituted peanut butter all over the living room. She put him in his crate while she tried to clean up...he busted out of the crate. Orso goes for obedience training starting this week. Bff needed to evaluate a few places that did doggy training first. We're still joking about the place who doesn't believe in "no", thinks it's all right to leave a dog in a crate for 12 hours (in September, bff is thinking of getting back into nursing and could be gone for as many as 13 hours on days she works) and only uses treats to reward good behavior. And a strange "treat" at that...during their meet and greet, this place kept stuffing Orso with cream cheese if he did well. He got home and promptly threw up. Small doses of cream cheese, given sparingly, are fine as a treat but a canine shouldn't consume an entire block of it in one training session. Anyways, bff told me she didn't trust Orso to be alone most of Saturday (understandable), so she was going to not participate. She did stop by Saturday morning to bring over some supplies for the display, none of which I wound up needing.

It was a LOT of work loading up the car Saturday morning, even with three people doing the work. I wound up not being able to use one of the tables bff brought over because it wouldn't fit in my Kona, even with the back seats down. That left us one table short, so I had to sacrifice my one chair and leave some of my pour paintings in a box atop the chair. We also didn't think to bring anything to anchor the legs of the canopy I had. If we'd set up on grass, I had pegs to stake it down but that didn't help on a paved parking lot. Several times, the wind picked up the canopy and skittered it a few steps across our allotted space. I wound up holding one leg while gcf held the diagonal leg. Eventually, a kindly vendor across from us brought us some round, heavy disks to hold the legs down. Then all we had to do was hold down the earring tree that kept blowing over and replace the few pour paintings atop small stands that also kept blowing over. I will have to think long and hard about participating in another outdoors show.

Other than the wind, the day was absolutely lovely: not too hot, not too cold, sunny but not too sunny. There was a decent turnout as well...but many people were there to look, not buy. Gcf was selling pony bead bracelets for adults and tiny "doll" bracelets...she only sold two of the latter. I sold a small pour painting, a pair of earrings and three bracelets. Lots of people complimented my crafts but most didn't buy anything. The junk...I mean "vintage" items I hauled down from the attic actually went pretty well. I had a lot of interest in a Fostoria glass oblong bowl I'd gotten years ago from an elderly neighbor across the street I'd seen it on eBay for anywhere between $40-300...I let it go for $20. One young man really wanted it to go with a pink glass vase he'd just bought but he didn't have any cash* and bff was the one who was supposed to set up a credit card reader. By the time he found a vendor who'd let him buy something and give him cash back, I had just sold the bowl literally about a minute prior. I also got rid of some salt and pepper shakers, four pairs of Halloween themed earrings, a cow-shaped creamer, a large white pitcher, a smaller white pitcher, an old(ish) post card from Niagara Falls that led to the woman buying it telling me the story of almost going over the railing and falling into the falls while posing for a picture there in her youth, a pewter "give us this day our daily bread" bread platter that every Christian home had in the 80s, a decorative but (I believe) not functional tin tea kettle and a Cleveland snow globe that plays "America the Beautiful". I was a little surprised nobody bought the cookie jar painted to look like an orange (several people commented on it) and the large etched glass pitcher (several people admired that as well). Altogether, I made $102...but I paid $25 for the table and spent another $25 buying the earring tree and a ring display. Eh, it's more than I had before the weekend, and really, everyone was lovely...and a lot of people brought their adorable dogs that were anxious to say hello and be petted.

* I was pleased that not one person tried to buy something for $3 and hand me a $50. That actually happened to me at a garage sale years ago. Everyone had either exact change--most of what I sold, I sold for $5 or $10--or else I could make change. There was the one young man who originally could only pay digitally, and later there was a quintet of early 20-somethings, one of which bought the tea kettle, who initially wanted to Venmo me. The young man buying the tea kettle looked into his wallet and told me, disappointed, that he only had $7...I told him he could have the tea kettle for $5. I *do* have to wonder if anyone who bought anything was going to go home and sell their purchase for 5x what they paid for it, but I'm OK with that. I had no desire to put in a lot of work selling online and then shipping things out.

I had only two minor quibbles about yesterday's show; first, I got an e-mail promising the vendors a free breakfast since many of us were still without power, but unless they had that right at 7:00 AM, when you could begin setting up, we missed it (we got there just before 8:00). Second, there were supposed to be food trucks...I was planning on grabbing lunch from one of them but the only trucks that were there were selling sweets. I didn't want a cookie or ice cream for lunch <g>. I wonder if there were more food trucks scheduled that had to back out (no pun intended) due to the power outages last week.

And now I need to spend this week putting away the craft supplies that are strewn all over the living room <g>.