Craft fair

Craft fairs

Aaargh I hate them!

Lots of bloggers seem to blog about wonderful craft fairs they've been to, get all excited about the planning, share pictures of their beautiful stalls, blah blah. Me, I dislike, them ....... a lot. For one thing I don't like trying to sell things because I don't like people trying to sell me things. I never sell enough to cover my time at the fair all day let alone all the preparation time and the time spent making my books. But every now and then I forget how much I dislike them and I get seduced into doing it again, and I do have to say that occasionally I make a useful contact that leads to a dose of teaching work. At the moment I have a load more book workshops in the pipeline and I decided to have a stall at a craft fair in Exeter mainly to promote my workshops. Because I now expect to hate the whole experience I don't suffer too much on the day. On this occasion I sold a few book making materials (under £10 worth), but didn't sell a single book. I did get rid of seven fliers for workshops which was ok but not brilliant. The only sight consolation was that I spoke to several other stallholders who hadn't sold anything either so it wasn't just me! 

I did make an effort to make my stall look nice, I practised this kind of bookshelf look at home..

I made a banner with book pages.. Note the bit that's supposed to say 'handmade' on the table, it actually reads edamdnaH, because I strung them the wrong way round at first. Surprisingly I found this very amusing and it cheered me up so much I had to take a picture!

Anyway, the event was in a theatre space, which as you can see below was very black, although quite well lit, but my stall was in a slightly dark corner. Looking at the pictures when I got home I thought my stall looked like a horrible untidy jumble. This is actually quite a good reflection of how I live, and, although I'm comfortable like that, I don't think it's a good way to present my books, ho hum, back to the drawing board..

In fact I'm really quite embarrassed at how bad it looks, but I'm going to share it anyway because I have a tendency to blog about all the lovely and wonderful things in my life and I just want to share some of my angst and uncomfortableness.
On the plus side I did meet a couple of people who expressed an interest in me doing workshops in their spaces, and possibly sharing space in a pop-up art shop in Crediton. we shall see...!