New Year's Res Accomplished

Wow, what an experience! If you look back to my New Year's resolutions, you'll see that something I wanted to do in 2010 was participate in a craft fair. Last Friday and Saturday, I did just that!!

My mom and I worked 8-10 hour days for 5 days straight to finish up with the production of all the product I hoped to sell. We set up the booth (handmade by my handy husband) in the living room and tried out all different ideas. On Thanksgiving day, we rested as much as we could and enjoyed a feast with friends (I supplied the apple pie and pumpkin roll). Then on Friday, we were up at 6 and out the door by 7 to head to the Fort Collins Senior Center. We used photos Mom had taken with her iPhone to set everything up correctly, and posted the last of the pricing signs right at 10:00, as the doors to the public opened.

Here are two photos of how all my product could mostly fit into two Rubbermaid tubs(!), and the clunker truck we borrowed to get all of the "set" to the stage.

Across the aisle from me was another first-timer, Rachel, who makes colorful headbands from lycra. (Visit her shop at www.thesportygirl.com.) She and I cheered each other along the way, and worked to manifest more people on day 2 as well as a younger crowd (Friday provided many 60+ers and we figure both of our audiences are younger than that). Other vendors around my booth sold things like fleece hats with ears, emu oil/soap, knitted coathangers/sweaters/necklaces, and jewelry. While there were other people who sold cards, nobody had anything that looked like mine, which was a relief!

Lessons learned, from this experience as well as tips from more seasoned vendors:

• That you can use a smart phone to do credit card transactions! It seems super easy, and low cost. Might be time for me to upgrade.
• A fair with 90 vendors might be just too big for someone like me, who is asking a lot of money for fine-detail work. Figure that the average customer has a budget, and that they do a once-around the whole fair before spending any cash. What are the chances of them making their way back to me? And justifying to themselves that $5.25 for a card is a wise purchase? If they had fewer choices of where to spend their money, they might be able to find me again, and feel that my product is a good choice if their other choices are limited.
• There are 5 million ways to market a product! What will work and what won't is anybody's guess, but we certainly thought about it a lot, and made adjustments throughout.
• (Not the biggest epiphany:) Very few people (in this crowd) will pay a lot for a card. Even if they LOVE it. I knew this, though.
• People of my mom's generation and older don't want to buy aprons. Aprons mean work, scrubbing, stains, cleaning, whatever. They don't see aprons as a fashion piece or spunky uniform as I do. Some people are astounded that I own something like 10 aprons and use almost all of them for various different tasks in my life.
• I think I should reduce my product to one or two things. Maybe three. Six was too many. Well, maybe.
• The best sellers (again, with this particular population): mini quilts, advent calendars, and cards. Fabric-lined boxes didn't sell at all, and aprons were the second to last. Gift bags weren't too poorly received, though. People liked the concept of them (reducing gift wrapping waste, yearly re-use, etc), but lots of folks knew they could make their own at home.
• There were a lot of people who liked my stuff but the economy is rough right now and it sucks that just now is when I'm trying to stick my foot into the mix!
• To keep trying! Try another fair, another day, a different group of consumers! Adjust my prices, adjust my inventory, stick my neck out. Keep going. This is one of my favorite lessons of the weekend.
• You definitely need a buddy. I was super lucky to have such an enthusiastic partner as my mom. We could each take turns having lunch or breaks or shopping excursions to other booths. And she had so many great ideas that really enhanced the booth. That along with all the grunt work she did to help me finish all my product, I couldn't have done it without her.

Thank you to everyone who supported my endeavor, by coming to the fair or by purchasing something I made. I am so glad that you found something worthwhile in my work and I look forward to sharing the next adventure with you.

My Studio This Week

In my studio this week, there has been a lot going on. I feel like I'm working 7 days a week! But at least 3 days of the week are in the studio. While I am having fun, I am definitely tired out. The photos above show from L to R, starting at the top:

• Bases for more mini quilts
• Aprons in the works
• Wooden discs we drilled holes in to make buttons for...
• Gift bags (never buy gift wrap again!)
• 4 more advent calendars
• Folded white cardstock (for when the Christmas cards below get to that stage)
• Christmas cards in their early stage and a fabric covered box
• Paul making a "wall" for me to hang stuff from
• Inserts for the advent calendars
• Envelopes stuffed into clear plastic protectors
• The new Parsley Art logo!
• Christmas cards design #2

As usual, you can click on the image above to see the photos a little bigger.

Here are two photos of my studio right now.

Finally, I bought my domain and website for www.parsleyartstudio.com! (If you go there now you will not see much more than an intro page... it will be another few weeks before I'll have the proper time to give to it.) And my new business cards came this week too. They are very fine!

Better in Person

I sent the little 3-flowers card you saw in my last post to my sister last week, who, upon receipt, exclaimed over the phone, "It's so much better in person! The photo doesn't do it any justice!!" Even if I had a professional photographer, I think I would need an actual photography studio to get anywhere close to actualizing the reality of my work (you know, like you might see in an art book). My work is so incredibly textural that you have to see it and, if you can, feel it to really get it. I wish you could reach through the computer and grab the stuff I make to see it in person for yourself, and touch it. But since you can't, take my sister's word for it!! It is even better in person.

This is a first design I came up with for an advent calendar after the happenstance circle storage system I developed, which you can see in my last post too. Surprisingly, I hadn't thought of an advent calendar, and then Tara suggested it! Thanks Tara! The pockets and background are all made from THE dictionary, and then sewn to a bit of scrap fabric (which I incidentally got at a great garage sale last week). Inside the pockets are little notes, one for each day leading up to the big event.

Now, if you click on the photo for a closer look, you can see that the word 'advent' is at the top, kind of as its title. At the bottom, there's the definition. Did you know that advent doesn't necessarily have to pertain to Christmas? So, while this initial design is obviously Christmas-y, not all of them will be. What do the notes say? Your choice! I'll have some pre-made ones that can be bought (jokes, quotes, etc), and also some blank ones for people to write on to make their calendars more meaningful and personalized.

You can see, feel, and BUY this piece and/or others like it if you come to the Holiday Craft & Food Market, November 26-27, 2010, at the Fort Collins Senior Center. I hope to see you and your family there!

Work-horse

I seem to remember this happened last fall, and the fall before that too. My life has been far too busy for my liking! Sorry for the more than 3 weeks since my last post. Besides having some long-term company at home, it was also my 10-year college reunion at the start of the month (hooray for Mills College!), and my day job has been considerably more demanding these days too (actually always the case at this time of year).

I have been a work-horse in the art room. The photo above shows what I feel I've been doing for a month: circles and quilt squares. You can see what will become of the circles, and the quilt squares will become aprons, as seen in a past post. When my mom saw that purple square, she said she just wanted to lick it, it reminded her of candy!

In the lower left corner, you can see what I devised as a storage system for circles I have purposefully paired and prepared to become flowers, but there are so many of them that I won't get through them all in one sitting. So I made these little pockets out of scratch paper to keep them from getting separated or mixed up, and I like the look so much I'm wondering if I can put the idea into something sell-able. What do you think?

Work Day and Name Change

I've officially been accepted into the Ft Collins Holiday Craft Fair over Thanksgiving weekend! Hooray! So as you know, I have some work to do, and today I invited three helpers into the art room to help me with some of the grunt work of mass card-making: Mivvy, Haley, and Katie.

We worked for a good 4 hours (with a gourmet snack break half-way through) to do all the finishing on my non-Christmas cards. The photo below is the pile of cards we completed. I'd done all the design, painting, gluing, layout, etc. beforehand. Then today we sewed on buttons, beads, and other embellishments while keeping each other company and laughing at the chickens clucking right outside to screen door. We accomplished so much; that was 16 hours of work that the four of us did in 4. Fantastic!

Now, a story: when I was in Oregon over Memorial Day weekend, I stopped in a great quilt shop in Hood River. I was explaining to the woman there the type of art I did and the reason I was there to buy buttons (for 2 cents a pop from their bulk basket), and she asked if I had a card, so she could visit my website when she got home to her computer. A week or so later, she called me(!) and said she'd had problems finding my Etsy shop, Follow Him.

Whoa.

And so, I would like to announce the transition to my new studio name: Parsley Art. I am still working through the details, but you will see that it is a good fit. "Fresh art with lots of taste," you know, something along those lines. Katie came early to our work session today to do some photography with freshly picked bunches of parsley from my garden. We experimented with all sorts of things to integrate the parsley and some of my art supplies. You'll see more of those photos soon. For now, here are a couple...