thoughts on being too bright for the room.....

this should be subtitled and its not over 'til the last lady buys




once again this weekend we found ourselves in the position of being too bright for the room.

We set up our normal way -- raising the tables, nice drape to the floor black table cloths, full spectrum lighting (yes we were literally brighter than the room!).













What passes for a doll and bear show in this case was largely a flea market of used dolls, doll clothes and doll parts.

There were only 3 of 46 booths that were bears that had been hand made (and there were probably only 1 or 2 more that were displaying any kind of item actually made by the seller--one vendor was actually bragging about how she had bought all these doll clothes at Walmart for $0.50 each and had marked them up and was selling them at $6.00 each.)

Most of the rest of the tables held plastic bins or battered cardboard boxes full of doll clothes, metal toys, odds and ends of accessories, paper dolls and books. Some of the booths could have had a sign reading "Bare Naked Ladies" for all the nude dolls on the tables.

It is at this kind of show that I see the following senario: A couple strolls past my booth and says "Oh, Steiffs". Now while I'm pleased to be considered to be in that company; I must then patiently explain that all of the animals are designed and made by my husband and myself. (A side "talking point" is that a lot of the materials we use come out of the same mill in Germany that the materials Steiff uses do.)

For most of the day I'm watching plenty of $2 and $3 sales going on all around me, but as usual, I'm just one sale away from having a really great show (when the cheapest item on the table is $25, I don't have to make a lot of sales to catch up on those $2 and $3 ones).

Towards the end of the day I had sold only 2 small sales, and I was thinking I should have just hit the snooze button when the alarm went off at 4:45 a.m.!

In the last half hour, however, something different happen. I took an order for 2 special pieces from a lady, had an inquiry from a store owner for a special edition for her store (I'll be preparing a proposal this week) and after the show was actually supposed to be closed and we were packing up our inventory, a lady came back and bought 2 of my more expensive pieces (paid with what we call "green card"--you know, pieces of green paper with pictures of dead presidents!).

It was nice that in the end the show turned out to have been worth while, but I have to say I was exhausted by the end of the day, and I still feel pretty tired today.


While I was in the car up and back, I finished another afghan square.

Worked some more on the piece for the knitted/felted critter. I am now about half way through the second skein of yarn.

As I was looking at the skein wrappers for the two yarns I'm using for the felt project, I was amazed to discover that they are both the same brand of yarn. That may sound crazy, but one of the skeins (the dark one) was given to me by my sister about 2 years ago while the other one was purchased in California during our most recent show trip there. The labels aren't even made out of the same kind of material--one is paper, the other one is Tyvek (or something like it)--WEIRD!

Today I will be doing laundry and all the usual post-show paperwork (tax filing, writing thank you notes, etc) and maybe even catch a nap somewhere along the line...we'll see