Busy, busy busy!

I have not posted anything new for a while now. It's not because I have nothing new to post. It's because I have been busy, busy, busy with my little business.

Craft fair season is in full swing. I have done a few different types of shows with mixed results. I decided the best way to do it is to go into every one with no expectations and see what happens because you never know which ones will be a gold mine and which ones will be a bust. Oh- and I ALWAYS try to split the booth fee. That way, I am only out half as much if I don't do very well.


These are photos from a recent show Amy and I did. This picture is the inside of our booth. Since we are cramming three businesses in one booth, I took one side with my toys, Amy took the other side with her soap and dresses and we packed the back table with gift baskets. We hung flower clips and dresses along the sides with our cute decoupaged clothes pins. We were worried about not having a huge inventory, but it turns out that a 6'x6' space is not a whole lot to fill up.

Up until this point, most of our shows have been outside, so we have been able to just pop up a canopy and use that. But the weather is starting to cool down and soon the snow will be flying. We needed to come up with a booth that we could use for indoor shows during the winter. Most of the crafters out there just make walls out of pegboard or use metal grids and throw a sheet over it. However, Amy and I are both complete overachievers and when given a challenge, we go above and beyond. This is what we constructed in my backyard with no help from any boys (including our husbands and the intensely unhelpful Home Depot guy):
We call her the "Princess Shack" and she is fabulous. She is constructed out of pvc pipe and covered with yards and yards of fabric, tulle, ribbon and flower garlands. My favorite feature is the pitched roof with the chandelier. This picture doesn't do it justice, but trust me. You could see the sparkly pink chandelier hanging like a beacon over the tops of all of those other sad little booths.

As we were putting her together on the morning of the show, people were coming over to see what in the world we were doing. The structure looks a bit rickety when it is just a frame of pvc pipe. The event organizer even brought over her tape measure to point out how she thought the sides were not stable enough to stand through the entire show. We assured her that by the time the roof was in place, it would be quite stable but we could see that she was worried that it would look like a rickety piece of crap and ruin her show. When it was finished, she came back to take another look. She said, "Wow! It IS beautiful!", not bothering to disguise the utter shock in her voice.

Another woman dragged her husband over and said, "I told you that we could have built a booth out of that stuff!" Her poor husband hung his head in shame since a couple of girls managed to do what he told his wife could not be done.

Overall, the show was not a raging success from a financial standpoint, but the maiden voyage of the Princess Shack was fabulous.


On another note, A Tisket A Tasket is off the ground and running. We have already sold a couple of our gift baskets and have plans to add more to our line-up for the holiday season. Our most recent addition is the spa basket. Amy makes this awesome handmade soap. It is beautiful soap and it smells yummy. We decided to put it in a gift basket with some crochet washcloths. This is one of the baskets.
You can check out more of the yummy spa baskets and our baby gift baskets at http://www.tiskettasket.etsy.com/. You can also check out Amy's other soaps at http://www.amyspolkadotsnposies.etsy.com/.

I have several other projects in the works that I am really excited about, so stay tuned for updates and I will try to post about them in a more timely manner!