Red Hot Art Festival

I had my first "real" craft show here in Minneapolis last weekend. I thought the Red Hot Art show was great! I had only started making inventory to sell about two weeks before and I was rather stressed out during that time. I like being prepared for what I can, so I tried to make as many pieces of a design as I could. I had something like three charming candies bracelets, 15 ice-cream cones, 27 sprinkles cupcakes, 12 chocolate sandwich cookies... It was definitely tiring and I couldn't afford to take a break and do something fun. For a while it was just work, work, work! But I'm glad I worked hard for it, I think it paid off. 

So before the show I scouted around several places and bought some pretty frames, plates and dishes for real cheap. I got the tablecloth from Joann's and I just love the color and pattern on it, though not very noticeable, that's the point right? I got most of everything else online. Had 1000 business cards printed professionally for the first time and am so happy with the results! I gave out a whole ton of them during the show.

I absolutely love the mirrors I got! It's the heart-shaped mirror on the far right of the table. I spray painted it white from silver so it would match my table. I even got a lady asking to buy it during the show haha!

The fair ran for two days and thank goodness the weather was permitting. I'm surprised at how well I thought I did. I think this has earned itself another blog post for the kinds of things I did to attract people to my booth. And as a person selling her jewelry, how I interacted with my customers. All the preparatory reading I did about craft shows has helped me a lot. I guess it never hurts to do your studying!

Not only did I get a good number of sales during the show, I also opened up some grand opportunities for Tiny Hands. Don't forget also that if you don't make any sales, the number of business cards you gave out, all the people that you talked to and made aware about your brand, are potential future customers on your Etsy or website. While you can't really calculate how much you profit from that, you can be sure that there will be those future customers!

And here comes the Grammy award winning speech part... *sob sob sob* I want to thank my boyfriend, Peter for being so incredibly supportive, helpful and sweet. I know that I would never have been able to do so well without him. And I'm not just saying that, okay! :P 

So I also made a ton of new designs for the show, but will be putting them up soon on my website. I'll be sure to blog about it!