Ahhh Friday

Where does the time go? I swear I just moved to Minnesota the other day, but low and behold... I have been here for 4 months already! Time has flown but that doesn't lessen the fact that I am extremely tired and burnt out from the late nights and other stress. I really put a lot of time into my shop in the last couple months and it has really paid off. I am more determined to make this dream a reality and in the next month I will be taking a nice break from production to design and create wonderful items that will make you 'ooo and ahhh' in 2008!

Picture: Limited Edition Sketchbook.

No Coast Craft O Rama Update

No Coast has come and gone. Almost with the blink of an eye. I spent many a late night working feverishly for this show printing, cutting out, scoring, and folding, and clipping, and on and on! The show began Friday afternoon and into the night and then all day Saturday. Friday brought out quite a bit of traffic which was great. Saturday, was not so great. There was a wicked snow storm that started right as the show did and did not let up all day! Barely anyone was left during the last few hours! I am seriously mad at all the weathermen who told all the watchers not to leave their house!!

I came out rather short of my goal. But honestly, who expects to bring home $900 after their first craft show! Maybe if it wasn't a blizzard I would have. Maybe not. Now on to the next show!

Pictures above are of my display. I had a bit of trouble with the shelves at first but my fiance found a wonderful solution. And since I was too lazy to go and have a sign professionally done I made a collage of a design I made! Not too shabby :)

ps- That is my mom creepin around the corner in the second photo! What a great helper!!!

The Recycled Collection!

I just introduced the recycled collection to my etsy shop! I have been using old magazines and brochures to create envelopes and recycled papers for my sketchbooks! I am happy to be reusing materials that would have otherwise be thrown away. And all while doing this, I get to showcase wonderful Minnesota! The sketchbook features pictures I took around Minneapolis and many of my envelopes feature magazines from around MN!

Let me know what you all think!

The aftermath...

Well, since so many of you just see pictures of my nice clean studio, I thought now would be a perfect time to show you what it usually looks like... especially after a craft show!

Excelsior & Grand Art Show Update

Well, the show has come and gone.... and boy am I tired. I am so glad that I did this show before No Coast Craft-O-Rama. I think this prepared me to work my butt off for the next few weeks! I stayed up late every night this week to print out and cut and package my stationery products for the show. I knew that if I had leftovers I could just bring them to No Coast, so it wasn't that big of a deal. Although this show was free I had set a sales goal and luckily I did meet it plus some! Now since I have done my first show I have some tips/lessons I have learned for the next show.

1. Show up on time/early! (I was half an hour late for the show set up time and there was literally NO SPACE FOR ME TO SET UP! This is mostly the fault of those who came early took large amounts of space and left none for the people who came later, hopefully next year there will be equal space for everyone! I nicely asked a lady who had tons of space to move over a bit so I could set up my table. I think a few artists who came in after me ended up leaving because there was no place to go.)

2. Bring food and water. (I talked so much my mouth was dry! Bring lots of water!)

3. Bring a helper. (My fiance was wonderful enough to help me package all my stationery so I let him off the hook and he didn't have to sit with me. But luckily one of my friends decided to hang out and ended up being a great promoter for me!)

4. Price each piece. (Although I had 3 sheets of paper on the table specifying how much each thing was, people rarely looked at it and looked on the package for it instead. So now, I am going to get little stickers that allow me to write quantity and price on each thing. It may be tedious but it will save me the trouble of having to explain it each time someone comes to my booth!)

5. Bring chairs! (Since I was running late, I completely forgot to bring chairs!!! Wow would I have been tired if the spot I got didn't have a few club chairs against the wall!!!!)

6. Load up your car the night before! (Again, always running short on time, it would have helped if I figured out how to fit my gigantic easel in my car earlier...)

7. Use vertical displays. (I have two white box/shelves to use for my display to create some hierarchy between my products but I forgot it. I didn't mind my display in the pictures at all, I thought it looked fine, but I would have liked to get rid of some of the clutter with the extra boxes.

Hopefully a few of my mistakes will be your gain!

The 2008 Calendar is here!

YAY! Lots of hard work, many, may hours my calendar is here!

Now, since my last post I decided right away to not sit on my duff and sulk that sales had been slow. So I went and did some networking and what do you know... I AM ON DECOR8'S BLOG!!!!! I am in her amazing calendar feature! If you don't know much about Decor8, you should check it out. It is one of my favorite blogs to read every day and I have some links (to the right) of some other amazing bloggers I like to keep up on. Since she posted about my calendar my sales and traffic to my blog have been amazing. So lesson learned, it really takes some big promoting and networking to have some success. Word of mouth is fabulous!

Have a HAPPY NEW YEAR! :D

Another front page!

I got back from lunch today, and there were my poppy cards chillin on the front page again! Unfortunately out of my 2 front pages this week, I did not make any sales. I seem to be stuck at 105 sales. So after all the extra exposure and still nothing, I clearly need to start trying some new tactics. I have started listing/relisting more than once a day and I am designing like crazy coming up with new designs to fill my shop. I will also be promoting my designs harder than before and with a new consignment deal and a few art shows coming up, hopefully my slow streak will end!