Festival planning

This is one of my favorites. available here. And it's on sale, too!

So one of the things I decided in a previous post was to focus on festivals and not put so much pressure on my etsy site.

To that end, I made a list of some of the festivals that occur in my area and began figuring out what they required and their deadlines. There are some, like the Dogwood Festival, whose deadlines are 6 months from when they occur. Luckily those same festivals don't require full payment unless you are chosen.

These are mostly juried shows, which means there's a chance my pieces won't be selected and I won't be participating. But I can't move forward if I do nothing.



That's why I'm compiling a huge list of festivals (and there really are tons in my area) and will be applying to most of them. Other things are that I want to get a specific set up going for my art. There are professional looking mesh stands that run about $600, which are way more than I want to spend. In addition, they aren't really the look I want. And since I have time, I can think on this, and then perhaps get some help in building some lightweight solution to hanging my art. Here's what I did at my first festival:

We hung the paintings with fishing wire so it looked like a gallery. But when it started pouring, we cut everything down. So this wasn't the last set up. 

I like what I did here. Some things I want to change are to maybe not have 3 tables (although that ended up saving us). 10x10 isn't very big, and I'd like it to be airy in the tent. I'd like a rug. A fan for the hot days. I want to create an atmosphere within my tent that makes it special and where people want to stay. I brought vanilla-scented candles and music, but I ended up not using them because of the rain. I probably would hang the paintings a little lower, or have two rows. I like how the paintings are spread out so that a person can look at each one. I wanted Ryan and I to be outside of the tent, but then I felt like we were keeping people from coming in. It would be nice to be un-obtrusive, to let people wander through, without feeling like I'm a hawk or whatever.

This is what the booth ended up looking like. All the paintings crammed on the tables.

So this is what we ended up with. Everything set up on the tables (we didn't have time to re-hang anything). And in spite of the horrible set-up, we still made sales and people really gave us positive feedback. And I had fun.