Well, I survived the Chorley Contemporary Crafters Big Crafty Takeover on Sunday which was a great relief! We had an early start, getting up at 6.30, not a time of day with which I am particularly familiar, then a little light weightlifting as we loaded up the car in the slushy remains of the previous day’s snow. Thank goodness the weather wasn’t as bad as we had feared, there was no fresh snow and it didn’t seem very icy. Mum arrived and off we went. The location was very nice – not that we could see too much of it through the fog! We parked right outside the main doors and were unloaded very efficiently. My table was in the big room downstairs, opposite the cafe, and next to the side door which we had been warned would be open during the event. My table looked good when it was all set up, but I realised that I really needed some better display solutions for my cards as they weren’t shown to their best all grouped together in one box. There was a good range of items and it was certainly colourful and eye catching.
It was pretty quite up until nearly lunchtime, I suspect due to the not wonderful weather, but I was selling a few cards and chatting to lots of people who seemed interested but unfortunately, not interested in buying! It was pretty freezing by the open door and I swiftly lost the feeling in my icy feet! After lunch it did get much busier and I carried on selling a few cards, one zine and one small unmatted prints – no blocks and no mounted prints. By about 2.00 I’d had enough of that and reduced the blocks in price drastically and then they started to fly off the table – hurrah! The biggest sale was eight to one lady, and then six to a family and the husband didn’t have enough cash so we managed to do a PayPal transaction which was fun and eventually worked. My table was really busy for the last few hours with a lot of the other sellers coming to buy some blocks, it felt great to be getting rid of them! I sold 33 in the end, which made me very happy! I did enjoy myself very much, the organisers were very friendly and helpful as were the other stallholders and I really enjoyed chatting to ‘the public’, I handed out loads of cards so hopefully I’ll get some visitors to my website and Etsy shop over the next few days. I was surprised not to sell any prints, I think the prices are just right – they do well in my Etsy shop after all, so maybe people just didn’t like them or thought they were expensive, or were confused by the sizes of the mats and didn’t want to have to find frames for them – I don’t suppose I’ll ever find out. I’d certainly be interested in taking part in another show, perhaps at a bigger event in a more affluent area – the Chorlton or Didsbury Arts Festivals or similar?
