Creative Life: Being Vendors at an Arts and Crafts Show, This Weekend!

in WORLD OF XPILARlast year

Sometimes I find myself taking a moment or two to be grateful for the fact that the assorted lockdowns and limitations of movement we have had over the past three years finally seem to have come to a close.

0828-Mountain.jpg

It would be an exaggeration to say that life has returned to "normal," but at least the constant state of outright fear among people seems to have abated, a bit.

As Mrs. Denmarkguy and I are both artists and creatives, we are doubly grateful for the fact that we can once again take our creative endeavors to local and regional arts and crafts fairs and set up our booth as vendors. Such activity was basically completely shut down from early 2020 till about mid- to late 2022.

And so, we are headed off to the first event of 2023 this weekend; a local Valentine's Day Weekend show... thankfully just a few miles down the road from where we live.

0816-Crow.jpg

Part of Our Living... Lost

We're particularly grateful because our creative project do contribute quite a bit to our annual income... and it was pretty much completely zeroed out for 2 1/2 years... through no fault of our own.

Vending at arts and crafts events is actually quite a "production."

In essence, we set up what amounts to a fully functional mini art gallery in about 2-3 hours, "run shop" for a couple of days, and then pack the whole thing down again and take it home.

If you've ever been to a street fair somewhere, that's what all those people there have done.

1179-Leaves.jpg

We're usually pretty exhausted by the time we get back home on Sunday evening... and let's be honest here, we're not getting any younger!

That said, I expect we'll continue taking our art to events for many years to come, because we really do depend on that extra income, in order to get by.

This weekend, we will be setting up Saturday morning, and then the event is open to the public from 12:00-5:00 on both Saturday and Sunday. The hours are a little shorter than most event we've been to, but that's probably not a bad thing... this weekend is also Super Bowl Weekend here in the USA, so a lot of people will be busy with the game.

Hopefully this event will appeal to the "Football widows!"

x393-YellowRose.JPG

So yeah... creative writing is just one of my creative endeavors.

Hopefully, it will be a decent show. Results from these kinds of things vary widely — and I mean widely — we've made as little as $120 in a weekend, and as much as almost $2,500.

Thanks for stopping by, and have a wonderful weekend, wherever you are!

Do leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — NOT A CROSSPOST!!!)
Created at 2023.02.10 23:30 PST
x524

Sort:  

Best of luck this weekend. I know the feeling as a recently full-time artist how much Covid hurt. I was planning on making the transition from my job of 20+ years in 2020 and, needless to say, that plan went right out the window. Was supposed to do my first big event that year and instead they stole our $500. It's been 2 months since I finally had my first show.

 last year 

Yikes! That truly rots that they stole your participation fee... so sorry to hear that!

Coin Marketplace

STEEM 0.19
TRX 0.14
JST 0.030
BTC 59715.05
ETH 3186.24
USDT 1.00
SBD 2.42