Diary of a Trailblazer: My First Craft Fair!

So, I know I haven't written here in a long time, and I'm sorry to have neglected you guys.  But there's a reason I've been incommunicado: I got in as a vendor at the May 27th Kensington Art Market!

BUY MY STUFF PLZ!

I've never sold my stuff to people in person before - just online and in a consignment store - so I had a lot of preparing to do, both physically and mentally.  I've spent the past few weeks running on a heady cocktail of fear, excitement, and too much chocolate as I dashed around buying supplies and making stuff to sell and rehearsing imaginary conversations with customers.  I probably only slept for twenty minutes total in the last fourteen days, but I'm pleased to report that the Kensington Art Market went well, I had fun, and I have all kinds of tips and experiences to share with you!

First off, you may remember that I have some issues with shyness and anxiety.  On one hand, I know that I need to actively sell my stuff at an art fair, not just skulk behind my table avoiding eye contact; on the other hand, I often get befuddled and don't know what to say to people.  Small talk is...not a thing I do.  So I've been pretty nervous, wondering if I could rise to the challenge of talking to strangers all day.  That was actually my single biggest concern in this whole thing.

Guess what?  I did pretty well!  When I was angsting about all of this ahead of time, I'd forgotten a key point: I wouldn't be making small talk out of the blue, with no common ground - I'd be talking to people who were looking at my art.  The art is the common ground!  So basically my old customer service habits kicked in and I'd engage people by telling them random little facts about whatever they were looking at.  Everyone I talked to was super nice and seemed interested in what I had to say.  Some people even gushed about how much they loved my art, and Art Market organizer Rupert Young even said, unprovoked, that my table looked great and I must've done a bunch of these shows before, so by closing time I think I was floating a few inches off the ground. :)

And, can I just say, for a socially awkward dork I'm quite exquisitely attuned to people's body language; it was easy to tell when someone was open to conversation and when they really just wanted to browse around quietly.  I hate pushy salespeople and never ever want to be one, and I'm confident that I came across well in that regard, so yay.

Having said that, I do wonder whether I should've stepped up my game a bit.  There's got to be a middle-ground between "Hi!  Here is some stuff for you to look at" and "What do I have to do to get this painting in your house today?" and I'd like to find it.  If anyone out there is a retail champion who knows how to "ask for the sale" without being a total pushy bastard, please leave your tips in the comments.  Thanks!

In other news, it was a great learning experience to see which items people were drawn to the most.  In this particular venue my greeting cards were the best seller by far, so I'm gonna come up with more card designs for next time so my customers get more variety - and maybe try offering postcards or prints, too!

The Boy, btw, was invaluable in helping me get through the day smoothly.  I knew that merchandizing was one of the things he did in his last day-job, but I'd never seen him in action before - throughout the day he'd periodically come around to the customer-side of my table, peer thoughtfully at my display for a minute, and make some minor shift that caused choirs of angels to sing and the whole display of merchandise to just...make sense.  I mean, I'm a visual artist - I have a good sense of balance, colour, etc., and can arrange items in a fairly pleasing way.  But The Boy has mad skillz and it was amazing to watch him deploy them.  Turns out he also knows a bunch of little psychological tricks that are good for selling; he told me, for instance, that it I'd draw in more customers if I stood behind my table instead of using the provided chair.  Something about seeming more attentive and energetic, I think.  He also thought I should stand with my hands lightly clasped in front of me (instead of behind my back, like I'm doing in every damn photograph from that day) but the pose didn't feel natural to me - my hands kept sneaking behind my back again.  I'll have to work on that.

Overall, I'm pretty pleased with myself: considering this is my first time selling in a festival/trade show/whatever, I think I did pretty well on all fronts.  There is one thing I wish I'd done differently, though.  When I applied to be in this festival, I decided one of the things I'd sell is decorated wooden boxes (you know, for jewellery and knicknacks and whatnot).  I was thinking people might be more likely to spend money on something functional than on a purely decorative piece of art that just hangs on the wall.

Here are two of the finished products.  Totally cute, right?

The thing is, I'd never decorated a wooden box before.  There ended up being a bit of a learning curve, and I lost some valuable prep time redoing the first couple of boxes I made when I realized I should've used a different sealant.  So my biggest tip for my fellow craftspeople is this: when you're on a deadline, stick with what you know.  Even if you have a super-cool idea that you think will make a ton of money, put it on the back burner and use your time and energy to make stuff you can slam out without thinking about it.  Experiment with the new thing after your show, when you have time to perfect it.  Then you can unveil it at the next show.

More things I learned from the Kensington Art Market:

-The tape and scissors I brought with me were a godsend.  I think I'll prepare an emergency bag to take to all trade shows: it will contain tape, scissors, string, pens and some paper (and probably other things that will occur to me during future trade shows).  Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it, as they say!

-Packing needs to be a priority for me, especially since I don't have a car.  The Boy and my amazing friend Molly were kind enough to help me schlep my stuff on public transit, but I'd really like to trim things down until I'm totally self-sufficient, if I possibly can.  I'm gonna have to investigate racks and displays that fold flat and figure out how to Tetris all my products into the most compact and unbreakable package possible.

-I need to point out my stack of business cards and encourage people to take them!  I had a lot of people at my table who seemed really interested in what I do, but didn't buy anything that day...and walked away without my contact information.  *Facepalm*.

-Pop-up gazebos and tabletop patio umbrellas cost a chunk of money, but I should take the plunge anyway. I got a really damn painful sunburn yesterday (apparently SPF 30 sunblock is not adequate for my freakishly white complexion).  Actually, if I were sheltered from the sun at outdoor art shows, I could stop buying sunscreen and therefore a gazebo or umbrella would eventually pay for itself.

Not just a sunburn: an asymmetrical, patchy sunburn!  Wheeeeee!

-I got maybe one sale per hour for the first half of yesterday, and started to feel pretty discouraged, but then  things picked up a lot.  From now on I won't start speculating on whether an event was a success until it's actually over!

-Next time I do this (which is July 29th, btw - I enjoyed this instalment of the Kensington Art Market so much that I signed up for the next one!  Mark your calendars!) I'm gonna put a few bottles of water in the freezer the night before and bring them with me.  This seems like a better plan than bringing one bottle of tapwater with me and having to seek out a drinking fountain for refills, like I did this time!

-I'm also gonna use a tablecloth next time to hide all the stuff I stowed under my table!  I didn't realize how messy and distracting it was until I got home and looked through The Boy's photos.

I AM THE GREAT AND POWERFUL OZ!  PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MESS BENEATH THE TABLE!!!

So, okay, I know you're all dying to know whether I made a heap of money at this thing, or what.  Let me set up my answer with an anecdote:

One time, I was talking to a guy who told me - with obvious pride - that his wife had recently run in a marathon.  I asked how she did and he said "she finished!" which momentarily threw me off because I was expecting him to give me an actual number, like "she came in fourth!" or something.  Since I'm the least athletic person ever, I didn't realize that people don't generally run marathons with the goal of beating all the other participants, they run marathons to improve on their own personal best.

Starting a business is a marathon: it's an endurance sport, not a flashy fast-paced one, and the concept of "winning" is not cut-and-dried.  To be perfectly frank, the money I brought in from selling my stuff yesterday doesn't cover the amount I spent on my registration fee, let alone what I spent on materials, display stuff, and shopping bags.  But it's more money than I expected to bring in, the display stuff and shopping bags are a one-time purchase* that I can keep on using for the forseeable future, and my artsy friends who've done similar festivals tell me that if I keep getting out there and making a name for myself, I'll probably start selling more and more stuff at each event I attend.

In short: I didn't make a profit, and I likely won't get to the profit-making stage for a while, but I'm still in the marathon and still beating my previous bests.  I declare yesterday a WIN.


*It's a package of 500 bags.  I mostly sell smallish things that people can just stick in their purse.  It's gonna be a long time before the bags run out.

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By the way, I tend to update my Facebook page more regularly than this blog (I totally forgot to mention the Kensington Art Market over here until now, for instance, but I told my Facebook fans about it ahead of time), so you might want to head over there and "like" me if you haven't already!

Good Will Humping

The Boy and I recently had a Robin Williams movie night: we rented Good Will Hunting and One Hour Photo*.

During One Hour Photo, The Boy had to pee so I paused the DVD for him.  When he came back, he stood next to the tv and did a gyrating, lascivious naked dance.  Initially, I assumed he was trying to seduce me.  Then I realized that a) he was flapping his penis at the tv screen, not at me and b) he had deliberately positioned himself so his flapping penis was right in paused-Robin-Williams' eyeline.

I was laughing so hard I could barely manage to wheeze out the words "I...need to...blog this...!!!!"  The Boy obligingly stopped flapping long enough to take a photo of the tv screen so I could make this visual aide for y'all:

Note: not to scale.

Robin Williams' eyes are not as visible in this photo as they were in real life, but trust me, he is looking down and to the left.  The Boy lined things up perfectly.  It was epic. 

And let's take a closer look at Robin Williams' expression, shall we?

He seems deeply mistrustful of The Boy's swinging, twirling junk.  Or possibly the junk is making him really sad.  Maybe the slappity sounds of The Boy's frenzied undulations brought back poignant memories of a long-deceased family dog who used to flap its ears, and now Robin Williams is meditating on the fragility of life and the fact that eventually, everyone we love - canine or human - will die.

I mean, I feel nothin' but joy when The Boy does one of his naked dances.  But there's no accounting for taste.

*One Hour Photo is fascinating, by the way.  Williams gives an amazing performance unlike anything else I've ever seen him in, and the script and direction are really tight...and yet overall the movie comes off as a totally unremarkable thriller, which is a shame. 

Cat Lesson #3: Cats are Secretive Bastards.

I read somewhere that wild animals will usually eat their own vomit so predators don't find it and realize there's sick, weak prey in the area.  I've never seen a housepet do this, though, so I assumed that the barf-eating instinct must have faded away over centuries of domestication.  After all, when you live in a household with a bunch of doting humans, you don't wanna hide your illness from them, you wanna flaunt it so they can snuggle and spoil you*.

Well, it seems I was not entirely correct in my theory.  No, Birch doesn't eat his puke - but he tries to bury it!  I picked some socks up off the floor one day and found a pile of rapidly cooling Chunky Kibble Surprise underneath.  Since that day I've actually witnessed him throw up and then immediately try to scrape something over the mess (or just compulsively and repeatedly scrape the bare floor).

So, okay, I guess some domesticated animals still have the instinct to cover all traces of sickness.  I get that.  But the thing is?  Birch does the same thing with his food and water!  Sporadically, for no reason at all, he'll finish eating/drinking and then shove any available floor clutter into his bowls to cover up the leftovers.  I've had to pick grocery receipts out of his water on several occasions.  Once, he rolled a big ball of yarn in there.

Birch is our only pet; there are no other animals in the house.  Who, then, does he think he's hiding his food and water from?  Is he concealing it from me - the person who decided to put his dishes there in the first place - or from The Boy, who's in charge of keeping the dishes filled on a daily basis?  It's a mystery.

Do you have a cat or dog who does this stuff?  Do you have theories about why they do this stuff?  Tell me your stories in the comments!

*I may be projecting here.

Diary of a Trailblazer: Quitiversary!

Holy crap, I just realized it's April 6th - which means it's been over a year since I left my day job to focus on painting!

When I first quit, I had no idea my savings would last this long.  I mean, I thought there was a chance I'd still be a full-time artist in a year's time, but only if I were making a good chunk of money each month from said art.  But frankly, I'm not making too terribly much yet and what I do make goes right back into buying more supplies*.  The money I pay my monthly expenses with?  Pure nest egg, baby!

How have I made my money last this long, you ask?  I credit two things: happiness and hermit...ness.

Happiness, because I love my life so much that I don't often feel a need to "reward" myself with trinkets and goodies like I did when I was devoting like twelve hours a day to my office job**.  I mean, it was a very nice office job, don't get me wrong - great atmosphere, great people, opportunities for advancement, etc. - but I've always felt that full-time work takes up a cruelly ridiculous amount of time.  We shouldn't have to sacrifice our lives in order to maintain our livelihood!  And so I'd get out of work bummed that I had so little time to do the things that really matter to me, and I'd find solace in a $4 chocolate bar or a $400 pair of boots.  (Okay, the $400 boots only happened once.  But still!).

Hermit-ness, because being a homebody means I spend almost no money on restaurant meals, movie or nightclub admission, or (and this is the key difference between now vs. before) even laundry - I can easily stay in my pajamas for a week at a time vs. the old days when I wore a different office-appropriate outfit every day.  And since I'm not out in the world that much, I don't have a chance to see things in stores and want them.  I don't think I've bought a single new item of clothing in the past year except a bulk pack of socks, and that's only because my previous socks were getting threadbare.  Being a dorky loner has been great for my budget.

But I think I should start looking into having an income again***.  A part-time job, maybe, or temping...something that'll make my remaining money last longer while still leaving time for me to paint (and list paintings on Artfire, and hang paintings at the Arts Market, and make paintings into necklaces and magnets and prints and greeting cards to sell also, and blog about it all to you guys!).

TO THE RESUME UPDATEMOBILE!


*The best advice for entrepreneurs that I've ever heard: if you're gonna go into business for yourself, pick a field you love so much you'd do the work for free - because for the first long while, you will be.

**Only eight hours at the actual job, but then there's the commute time to and from work, doing laundry in order to look presentable at work, making lunch so I'll have something to eat at work, etc.

***Upon reflection, I probably shouldn't have shaved most of my head recently.  Hindsight.

Caturday: Birchy's Bathtime Adventures

Birch likes to keep me* company when I'm in the bathtub.

Or maybe "keep me company" isn't quite right...it seems more likely that he's baffled that anyone would choose to get wet on purpose, and the concept is so grotesque to him that he can't look away.  At any rate, when I'm in the bathtub he has a tendency to come up to the edge and stare at it with trepidation...

...And then lightly pat the water with his paw as if checking to make sure it's really there and not just a mirage induced by some bad kibble...

...And then recoil as if it bit him.

...Usually several times in a row.

When he gets tired of ascertaining whether the bathtub is in fact filled with water, he'll jump up on the edge and pace fretfully back and forth, pausing frequently to stare into my face and make sure I'm okay.

"Just say the word and I'll go get help!"

Sometimes, he'll actually calm down enough to lounge on the edge of the bathtub for a bit.  On at least two occasions, his tail has fallen in and he just sat there oblivious, swishing it back and forth through the water.  I don't know how he didn't notice his gaffe.  My bathwater is hot enough to boil cabbage in.  

The last time he accidentally dunked his tail, the realization did hit him eventually...all at once.  He jumped about a foot in the air and then tore out of the room like a maniac.  Naturally, he managed to slash his soaking wet tail across my face in the process.  Why wouldn't he?

For the next hour or so, his tail had a visible high tide line on it.  On one side of the line, a luxuriant floofy column of awesomeness; on the other side, a gross, scrawny little whip made of gristle and vertebrae.  He kept thrashing it around.  It's unclear whether he was trying to air-dry it or he was just plain pissed off.  I'm guessing both.

It never stops surprising me how tiny and sinewy cats really are, underneath their fur.  Maybe that's the real reason cats hate getting wet - it's not because it feels gross to them, it's because they know that without proper fur coverage they look like ugly little mutants.

Uh...no offense, Birchy.  Wuv you!


*Only me.  Never The Boy - at least not since The Boy tried to pull Birch in with him. Never let anyone tell you that animals have short memories.

*****

Do you live in Toronto?  Then you totally need to swing by my stall at the Arts Market!  I've just started selling necklaces and magnets with teeny-tiny prints of my paintings on them.  They are vibrant and beautiful and will add a glorious finishing touch to your sternum and/or refrigerator.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOTH!!!

I've had my booth at the Arts Market for about three weeks now, and it's been an adventure!

First off, remember that giant piece of masonite that would later become my booth's back wall?  At the last minute I decided (well, realized) that the idea of taking it on the subway to save money was totally whackadoo and that it'd be faster and easier just to splurge on a cab (special bonus: I could also fill the cab with more merchandise and tools than The Boy and I could possibly carry with us while manhandling that board everywhere).  But the cab companies I called said that their largest car would accommodate items up to 6' long...and the masonite is 8' long.

"But I was finally ready to stop being cheap!!!!"

Soooooo, The Boy and I ended up taking the masonite on the subway, after all.  And then we walked with it from Pape Station down to Queen Street (I'd guess the distance at two miles?  Maybe?) because we didn't figure they'd let us on the bus with it.  I'd tied rope "handles" through the holes all along the outside edge, which helped a lot, but what really saved our lives in the end (or at least our poor sore hands) was each of us looping a belt through one of the top "handles" and using it like a shoulder strap.  It was still pretty harrowing though because it was a really windy day; on several occasions the wind shoved the masonite around hard enough to almost knock us off our feet.  I was a little afraid The Boy would be carried off entirely, like Piglet in that Winnie the Pooh story about the blustery, blustery day.

But we did make it there in the end.

Arts Market administrator Daniel Cohen is awesome, by the way!  He's happy to help each artist get their area customized the way they want - in my case, he attached some beams to the ceiling girders for me so my wall would hang properly.  Look how pretty!

Since then he and his crew have helped me hang a second wall, too!  I'm grateful for the assistance because even if I didn't need to actually alter the building's ceiling - which I'd never presume to do without asking - I'm terrified of ladders and would never have been able to get up as high as he did without either a) falling or b) fainting (which is still technically a form of falling...).  So now I have two beautiful walls hung up and I didn't even have to risk my cranial integrity. :D

Further adventures: last Sunday I brought a folding chair to the Market and sat by my booth all day, just to see what it's like there when I'm not focused on getting things set up.  Well, okay, I didn't sit all day - I also took some time to walk around and look at everyone else's wares so I can (hopefully) talk intelligently about them if given the chance - I want to support my fellow artisans!

I got to polish up my slightly rusty retail skills* with some customers (mostly by chatting with them about other people's stuff, but still!) and I met some of the other booth-owners, who were all friendly and fun and generally awesome.  One of my immediate neighbours, Marjorie, even told me some cool stuff about needle-felting - an art I've always admired but never knew much about.  It's so cool to be surrounded by such creative talent!  I feel so inspired that I'm thinking of resuming my long-neglected Shoutout Sunday posts so I can write about a different cool market vendor every week!

So yeah.  I think I'm settling into the Arts Market nicely.  It's starting to feel like home. :)

I'll leave you with this picture of me setting up the inaugural wall of my booth.  This is just a bit of a tease - a hint, if you will, of what wonders lie in store.  It's the booth equivalent of cleavage.

Bow-chika-wow-WOW...

*Believe it or not, despite my whole "painful shyness" thing I used to be a retail superstar.  Probably because I'm genuinely interested in helping  people find the perfect item - I don't have it in me to do the skeevy high-pressure thing.  Customers may have bought less with me initially than if I'd pressured them, but they liked me more and tended to give me repeat business so I figure I did better in the long run.  Selling my own products feels more awkward and scary than selling someone else's ever did, but I'll adapt.  Eventually.

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Can't get out to Toronto to buy my work in person?  Fear not - you can always satisfy your cravings for funky, original paintings in my Artfire store!  In fact, I have some stuff on Artfire that's too, shall we say, family unfriendly for the Arts Market, like this "ad" for a sparkly pink lipstick or this pirate flag with a twist, so you get to see a side of me that my in-person customers don't. :)  

Caturday: My Cat the Supergenius

So, my booth at the Arts Market is coming along...although it's not nearly in the state I want it to be, yet.  It's surprisingly slow going when you have to schlep all your tools, supplies, merchandise, etc. on the subway an hour each way.  But in the process of getting things in order, I realized just how smart my cat Birch is.

See, one day I was sitting on the couch making signage for my booth, and I had paper and paint and foamcore board and wire and scissors and god knows what else spread all across the floor at my feet.  Birch - who had been asleep beside me - woke up and went to jump onto the floor, and I quickly stuck my hand out to stop him and said "Dude, don't do this right now, you'll mess up Mommy's supplies."

Birch's expression very clearly said "Well what the fuck am I supposed to do?" so I told him "You can go around, like this" and drew an imaginary line around my heap of art supplies with my finger.  Birch immediately hopped down and followed the exact path I'd mapped out for him to go to the kitchen.  After he'd had a drink of water, he came to the kitchen doorway and paused uncertainly, looking at me like "now what?" so I drew another imaginary line back to the couch and patted the cushion beside me and he followed my unspoken directions again.

At the time, this exchange felt totally natural to me: my cat had an issue, he mentioned it to me, and we negotiated a solution, simple as that.  But when I stopped and thought about it afterward, it occurred to me that these sorts of interspecies conversations are probably not standard.  And I'm no expert on feline psychology, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure expressing the sentiment "tell me how I'm supposed to get to the kitchen with all this crap strewn across the floor" with a single look and understanding the concept of "pointing" pretty much makes Birch the Stephen Hawking of cats, or at least the Carl Sagan.

I used to believe that Birchy isn't very bright.  I mostly based this belief on the fact that he'll do the same annoying thing fifty times in a row, even though I punish him; it seemed like he must be too dumb to comprehend the simple cause-and-effect of "putting my paw on Mommy's dinner plate makes her yell and push me."  Now it's dawning on me that he totally knows he's making me mad, but just doesn't give a shit.

So he's not just a genius, he's an evil genius.  I should probably start locking him out of the bedroom while I sleep.

Tell me about your genius animals!

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You can purchase adorable original paintings of kitties - both evil and non-evil - in my Artfire store.  Go see!