I’ve been away from this blog so long, I forgot my user name and password.
I have a very strange sense of time. It expands and contracts around me in unusual ways. It has been over 6 weeks since the Florida Faerie Festival took place in Bonita Springs, Florida and this was the 4th one: FFF4. I spent about 6 weeks before the FFF4, making items to sell as a vendor. My items included:
- wands,
- staffs,
- pouches,
- belts,
- hats,
- Fairy Pets,
and all kinds of other things that Fairies would like. I spent every waking minute focused on making my items.
I took March 16th off and my Husband and a good friend of mine helped me haul all my wares and the “booth” down to Bonita and we all set up the canopy thing and the tables and unpacked the cars and put my wares in tubs under the tables. We all drove home.
Grackle and I got up really early on the morning of March 17 and drove back down to Bonita. It was kind of chilly at the Festival site and some of the other Vendors were just waking up: they had camped next to their booths.
Grackle helped me set up my Booth and we were ready to go at 10:00 AM. And the doors opened and a trickle of Mothers and Children arrived and continued trickling in all day. Many of the Children were little Fairies: they had wings and little wands and they were so adorable.
There were very few people who were my target audience: grown ups who dress up as faries. These are grown ups who put on wings and glitter. They would have liked and approved of and most imporantly, purchased my wares.
The Mommies came into my Booth with their young children and they’d stop curious hands from touching my wares. Many of the children were too short to see most of the items on my tables. I would say, “oh, they may touch these things, and some thing have to be touched to be understood,” but by that time the young ones had been diverted and no sales were made.
At midday, my Husband the Baltimore Oriole arrived with several fabulous hoagies (“subs”) and drinks. Grackle was so happy to see him because she was HUNGRY and so totally done with helping me and she wanted a ride home. Oriole complied and at about 1:30 they were gone and I had another 4 and a half hours ahead of me.
After lunch, some more people arrived and one lady came in and admired my wares. In the course of making staffs and wands, I had ended up with a lot of twigs that were too small for a wand, and too interesting to throw out. Mahogany, for example, has these curious features on twigs that look like little bird nests. I took a bunch of these twigs and dipped them into glue and glitter on each end and put them on my tables as decoration and called them, “WhimsyStix.” [I wanted to call them Pixie Stix, but that name is taken already…]
The lady picked up one of the WhimsyStix and peered at it carefully. She said she was returning to Canada this week and needed a little something for ner niece. She admired my very nice hand made wands. These are 13″ Mahogany sticks adorned with silk flowers, ribbons, beads, and glitter. She said she didn’t think a Wand would make it in her suitcase, and I knew we were both wondering what TSA would make of a Wand in her suitcase. I sold her the 8″ WhimsyStyx for $1.00, plus tax.
It was 2:00 PM and I had made my first sale.
About an hour later a young boy wandered into my Booth and looked about. His parents came in right after him. He said, “Could I make a Wand?” and I showed him the WhimsyStyx and he picked out one he liked. I rooted around in my stuff I’d brought with me and let him pick out some ribbon and beads. We put together a wand for him, there and then and I sold him that for $3.00, plus tax.
Those were my only sales of the day so it wasn’t a total loss. (The other vendors we also having slow days so it wasn’t just me. We figured it was because it was St Patricks Day.) As I was driving home that evening I decided I could regroup. I went into my work room and made about 20 WhimsyStyx: nice lengths of stout sticks with glitter hot-glued to both ends. And I made a poster: “Make a Wand Here,” and another poster: “How to make a wand in 3 easy steps.”
I packed up my little pile of WHimsyStyx, and more ribbon and beads and a parsons table and some glitter pens and drove back to the Faire.
That day, I sold at least eight opportunities to “Make Your Own Wand Here,” and allowed the kids to select the stick, the two ribbons, the beads and then I tied the ribbons to the sticks and threaded the beads. That took a lot of time and I could have used a helper but Grackle was home asleep.
The Creative Express 