The Mouse Market

Custom Mix & Match Earrings

Throughout the Gateway Miniatures Fair, I spent a great deal of time thinking about ways to improve either my display, my inventory set up method, my pricing, you name it, and today I’ll share a few of those ideas. And, of course, if you have your own brilliant craft fair tips, comment away!

Starting with the pre-show preparations, here are some things that I would like to do differently. I saw a number of (clearly veteran) craft vendors who had rolling suitcases and other back-saving components, and all of their pieces fit neatly inside. What I would like to do for my next miniatures show is buy a set of stackable drawers (like this, perhaps) that will fit inside my rolling suitcase. Each drawer will be labeled with the name of a different area of my display so I don’t have to spend half of my set up time hunting for things, and as I’m creating the pieces, I’ll carefully tuck each of the finished items into the appropriate drawers. In addition, I’ll start my pricing list right off the bat. I’ll create a spreadsheet in Excel, which I’ll gradually add to as pieces are completed. With this method, not only will I avoid having to pack everything up at the end (a tedious, tedious job), but I’ll also do away with an entire day of pricing! Now why didn’t I think of this before…?

Ketchup w/ Digitally Drawn Label

In terms of the actual show, the drawers, once emptied of my inventory, will be a great place to keep all of my behind-the-scenes junk in order, such as receipt books, extra bags, etc., and I would also like to buy one of those heavy duty artist portfolios with handles to store all of my larger signs, paper table and riser covers, and other flat pieces that can’t be bent. Last but not least, one of the artists sitting behind me at this recent show had a really nifty pouch system for storing pens, bags, and other odds and ends. You can see it in this photo–look for the fabric pouches strung onto the edge of the table behind me.

Custom Soy Sauce & Noodle Earrings

A few random thoughts on the display: The price tag method that I used for this show (you can see it in this photo) worked very well, and a number of people commented on the ease at which they could determine prices without having to pick individual pieces up. I’ll continue to refine that system, utilizing more of the vertical spaces to hang signs, so the table top itself is less cluttered, but overall it worked beautifully. A number of vendors had display components from gershelbros.com, and I’ll be hunting through their online catalog in search of good jewelry display units (particularly for the dreaded necklaces and bracelets!), as well as another stair-step style piece that I can set next to my current wooden table risers, just to maximize the display area.

On an unrelated note, I finished a custom order this morning, which included a little bottle of soy sauce and a teeny ketchup bottle, and I was initially planning on shrinking down a regular label, only to discover that the resulting image looked more like a spot of bird poop on the paper. Not really what I was going for. I ended up drawing my own labels in Adobe Illustrator, and it was so much fun that I now want to come out with an entire line of miniature packaged goods with Mouse Market branding.

Tentative Booth Display

This weekend, a great deal of my time was spent on readying my booth display, and I successfully finished everything on my to-do list, including painting and attaching the little wooden strips I’ll be using as mini shelves for my earrings, sewing the table skirt, cutting poster board to cover the unsightly underbelly of my display, and other miscellaneous tasks. The picture above shows the booth without the poster board side covers attached to the table risers, and, obviously, with none of my pieces displayed, but you can still get an idea of where I’m going with this.

Mermaid Lagoon Doughnut Earrings

My tentative plan is to fill the white cork board area with earrings (propped up on the wooden shelves) and necklaces and bracelets (pinned to the cork board and allowed to hang). The very top shelf of the table risers will showcase the small selection of dollhouse miniatures I’ll be bringing to the show, and the green area to the right of the table risers will house the mailing list/business card station, adjustable rings, which will be propped up in little ramekin dishes filled with white or green sand, magnets, and maybe some hair accessories. I still haven’t decided what I’ll be hanging in the little white tree, but I’m sure I’ll find some odds and end pieces to display there.

Orange Sherbet Doughnut Earrings

I spent a good amount of time at the craft store trying to decide on an appropriate glue for affixing wood to painted cork out of the eighty billion or so options, including special glue for sticking crap onto rubber flip flops. Really? We need a special glue for that? I finally opted for Elmers’ Super Duper OMG! Glue or something like that, mainly because it had a picture of the Elmer’s cow, which normally looks rather sedated (or perhaps high on glue fumes), only it had been transformed into a blue, steroidal monster with rippling muscles that was snorting fire out of its flaring nostrils, all of which did wonders for inspiring my confidence in its supernatural gluing abilities.

Mini Food Preparation

It’s been quite the busy day so far, and with a commitment to complete two hours of web design each morning this week for one of my clients, I’ve been getting up earlier to ensure that I have enough time to photograph my pieces before the good, natural lighting fades. Today, I completed a variety of colorful lollipop earrings, about eight or so pairs of doughnut earrings, a handful of ice cream cone earrings (my first!), French fry earrings, and a whopping fifteen pairs of cotton candy earrings in anticipation of the Indie Craft Revolution. (I haven’t finished attaching the various pieces to the jewelry findings yet, so I’ve shown pictures of the preparation stage.)

Doughnuts Awaiting Posts

Speaking of Indie Craft, I just received my booth assignment today, and my eager beaver enthusiasm paid off–I sent in my contract ASAP and I’ve been given Booth #1, which appears to be one of only a small handful of booths in the immediate entrance area. I’m really excited, because I spent my very first craft show tucked in a somewhat remote pocket of the theater, and many shoppers weren’t even aware that there were frustrated artists hiding back there!

While I work, I’ve been mulling over potential booth display ideas for my first all-miniatures show in April, and it occurred to me that I’ll have to do massive amounts of preparation for that show, more so than any of the shows I’ve participated in thus far, simply because my inventory of jewelry is so much bigger than my 1/12 dollhouse pieces inventory. To give you an idea of the necessary scope of the preparation, for a jewelry show I typically bring about 200 pieces, and I generally already have about 100-150 in my inventory at any given time. In contrast, I only have about 15 or 20 dollhouse miniatures pieces at the moment, and the size of my booth at the miniatures show will be twice that of my jewelry show booths–yikes!

Sushi Bar Display

I’ve been spending more time making dollhouse miniatures lately, as opposed to jewelry, and I finished a collection of tiny sushi trays yesterday. The tray itself is made from cherry wood that my dad painstakingly cut into teeny tiny pieces, and all of the sushi pieces are handmade from polymer clay.

Spring Tea Party

In a completely different vein, I’ve also been busy making brightly colored doughnuts, and I’m experimenting with displaying them on little wooden trays, which, if you remember from an earlier post, I’ve been having far too much fun making.