The Mouse Market

Indie Craft Revolution Booth

After an exciting, craft-filled weekend in St. Louis, the minis and I are back! I’m still ridiculously exhausted, but I wanted to share my thoughts on my Indie Craft Revolution experience while they’re still fresh in my mind, so in no particular order, here goes…

St. Louis Artists' Guild (courtesy of www.stlouisartistsguild.org)

• The location was absolutely stunning. I had never been to the St. Louis Artists’ Guild, but I was in for quite a treat when we pulled through the gated drive up to the beautiful 1920s restored mansion. Wow. Huge fireplaces, stone floors, sweeping staircases, gorgeous chandeliers–the list goes on. What an amazing place to host of craft show!
• The artists were phenomenal. Before the show opened on Saturday morning I had a chance to peruse everyone’s booths, and I have never been to a show, either as a participant or a shopper, in which every booth had something (or in this case, many things) that I wanted. I was completely blown away by the diversity and quality of the crafts, and it was all I could do to leave without spending all of my money. I did, however, swap for a few upcoming birthday and graduation gifts, but otherwise, I behaved myself.

And now a few notes on what I will likely do a bit differently for my next show…

• My booth design will probably be a never-ending work in progress, but for now, I have a few concrete changes on my to-do list, the first of which can be summed up in one word: Velcro. I’d like to remake my table skirt and fit the edge of it with Velcro so that I can easily affix it to the table, and I’d also like to replace the signage on my skirt, which is currently attached with brads, with Velcro areas that will allow me to easily swap out laminated signs as needed.


Earring Display Boards

• The second booth change involves the ever-evolving earring display boards. The current design, which is cork boards fitted with wooden shelving ledges, worked much, much better than the previous designs. Customers were able to easily pick up pieces of interest, and I didn’t have to spend ages pinning everything to the cork. Next time, I’d like to again use Velcro to make attaching the boards to the table risers quick and easy, and make the shelves a bit deeper, just to keep things from getting knocked off, and I’ll extend the shelves to cover the entire width of the boards, rather than leaving room on one side for necklaces and bracelets. Which brings me to the next alteration…


Miscellaneous Display Area

• I need to devise a better display unit for my necklaces and bracelets. While I like the fact that everything is easy to see when it’s lying flat against the board, the pieces easily get too crowded and lost in the clutter. Since I now have about two feet of table that is not taken up by the risers/earring display, I think I’m going to build a board strictly for necklaces and bracelets. That would allow me to use some of the vertical space that I’ve been ignoring. My only challenge will be in figuring out where to put the board so that people may easily browse the pieces without knocking over anything that I might want to display on the table in front of the board, such as my rings and hair accessories. Hmm…


Charm Display Tree

• I have to look into getting a credit card merchant account. During my first two shows in Columbia, MO, I rarely had shoppers ask if I accepted credit cards. At the Indie Craft Revolution, I would estimate that one in every four people asked. I would say that 90% of them ended up paying with checks, so I didn’t lose a ton of sales, but I think it’s time to take the credit card leap and sign up for an account, particularly since my next show is a dollhouse miniatures event, and I’ll be carrying a much larger selection of pricier items. Another artist recommended ProPay, and if anyone else has a suggestion, please let me know!
• Last but not least, a note on booth placement. I was super excited to see that I had been assigned Booth #1, which was immediately inside the main entrance, and while it was definitely a great spot, I’m still on the fence as to whether or not it helped. At least a dozen shoppers told me that they loved my stuff and had specific people in mind for whom they wanted to buy something, but they had to make a round through the whole show before they purchased anything. I often didn’t see those people again, and since I’m also the kind of shopper who likes to take everything in before making a decision, I wonder if being the first booth hurt my sales, or if also being the last thing people saw (aka, last minute impulse purchases) made up the difference. Who knows?

Overall, the show was a huge success, and I was able to bring in as much as I did at a pre-holiday, three day sale in 2009, only this time in two days during a typically slow shopping month. My student loan lender is sure to be happy about that as well

Carnival Candy Apple Earrings

Whew. The show is nearly here, and I think I might be reasonably prepared. It’s a miracle. I ran a ton of last-minute errands yesterday, picking up a few more books of sales receipts (fingers crossed that I go through all of them!), candy for my booth’s goody bowl, and some random craft supplies. I still need to make two or three dishes, since we’re bringing most of our own food to save cash (and to avoid late night pizza binges), but overall, I’m feeling pretty good about everything I’ve been able to accomplish this week.

Cherry Chocolate Oreo Earrings

To top off my inventory, I completed ten pairs of candy apple earrings with a variety of toppings yesterday, as well as Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Cake Slice earrings/charm, Cherry Chocolate Oreo Cake Slice earrings/charm, Summer Strawberry earrings, Concord Grape earrings, and a few more pairs of Scarlet Nantes Carrot earrings, because I keep selling out of them. Hopefully, I’ve chosen a good selection of items that will be popular with the St. Louis crowd! If you’re in the area, be sure to stop by the Indie Craft Revolution and say “hello.” (Visit my shop/shows page for details and directions.)

Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Earrings

My Etsy shop will be closed starting Friday morning, and I’ll reopen it as soon as possible on Sunday evening, March 14. In the meantime, don’t forget to enter the Lolita Charm giveaway, which ends Monday, March 15, and use the special coupon code “LOLITA” to save 10% on Mouse Market purchases through March 31, 2010 (enter coupon code into order screen message box; discount amount will be refunded via PayPal). Have a great weekend

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!

Heirloom Veggie Accessories

After weeks of guiltily overlooking the heirloom garden section on my white board to-do list, I finally sat down and tackled some veggies this week. I spent an entire day making brightly colored peppers, carrots, and eggplants, before arranging everything for a nice, organic centerfold shot full of sexy vegetables (above). As if I weren’t already yearning for the spring thaw, I was then inspired to go over my proposed garden planting schedule yet again, in hopes that it might motivate the weather to cooperate so I can finally get my seeds in the ground. But so far, no dice.

Heirloom Garden Necklace

Last night, I had a bit of a scare entirely caused by, apparently, my inability to read a calendar. For some reason, I thought I had three nice, long weeks ahead of me to prepare for the Indie Craft Revolution, but sneaky, truncated February foiled those plans, and it turns out that I have only two–eek! With my new folding table ready for action, I now need to alter my table skirt to fit its longer length, and I have to prepare all of the St. Patrick’s Day accents I had planned for my display, along with the experimental jewelry shelves I’ll be trying out this time around, in favor of the awkward push pin method. And of course, that’s not counting the million and one pieces I still hope to complete. The countdown begins!

Tangerine Dream Earrings

After a morning yoga class, I made a quick stop at the craft store for supplies before heading home to finish a long overdue graphic design project. Thankfully, it’s nearly completed, and I should still have a good amount of time to make some miniatures this evening. I desperately need to replenish my cotton candy earring stock, since both of the original pairs sold out within days of being listed, and I also have a custom order for a pair of dangly Granny Smith apple earrings.

Juicy Tangelo Earrings

In the meantime, I’ll share pictures of yesterday’s citrus frenzy. I hope to expand my citrus collection before the Indie Craft Revolution using a new technique that I’ve been experimenting with, and which yields more realistic fruit, in my opinion. And last but not least, one of my Flickr friends turned me on to a super cute Japanese craft supply company, Yozo Craft, and I officially want everything.

Piled High BLT Earrings

If today’s post title is any indication, I have a lot of random things to share with you this morning. Now that my morning tutoring job is over, I’ll be able to get to work first thing in the morning, which definitely helps to ease some of the pressure I’ve been feeling to have pieces finished early enough in the afternoon to take advantage of natural lighting for my photos, yet still finish my graphic design and writing projects without having to work well into the evening.

Yesterday, I completed my first batch of BLT earrings, and I’m quite happy with the results. My goal is to have more savory foods, as well as vegetables and fruits, for my next show, since those always seem to sell well, and go a little lighter with the desserts. Speaking of, the promotional flyers for the show (Indie Craft Revolution) are available, and I’ve posted one online, so if you know anyone in the St. Louis area, feel free to spread the word and send them a link!

BLT Earrings (Detail)

The other night, I was craving crème anglaise something fierce, so we made a pile of yummy whole wheat waffles for dinner paired with the anglaise and a tamarind sauce. I had purchased a jar of tamarind paste a week or two ago in order to try my hand at making Pad Thai, and I was so delighted by its tangy fruit flavor that I was determined to find another use for it. I’m horrible with keeping tabs on my recipes when I’m cooking, preferring to add a “little bit of this” and “some of that,” but the basic idea is to take maybe a tablespoon or so of the tamarind paste, dilute with water, simmer, sweeten with honey to taste, and thicken with a corn starch slurry. The resulting sauce is the perfect contrast to the creamy vanilla anglaise, and the pairing made for some of the best waffles I’ve ever eaten.

Easter Bunny Charlotte

I know it’s a bit early for Easter, but I’m so tired of gray days and cold weather that I’ve started working on a few spring-themed desserts. The one pictured at left is my Easter Bunny Charlotte Cake featuring lightly browned ladyfingers encircling a strawberry sponge cake layered with vanilla bean icing and topped with sugar paste roses, green candy-coated chocolate pieces, and adorable marzipan bunnies. This afternoon I’ll begin working on my new collection of flower jewelry, which I’ll be showcasing at the Indie Craft Revolution show next month.

Spring Fever

I’ll admit that I’ve been feeling a little blah for the past few days, largely because my Etsy sales, which were doing quite nicely for the last four months, have tapered off in the past week. Granted, this isn’t exactly a booming season for shopping, and the economy certainly isn’t helping, but I realized that I’d gotten quite spoiled with regular sales. However, dwelling on the downside surely can’t help, so for now I’m going to focus on preparing for my next show and filling my shop with loads of springtime goodness!