My First Craft Fair

In the months after Glassified’s first Christmas, when sales were exceptionally slow (thanks in part to a cost-of-living crisis, as well as it being a slow time of year), I realised I was going to have to try doing craft fairs to sell my work. I didn’t exactly relish the idea - I’m not much of a people person, and I’d much rather quietly sell my work online - not to mention the fact that they’re always at weekends and I didn’t quit my standard office job to start working weekends instead! But I came to terms with the idea and started to make plans (I am, after all, a planner at heart).

I visited a few local craft fairs before I found one that I really liked: it was busy (good footfall), a nice atmosphere, a wide selection of stalls of different types and I felt I’d fit in. It happens every month during the summer, was well advertised in the local area and seemed like a good choice if I decided in the future that I wanted to do craft fairs more regularly. Oh, and it’s in a beautiful old house that is also used as a wedding venue!

I didn’t want to spend loads of money setting myself up to do craft fairs as I didn’t know if I would be doing many/any more (as I said, I didn’t relish the idea!) - but at the same time, I did want my stall to look professional and there were certain “must-haves” like a payment card reader that are just inescapably necessary. So, in typical Nicola style, I wrote myself a list of things to do / buy / make / organise. Quite a long list. Then I set up a trial stall in the spare bedroom, to check that I’d got everything I needed - and added a few more things to the list. It was 38 items long in the end!

Apart from all the admin side of things (card payment machine, cash float, order forms for commissions, paper bags, business cards, etc.), I put a lot of thought into displaying my glass. I made a plain cream table cloth from a spare flat bedsheet to fit over my existing craft table, leaving the back open so that I could keep the paper bags and things underneath and access them when I needed to.

Then I bought a white pegboard which clamps onto the back of the table, to display larger pieces of hanging artwork, and a simple plate rack for ‘spares’ which didn’t have space to hang. The plate rack inspired me to make a smaller version to display some of my coasters - particularly the black and white ones, which don’t stack nicely because of their raised design in one corner.

The sun catchers proved more of a conundrum - I wanted something like a mug tree, but bigger (because I had far more than six different breeds of dog to display) - so I ended up buying a broom handle and a length of dowel and fashioning a “dog tree” which was over a metre tall! It clamped onto the peg board, and all of the dogs faced forwards (ish) - it worked really well in the end.

The final display stand was an old plate stand I borrowed for the chess board - then, with trinket dishes and other coasters taking up the remaining horizontal space, it was ready to go.

On the day, I was positioned in a room with about eight other vendors. (There were more like 60 stalls in total, spread among other rooms and marquees in the extensive grounds.) It was beautifully sunny and they’d been advertising that visitors could bring a picnic and make a day of it. The morning began with a flurry of activity, and lots of people made positive comments about my work throughout the day. By the end, I think every single piece had received a compliment from at least one person, and I reckon I made a similar value of sales to the other stalls in the room.

So would I do it again? Well, I’d still prefer to sell online, but I will do more craft fairs if I have to. It wasn’t that bad.