I’m getting ready to get my Christmas and seasonal art up on this site in the next week or so, which got me to thinking about what it was like for me when I was a crafter and worked like a mad woman half the year so I could be home with my children the other half of the year!
If you craft for Christmas either for yourself or for a small crafting business, you only have 166 days to go until Christmas and only 50 until Labor Day which is sort of the kick off of the Craft Show season!!! Are you starting yet? Is it hard to get motivated? Are you really terrible at working until under the gun of an actual deadline? Does that thought make your blood pressure rise?!
I really struggled with this when I did the Craft show circuit. For years I exhibited with the Harvest Festival Shows in California. These are BIG shows that cost a lot of money to exhibit in, so it was very important to have enough stock to make the expenditure worth while. Also the shows were so exhausting that it was important that we not be pulling all-nighters once we got started.
However, being your typical artist and crafter I was really, really bad at not getting started until it was a crunch and the show season was looming. But towards the end of my time doing the shows I began to work in a different manner. It was so much more effective, restful and profitable that I could have just kicked myself that I didn’t discipline myself to do it earlier.
I took the time to go through my spread sheets of what had been sold the year before (if you know how to create a spread sheet this is very easy to do) If you don’t know how, just use some graph paper and put your basic craft products on it going one direction and the shows you do or did going across the other. Write the numbers in, total them up and you’ve got a pretty good idea of what you’re going to need.
For my product line, a framed calligraphy sentiment line, it was especially easy as every piece required a mat, most also required a frame and the prints were interchangeable so if one didn’t sell, the frame and mat was easily changed out to another. I didn’t order my frames, glass or backing boards until the last minute so that building inventory didn’t cost me much until the very end of the process.
For those of you that do food wrapping, for example, you could create your kits for very little and buy the food you assemble them with at the last minute or even week by week during your show season to manage your expenditures more effectively.
By calculating the total # of pieces that I sold during the show season it gave me a target number to create each month leading up to the show. A goal of 500 mats to do each month sounds like (and is) much easier to do than a binge session of 3,000 mats to cut in the month prior to the show!
I found that the excitement of seeing my display bins filling up, stimulated my creativity in coming up with new products for the next season while there was still time to create them. The WORST THING IN THE WORLD was thinking up a great new idea that would have sold gangbusters AFTER the show season got started because I never had enough time to do it and I kicked myself all season long!
If you have room to assemble your show display and leave it up, stocking your bins, shelves or other display areas as you go, it is a constant visual reminder that the season will be here before you know it! You can create fresh new signs, and make your booth beautiful as you’re creating your new product.
If any of you are crafters and have some ideas to share with your fellow crafters, please post them as comments here so we all can learn!
I am very committed to the crafting community. Crafting allowed me to be a Stay-at-home-mom with my two daughters and now that they are grown, I’m so glad that I did stay with them. It made a world of difference in their lives and my own. My digital art Terms of Use allow a single crafter, with no employees and no mass production machinery to use the art to create their own gifts to sell. You may make up to 200 crafts to sell in a year with a kit. If you desire to make more, we will usually grant extensions to that license for a small fee. A lot of artists won’t allow these terms — I do for one basic reason. It really matters to me that moms have a way to stay home with their children or grandchildren if they want to and I love that my art is often used to help accomplish this purpose.
So what are you doing hanging around here? Go get crafting! If you want to be held “accountable” to your goals, just post a comment and we’ll all try to encourage you along towards accomplishing them!
This set of two quick pages is our GRAND OPENING SPECIAL and will be free until next Saturday morning only (UPDATE: FREE LINK DISABLED now available as a kit in the store) The art kit it was designed with will be available next week (fingers crossed!)