Well, as you are all aware I had my first outdoor craft fair. I'm pretty used to doing craft fairs indoors now, so it wasn't too fazed at setting up outside....
it all went slightly 'whopsie'!
We arrived on Saturday morning at the event to set up, just before 8am. The man showed us where our allocated space was, by spraying the grass in yellow paint! We had a lovely deep area of 30ft, and 9 ft frontage.
We unloaded the car, and started constructing the gazebo. It all went quite smoothly considering we were in quite a rush. We had 1 hour to get it all set up for opening time at 9am.
Up went the gazebo, the tables, all the jewellery on one table, and accessories on the other.
Well, the morning went on, and I nipped to the loo.... I came back... and noticed one of my packets of cord fluttering along the grass.
I picked it up and carried on walking along the grass to my stall, only to see my Mum, Dad, and my dads friend picking up the entire of the accessories table contents off from the grass! (table on the right with the purple covering), along with the stand at the back, and all of its contents sprawled everywhere!!
The wind, which had started picking up, had caught the gazebo panels and hit it all on the floor. I was pretty upset, but carried on picking up everything.
We decided to move the table to the back of the tent, and move the stand in front of the jewellery stall.
The day went on, things were flying off the tables all day! By the end of the day I had given up and secretly didn't want to go back again on Sunday.
Apart from the Saturday wind, the day really was okay. Not as busy as hoped, but Saturdays are usually slow at Rallys.
Sunday arrived. I was very sceptical. It was pretty windy at 8am, but we got the gazebo up, again, the tables and all the jewellery.
We arranged the tent slightly differently, and secured it as much as we could we cable ties, and camping chairs pinned into the ground and tied to the bottom of the gazebo panels.
Sunday was a lot better. Lots more customers, more sun, although the wind was still playing up, majority of the tent stayed still..... until the evening when we dismantled the gazebo. The top blew off. The front end went up in the air, while still being connected the other... came back down, and ripped two of the plastic components. Grrrr.
I've one more outside fair to do in September. I'm pretty worried about it now, but I think that will be the last one I do. I'll stick with inside doo's next time!!
Hope everyone else had a good weekend!
3 comments:
Oh Sprinks. What a shame. I did an outside one recently and as you say, the stands and all of my lovely little hand made labels saying what we offer etc kept flying off the table. So in the end we just eat cake and took it turns picking up the cards etc. Actually a lot of the customers caught some of the cards and brought them back.
Sorry I did not get to you with the icecream, the entry cost was £7 each and we could only stay 2 hours and decided not to bother. Sorry x
Thats okay Jean! Yeah, it gets more and more expensive every year it seems. you didnt miss much, just me! its very bare at the rally now, the trade stands were limp, and the amount of people there still wasnt brilliant.
If they called it a Beer Rally it would have been heaving ;)
Oh no!! I know the feeling. We lost 3 gazebos last year to the wind doing outdoor fairs, horrible! I've only done one this year, and luckily it wasn't a windy day! Glad you had some good sales though, hope they made up for the gazebo! x
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