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Adventure at Jacob Javits     28 November, 2007, 12:38 am In addition to arts & crafts festivals and flower shows, we also exhibit at selected professional meetings for librarians and teachers. One of our favorites is the National Council of Teachers of English, or NCTE, headquartered in Illinois. Their November convention rotates annually to different locations across the United States. Over the past 14 years we have exhibited with NCTE at various convention centers in San Diego, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, and Atlanta – to name a few. It was a mix of excitement and trepidation when I learned that the 2007 convention would be in the Big Apple, at the storied Jacob Javits Convention Center. This would be an adventure. Anyone who knows convention centers has heard of Javits, the massive I. M. Pei-designed structure that stretches for eight Manhattan blocks along the Hudson River at one end of the Lincoln Tunnel. It’s said that this place was once so tough that you had slip someone $50 to even get to the loading dock. Those days are thankfully gone, but the workers still can make it plenty rough on a Ford van full of Literary Calligraphy from Bedford County, Virginia. I timed my arrival at Javits for about 11 a.m., ... ( Read More | 8 Comments )

The Rise of Craft Shows     20 September, 2007, 10:58 am The 70s saw the expansion of the arts & craft business and with it, a lot of new show opportunities for established and emerging artisans. Established shows were expanded (and copied) while totally new venues, including malls and newly-minted craft promoters, rushed in to make arts & crafts more available geographically and culturally. Crafts were part of the back-to-nature movement that was so important in the 1970s. That artists and promoters could make money in it was so much the better and word spread quickly. There were long-established shows like Greenwich Village or guild shows including New Hampshire and the Southern Highlands (discussed in an earlier blog) that artists plugged into. Alice and Chuck Hollander were at Greenwich Village in the mid-70s, selling macramé wall hangings and necklaces. She was a kindergarten teacher in Long Island and the setting must have seemed very exotic for her. This show is still going strong today. Add to these established shows, a list of college-sponsored (however loosely connected) venues and the list expanded. Jeff Nelson, the artist behind Hudson River Inlays of New York, did his first show as a student in San ... ( Read More | 21 Comments )

Setting Up in Ripley     25 July, 2007, 10:10 am Susan and I arrived at the Cedar Lakes Conference Center for the Mountain State Arts & Craft Show near Ripley, WV at about noon on July 4. This was our first foray up the West Virginia Turnpike (I-77) pulling our travel trailer. The mountains near Beckley were very steep and I was nervous that the van would make it. We still haven’t weighed the van and trailer, although we have done the calculations on van pulling capacity. So we used trial and error and math on our mountain-climbing adventure. Actually it all went well, and the trailer only added about an hour to our driving time. The show is arranged around Cedar Lake and we were near the end of one of the large tents. We are able to drive right to the 8’ x16’ booth, which is a big deal for exhibitors. The festival organizers provide pegboard backing, one of the last festivals to do so. We put down plastic on the ground, and covered it with our grey carpets. We only began using carpet outdoors last year after being told that a grass floor makes you look like a flea market. It does look nicer and cuts down on the moisture. It adds another step to set-up, and more to carry in the van. Once the floor is ( Read More | No Comments Yet )

Susan & Ron buy an RV     4 June, 2007, 01:10 pm I write this blog at the Woodstock-New Paltz Arts & Craft Fair at the table of our new (used) travel trailer that we have owned for the past three weeks. Susan and I have been exhibiting at art shows for the past 20+ years while staying in motels and hotels. What caused this sudden switch? First were the rapid increases in hotel rates in the past few years. We particularly noticed this last January in Florida, where we ended up at some cheesy hotels, costing more than $100 per night. Our hotel options are also limited by the need for the hotel to be “pet friendly” because we travel with two small dogs. Another consideration was that there are many shows where having a nearby RV is a luxury. And besides all that as Susan says, change is good. We settled on a 21’ travel trailer so that we can still carry our display in our van and be able to maneuver around show sites. We started shopping for the trailer, first on the Internet, and then on our way home from the Sugarloaf show in Chantilly in early May. We stopped at several dealers before we found a great deal at a lot in our county. The trailer was barely used and was ½ the price of a new one. We bought it ... ( Read More | 5 Comments )

The Philadelphia Flower Show     16 March, 2007, 10:34 am The nine-day Philadelphia Flower Show is our most grueling and highest-grossing show of the year. The scale is enormous for us: double our regular booth size, day-long set-up time, and about 25,000 attendees per day! With so many sophisticated customers, the show is coveted by arts & craft show exhibitors so that the waiting list is said to number 700 or more. We began contact with the promoters, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, in late 1992 and our first show was 1995. The show itself is in its 179th year in 2007 and if you’ve never been there, nothing can quite compare with the largest indoor flower show in the world! We began our physical preparations in January, after I developed the Pick Sheet for the show. We keep track of which items sold in 2006 and try to predict the same for this year. As an economist, I am always working out ratios of this item vs. that item to figure out how to pack the show. For example, we have about 10 different note card boxes and we sell over 600 boxes at the show. We don’t sell these boxes in even quantities so I try to take exactly the proportions that we need. We sell a lot of “Irish Blessings” cards because the ... ( Read More | 27 Comments )

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