Weather Nightmare At Street Fair

Well, here we are at another street festival - this time we were at Sunset Beach, California.  I had picked this particular festival because of its proximity to the beach.  Sea glass, beach glass jewelry - think beach and you get the reasoning behind my decision.  If you look to the right of our sign in the picture above you will see a silver car in the distance and beyond that is a sandy path to the beach.  Here is a slightly better picture.

As we set up our booth, I'm very excited.  I can smell the ocean air.  And I plan to walk over after we're ready to check out the beach,.  Here are a few of shots of the tables set up with sea glass jewelry.

Sea Glass Nuggets Hanging on Chains

Shirley's Crochet Necklaces with Sea Glass

View of  side table

View of Booth Closeup from Front

Another view

Another view with Steve in background

As you can see, a lot of our jewelry is mounted on cards and hangs on boards.  Finding a great way to display our jewelry is difficult and I'll go into that in a later posting.  Anyway, when the weather is great and there is no wind our displays work well.  But at Sunset Beach, we learned what can happen when the wind starts to howl.  In the afternoon, of the first day, a light breeze came up.  As our booth was situated backing toward the beach access path, we didn't have any buildings to block the wind as it came in off the sea, this was a real problem.  

The afternoon progressed and as it did, the slight breeze turned into a wind, a raging, pull your hair out,  wind.  All the cards on the boards went flying.  The tablecloths ruffled and blew back over the tables.  And finally, our whole tent began to lift off the ground.  As the tent readied itself to fly away like a kite, we scrambled to save it.  We didn't have strong stakes to hold down the tent, we didn't have sides or a back for the tent, so we had to lower the back legs trapping us inside.  The vendor to our right, helped us tie down the back legs to his generator and we scrunched down inside to weather the wind.  Needless to say, our sales fell off as no one wanted to stand in front of  a booth that had the wind slapping their face.  At 4:30, we started boxing and bagging our jewelry so when the fair ended at 5 we could make a hasty retreat.  

As we drove home, we realized that we needed to be prepared for the wind the next day.  We went to Home Depot and bought a tarp for the back end and strong steel stakes for staking down the legs of  the tent.  The next day we were prepared for the wind. 

Shot of Booth Enclosed with Tarp

We only enclosed the back of booth

The tarp wasn't especially attractive, but it did the trick of keeping out the wind.  (Right now we are looking for a more attractive covering)  What the whole experience taught was to be PREPARED for all kinds of weather. Remember,  if the street fair is near or at the beach, you can count on there being some breeze or wind. 

You can find us at our new website http://sistersjewelrydesigns.com/  where we are always posting new designs in sea glass jewelry - necklaces, pendants, earrrings and more.  

New Ice Blue Sea Glass Pendant with Mermaid Charm and Pearl

Coming soon - more adventures selling Sea glass jewelry at street fairs and art fairs.  

Second Fort Bragg Sea Glass Festival

On May 27, 2011, we drove up to Fort Bragg, California for our second sea glass festival at Captain Cass's Sea Glass Museum - http://glassbeachjewelry.com/ It is a long drive from Palm Springs as Fort Bragg is several hours past San Francisco. We finally got to our motel and unloaded, then hit the beach. The coastline in Fort Bragg is strewn with cliffs and rocks. There is one sandy beach near where we go, but the best glass beaches are the ones you climb down the rocks to the beach below. One of the very best glass beaches is accessible by climbing, but it is off limits and posted with no trespassing signs. I really wanted to go there, but with my luck I would have been ticketed so we kept to the other sites. We picked up glass for about an hour then headed back to the motel. It'd been a long day and we were starved. The first night we ate at a wonderful restaurant called Chapter & Moon. It is a small place with a tiny staff and you have a view of the harbor. The food is to die for - homemade breads, grilled salmon, fresh seafood and huge garden fresh salads - located at 32150 N. Harbor Dr. (S. Main St.)Fort Bragg, CA 95437.

At the restaurant, we started talking to a couple next to our table, telling them about the next day's sea glass festival. And we asked the restaurant owner if they'd heard of the festival. No one had heard or seen anything about the festival which wasn't a good sign. We'd asked earlier at the motel if they knew about the festival and they hadn't heard of it either. Yikes, no advertising. We knew the town was full of weekenders - all the hotels and motels were full, but would anyone come? We went off to bed hoping the weather would be nice in the morning and the festival would draw a crowd.

The next day, we arrived at the museum grounds and Captain Cass told us we'd be one of six vendors. He also told us he was putting up a sign which could be seen from the highway. Hmmm. Was that it for the advertising? Well, we didn't have time to worry as we had to set up our tent and put out our displays. As you can see from the picture, the day started out nice - blue skies and sun. More about weather in a bit. Here are some pictures of the tents of the other vendors -




This is a shot of Tammy Sue Davis. You can find her on the web at tammy@mendocoasttreasures.com Tammy lives in Fort Bragg and she finds the most wonderful glass. She is an artisan who creates sea glass jewelry and accessories. I love her dog collars with sea glass.


Next to Tammy's tent was a vendor named Victoria Roberts, who does custom designs, repairs and instruction. She makes the most beautiful crocheted bracelets with wire and delicate sea glass earrings. You can find her on the web at http://vroberts1017.etsy.com/ You can just see Victoria on the stool in the blue sweatshirt. The husbands were standing around chatting about the weather or whatever.

The end booth belonged to Don the Beachcomber and Surfer Joan. Both fun people and great artisans. They live in Santa Cruz and you can find their jewelry in shops there and at the famous Santa Cruz sea glass festival. Don does a lot of bevel work with sea glass and silver. Joan makes the loveliest sea glass rings in silver. On our last morning in Fort Bragg, Joan and I sat on the beach talking and picking up sea glass - it was fun.

I don't know what happened, but I didn't get a picture of Wendy Craig, another vendor who came all the way from New Jersey for the show. She had made incredible necklaces with marbles she'd found at the beach back east. Really delightful work. You can see her work at http://www.2ndtimeglass.com/ - really worth a look.

I also didn't get a picture of the couple next to us - Pete and Kim of Sea Glass Essentials. We'd met them at another sea glass festival and they are the nicest people as well as being great artisans. Take a look at their work at info@seaglassessentials.com

We all got set up and a few customers started arriving as did the rain. Luckily, we all had tents and could keep semi dry. And we certainly appreciated the customers who came and braved the rain. We made a few sales, but by noon, everyone was packing up and leaving. Wendy from New Jersey decided to stick it out and so did Capt. Cass, but he was inside a nice warm building. My feet were wet and I was getting cold, so we packed up our jewelry and headed to the motel. We had just finished lunch when I saw that the sun had come back out. So Steve and I decided we should go back to our tent and set up again - which we did and stayed open until 5 pm. I don't think we made another sale, but we felt good about trying - which meant being there.

A shot of Steve looking at our inventory. (I think this was taken in the morning, before the rain.)

That night we went to Silvers at the Wharf. A large commercial restaurant down by the harbor. Good food with a full bar which is what you need after a day of rain - stops and starts.

Sunday started off with overcast skies. Gray clouds and a slight wind. I prayed it wouldn't rain. I should have prayed the wind didn't pick up which it did in the afternoon. It got so windy by late afternoon that Tammy's tent was blowing over as was Wendy's. Our earrings on cards were flying off the displays. Again, the others left, but we stuck it out with Wendy from New Jersey. Finally, the wind got so bad and it was late, we packed up. Captain Cass said we could come and sell again on Monday which was the holiday, but we were done. We went down to the beach again and braved the wind, but I was all bundled up and ready for a typhoon. Dinner was at Chapter & Moon again as we both love the food there. Monday morning, hit the beach again where I ran into Joan and we chatted as we picked up sea glass. She was looking for a marble for me as I've never found one. She didn't find one and to this day, I still haven't found a marble at the beach. Here are a few shots of some of the sea glass and pottery pieces I did find -

As you can see brown sea glass is very common and plentiful as is white.

Driving back to Palm Springs seemed like a long haul to do in one day, like our trip up to Fort Bragg, so we stopped way down the coast at Shell Beach which is next to Pismo beach and only 2 hours from Los Angeles. And of course, once we found a motel, we had to run right down to the beach. Here are a couple of shots of Shell Beach, another beach you have to hike down too the sand.There were no shells or sea glass on Shell Beach. Maybe it was the wrong time of year? We had a lot of fun on our sea glass festival weekend - ate some good food, made new friends and sold some of our sea glass jewelry. Here is a shot of one of our new designs to look at until I get back to blogging about our next adventure. (Sea glass from Fort Bragg - sterling wire and sterling mermaid charm)

Find us at http://sistersjewelrydesign.etsy.com/

Fort Bragg Sea Glass Festival - Part Two

In the last post, we left off as we were walking the path to the beach in Fort Bragg. The path forked and not knowing which path led to the famous Glass Beach we decided to go right. This path ended in a patch of pink blooming ice plant and a glorious view of the coastline. You will note the rocky landscape in the above picture. I was surprised as most of the beaches I'd been to were easily accessible.
There was nothing to do but hike on down to the beach.

Here I am looking a bit unsure of the climb. But it turned out to be a gentle hike down through sand and rocks to the beach.

I don't know what I'm thinking here, except that my husband can stop taking my picture so I can look for sea glass. It was a negative tide so I started off toward the water. Almost immediately, I found sea glass. I was in heaven. It seemed that everywhere I looked there was sea glass. Most of the glass was tiny, but I didn't care. I lost track of time, as I looked for pieces of glass. There was a lot of white, green and brown glass which is natural as they are the most common colors. What was unusual about Fort Bragg sea glass as compared to Mazatlan sea glass is that Bragg's glass is much thicker and I'd guess older. The texture and frosting was delightful. As I moved closer to the water I found larger deposits of sea glass. As you can see in the next picture the glass was as thick as gravel on a road. Later, when I talked to Captain Cass, who owns the Sea Glass Museum, I'd learn that I wasn't even on Glass Beach - I was north of Glass Beach because I'd gone right instead of straight on the path. Oh, well, at that moment, I didn't know any better and I was happy as a clam to do my beachcombing. Steve and I stayed on the beach for a couple of hours then we had to return to the motel where my sister Julia and her husband Gary were waiting for us. Julia and Gary had come to Fort Bragg to spend time with us all and Friday was the only day we could do things together. I wanted to stay on the beach all day, but hey, sometimes you have to be a team player, right? My other sister, Shirley, partner in Sisters Jewelry Design, had arrived the night before with her husband Pat and become suddenly ill with the stomach flu. She loves beachcombing as much as I and for her not to get out of bed, I knew she was really sick. I was hoping it would be a one day illness as this was a free day, but tomorrow we'd be selling our jewelry at the Sea Glass Festival. I had my fingers crossed that Shirley would recover.

This is a picture of Julia and Gary at a restaurant, we'd gone to the night before down at the wharf.

Anyway, we went back to the motel, checked on Shirley, she was sick, sick, sick. Pat was going for a two hour bike ride and we decided to go with Julia and Gary first to a botanical garden, then we planned on locating the sea glass museum so we'd know where to set up our tent for the festival.
At 18220 North Highway One, is the Mendocino-Coast Botanical Gardens. They are really magnificent and worth a visit if you are in the area. You can visist their website http://www.gardenbythesea.org/ to learn more about the gardens. There are incredible rhododendrums twenty feet tall and amazing sculptures by California artists. There are 46 acres of trails and gardens so you can spend a lot of time just wandering around. Here are some of the pictures we took of garden as we walked out toward to the coastline.

First view of entering the gardens. Following are all pictures taken in the botanical garden.

Julia and my husband Steve stand by one of the many garden sculptures. Here is another shot of the glass sculpture. Some amazing photos of flowers in the park taken by my sister Julia.

As we walked through the park and walked and walked, I coughed and blew my nose constantly. My headached and I wished I was back at the motel in the bed, but I hadn't seen my sister Julia in a long time and I wanted to spend time with her so I gutted it out. I must say when we reached the end of the gardens at the ocean it was well worth the walk as the view was gorgeous - inspiring to say the least.

After we left the botanical gardens we drove a few blocks south on Highway 1 and turned into the spacious driveway of the Sea Glass Gallery & Museum. The exact address of the museum is 17801 N. Hwy 1, just 11 miles south of Fort Bragg. The museum is open daily from 10 to 5 with free admission. Be sure to talk to Captain Cass who owns the museum. His website can be found at http://glassbeachjewelry.com/

Cass is a wealth of information on sea glass and the beaches surrounding Fort Bragg. You can also pick up one of Capt. Cass' Glass Beach Guides and Map. I was beginning to love maps after the fiasco in San Francisco. From Cass and his map, I learned that I'd gone to one of the newer glass beaches I should have gone straight on the path then left. Fort Bragg has three glass beaches - each site was once a dumping area for the town. The oldest site, 1906-1943, is hard to reach without a kayak. When a dump area filled up, the townspeople would move further down the coast. The second oldest site, 1943-1947, is off the Old GP Mill Site and it has a "No Trespassing warning" - people still climb down the rocks and kayak around to this site. Not me, as I don't have a wet suit and I don't kayak. You can contact Captain Cass as he offers ocean kayak tours to this site weather permitting. Then there is Slag Pile Cove, 1949-1967 and Glass Beach 1949-1967. Suddenly, I couldn't wait to get back to the beach and find the older site.

After getting the information about where to set up for the festival the next day, we headed off for lunch down at the wharf. A quick sandwich, then a stop at a bakery for cookies. At the motel, Shirley was still sick as a dog. Julia and Gary wanted to go up the coast to see the seals lying on rocks.

I wanted to go to the beach, but the tide was coming in and my head was pounding so I went to lie down. Took some aspirin, but couldn't relax, the beach was calling my name. Finally, I got up, coaxed Steve into going and stopped to get Shirley's husband Pat. We drove down, parked and walked the path to the end where land dropped off to rocky cliffs. Then we had to follow a narrow path to where we could drop down into the rocks. (the path was like a ledge of dirt over hanging a cliff!) Yikes, I was glad I was wearing tennis shoes. Finally, we made it down onto the sand - well, you really couldn't see much sand it was all sea glass. Sea glass in layers and layers. We'd hit the "mother lode." We stayed until it was dusk picking up sea glass. I found some beautiful pieces. When they finally dragged me away from the beach I thought I'd go collapse on the bed as I was still sick and coughing like a maniac, but when we got to the motel, my brother Marty was there. Marty had ridden his Harley down from Oregon to see us all. A family reunion, so of course, I stayed up and talked with my brother. We went to dinner and then all talked some more. Poor Shirley couldn't even leave the bed she was still so sick. Here's a shot of my brother Marty on the left, my husband Steve and my brother-in-law Pat. I think they were having a "happy hour." We made an early night of it as we had to set up our jewelry booth at eight in the morning at the Sea Glass Festival. Cass had told me when I'd talked to him that some of the vendors weren't coming - in fact, there would only be three of us. I went to bed worrying about the festival - would anyone come? Would we sell any jewelry? Would Shirley still be sick and not able to help me?

Find out in Part Three what happens.

Art Fairs, Craft Fairs, Sidewalk Sales

Picture is table set up. We're getting ready to go to a Kite Festival in Ocean Beach, outside of San Diego, where we will have a booth to sell our Sea Glass and Other jewelry. The festival is on Saturday March 6, 2010 at 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. - outside. The weather forecast is now calling for some rain showers - oh, great. We were juried into the show, meaning we had to send pictures of our work and hope they like it, then we were accepted and had to pay a nonrefundable fee and now it might rain - I'm quickly learning that outdoor venues have a major drawback - the weather.



As I've explained in earlier posts, we are new to making jewelry and marketing. We've had home jewelry parties and we've had one indoor art fair, an easy one as it was up the street and one side walk sale that no one attended, and a few sales on our internet site Etsy. How do we get our jewelry out there for people to see and buy was the next question we asked. Luckily, there are nice people who share and one such person told us to buy the magazine "Craftmaster News," which I did. It's not cheap, but it lists almost all the big events on the West Coast - 2,500 evens to be exact.



So now I have the magazine and I begin looking at all the events listed by months. I looked at the location - we can't be driving to Idaho, right, then I looked at the cost of the event. We're small and right now we can't afford to put out $500 or more for a weekend event. I circled the shows in our area and in Oregon because the other half of Sisters Jewelry Design is Shirley and she lives in Oregon (a long way for us to drive, but I can see my sister so it's worthwhile). And I have to look at the type of show - if it is an auto show or farm equipment show for example, I know that sea glass jewelry won't be a big seller.

Okay, so now I have three criteria for picking an event - location, type of show and cost of show. The first show I picked is the one mentioned above, The Kite Festival in Ocean Beach, San Diego. It is a two hour drive for us, but it is near the beach which is a great location for a sea glass jewelry artisan booth, and it is realitively inexpensive at $35 for a 10x10 space. I took some pictures of our jewelry and submitted to the fair committee and waited to hear if we got into the show. We are accepted - yeah.
Back to the garage and the table set up. We've got our first art fair show lined up, but now we have to get ready. I learn that a lot of art and craft shows have rules - for example - they want all the tables to be covered with the cloth falling to the ground, they want fire retardent table covers, and of course, they specifiy the size of the booth. Originally, when we had the home shows and the one show up the street, we just used a bolt of material from Wal-Mart and cut it to size. Now, we realize we have to have something that looks professional. My sister suggests we have the table covers made - that idea turned out to be quite expensive so I went on the internet and found these black covers made to order - not cheap, but fire retardent and cheaper than having a seamstress make them. (There are a lot of sites on the internet that sell table covers and booth setups - ranging in price from low to high. You can even have your company's name or logo on the skirt of the covers, of course that is not an inexpensive option.)


I forgot to tell you that for tables, we had a bunch of banquet table legs, so Steve went to Home Depot and bought plywood and made the tables to fit the 10x10 space. We saved on not having to buy professional convention tables that fold up, they can start at $100 and go up, but our tables have two drawbacks - heavy and you need a pickup to carry them to the site as they are long. Luckily, we have a pickup and Steve is strong so he's in charge of setting up the tables. I am thinking that if we are successful at selling our wares at art fairs we may eventually buy the fold up tables - for now, we're on a shoe string budget.


Okay, we've got the tables and the covers, the next big questions to solve is how do we display our jewelry. In the past, we'd just put everything on the table flat - easy, but not really attractive. My sister and I hashed over some ideas, nothing grabbed us. I decided to go to an art festival and see what other people were doing which led me to The Southwest Arts Festival in Indio, California at the Empire Polo Grounds. This fair charged a $10 admission fee and you had to pay for parking in a big dirt lot. Approaching the Polo Grounds, we could see a myriad of tents set up on the polo grounds grassy area.

The art fair included a myriad of artisans from rug weavers to fine artists, watercolorists, sculptors, leather bags and of course, jewelry artists. There was food and music and lots of people milling about. We mapped out our course of how we would see the booths - doing the full circle then the inner rows.
(I've learned there is actually an art to picking where your booth is located as psychologically, most people enter say a room and turn right, often not seeing the row down the center or the left side booth area - interesting, huh?)


There was a lot to see and as we went along I asked if I could take photos for my blog and some people graciously said yes, and some were paranoid that I might copy some of their work - not, but that was okay too. One of the artisans I really liked was a woman from Albuquerque, New Mexico - Karen Carlson - she creates with leather and her bags were simply stunning. Another artist, I really liked was Cameron Kaseberg from Redmond, Oregon, who does solvent transfer of images. He had wonderful images of crows and as I'm a big fan of crows I was drawn to his work. Note in the above two pictures, you can see the two different booths and the set up. We also saw several jewelry booths and their set ups.

Note the plastic boxes and the large photos of jewelry on back and side walls of booths. These last two pictures show very sophisticated booth layouts. Hopefully, as we do more shows and learn more about the business of selling our jewelry at shows, we'll develop more of a look for our booths, but right now time and money dictate a simpler look for us. We left the art fair with more knowledge and more questions in our mind. So much to learn and yet, I'm confident as we sally forth to do a few shows this summer we will answer a lot of questions we have on "how to."

As I write this and look at these pictures again, I realize that most of the pop-up tents are white.

We bought a pop-up for this weekend because of the forecast of showers, but they didn't have white. I hope our light brown one will be okay. I'll let you know in my next post which will be after the show coming up.