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.  

Lesson Learned - A Mean Music Man

July 4, 2011 found us at the Ashland, Oregon Art Festival in Lithia Park. Yes, we did this festival last year. Not a big money maker, but we like the setting and the people - at least we did until this year. Or I should say, we like the people, except for one busybody vendor and a mean Music Man.

We got to the park a little late, but still early enough to unload and get the car out before the 8:00 deadline of moving the car. Drove right up to our assigned space, the same one we'd had last year, jumped out and stopped dead in our tracks. There was a scruffy young man with an odd looking modified guitar, amplifiers, tables and chairs in our space. Shirley walked up to the Music man and introduced herself, then pointed out that he was in our space - a space we'd paid for and reserved. He went into a story about how he'd traded spaces with another vendor up the line and her space was next to ours, but since we weren't there, he'd taken it upon himself to take our space. About this time, this older woman vendor-busybody comes along all smiles and cheerily tells us that she "thought" it would be fine to let the Music Man have our space.

Well, it wasn't fine with us. We wanted our space and we wanted him to move down the row to the space he'd exchanged with the busybody vendor. Well, he wasn't about to move - telling us that up the line, further into the park, there were a lot of spaces and we could go there. Everyone was getting angry. Finally, an official from the festival came and she tried to calm everyone down and offered us a two space spot further up. Shirley and I didn't want to go up the line of vendors as we wanted our spot. Steve stepped in and said, "Let's move up there." I could tell Steve was upset and he would get more upset if he had to spend the day next to the Music Man. So reluctantly, we moved our stuff up the line. In the meantime, while we were talking to the official, the Music Man slipped off and hid making it impossible to get him to move.

A couple of days later, we learned from a friend that they hadn't walked all the way up the line of vendors, but had turned around where we had our booth the year before. We could understand as it was a hot day and after the parade and walking up past food booths, some people in the park didn't check out all the booths. Lesson learned - don't get to the festival late - get there early to make sure no one takes your spot. (I am glad we didn't have to spend the day next to the Music Man as later when I walked by he was playing some sort of musak on his modified guitar and I'm not sure I'd classify it as music.) Our booth ended up being across from the hat vendor - nice people who did a brisk business. We set up our tables and took up two spaces as we were assigned.

Here we are looking a bit frazzled after setting up the booth. It was early and the sun hadn't hit our side of the park at this point. Later we would wish we were still in the shade. Shirley sold some of her sea glass pendants.

And I sold some of my sea glass earrings -

So all in all, it was a good show - despite learning a hard lesson from a mean Music Man. Next, we are off to an art Festival in Bend, Oregon where we meet up with another fellowing playing and selling his music.


Please check out our store on Etsy at http://sistersjewelrydesign.etsy.com/ for more sea glass jewelry.