Well, I made a few earrings for the craft show at my church, and I was REALLY optimistic about it this year, because I knew the "competition" wouldn't be there. I'm good friends with Sarah DeAngelou, who has a shop on Melrose, and her own department in Fred Segal here in Los Angeles. She makes great jewelry, and I love her to death, but I knew that I wouldn't be able to produce the amount or quality of her work (she has WAY more practice as I do, & no kids to suck the time and energy outta her;o). Well, she moved to Wisconsin a couple months ago with a new church planting team, so I thought this would be a good year to get my stuff in the holiday boutique.
I made 18 prs of earrings, and everyone that saw them were bubbling over with praise, and compliments. I even sold one pair to a friend before I got them up to the church! I was feeling really great about them. But, when I got there, it turns out that Sarah had mailed all of the jewelry she had made for her upcoming trunk show to the church, after finding out she wouldn't be able to make it out to California next month. So, now my 18prs of earrings are peppered across a WHOLE ROOM full of her professional stuff, and they just look so amateurish. I think I will get a few sales, since my earrings are all priced between $10-15, and hers are in the $30-70 range. But, I invested money that I really don't have into this, and, not realizing, quite a bit emotionally, too. I am not the kind of person that bruises easily, but I kinda let my guard down on this one. I'll have to watch out for that, and learn to expect the unexpected for future shows (sidenote bummer-Sarah was the friend that had invited me to be a guest artisan at her trunkshow this year...the one that's not going on now).
LOL, and the lamest thing is, I was so concerned with keeping my prices low, so as not to be outstanding (in a negative way) among all the other things I knew would be selling there, so I just used masking tape for price tags. Thankfully, I did splurge on some earring cards, instead of just poking them through posterboard, like I do here at home! ;o)
Anyway, just needed to gripe a bit, I guess. The sale is going all weekend, from 11am-11pm. Maybe I will just have to sew some stuff to take up there this evening.....I noticed there wasn't a lot of sewn items, and that's really where my expertise is......