Freedom Festival Day Three

Yes that is a wicker-work casket...

Day three started with one of the Freedom Festival reps coming around and telling us he hoped the day three crowd was good this year.  Apparently it has been hit and miss in the past.  We decided it would be a good day and started up.  We of course started the day with an amazing donut from next door and then the crowd began to trickle by.  It was a slow trickle most of the day.  We ran random specials ranging from $5 off a dress while Andrew was holding the sign to a clearance price of $10 per dress.  We were able to get some sales off both specials, but it was nothing compared to the fourth.  As I mentioned before we did have a return customer and she brought a friend. That was great! The return customer bought two more dresses and bragged about how much her grand-daughter had loved them. That was great to hear.

As evening approached so did the clouds.  We had decided to start cleaning up the things that were not selling well to make the clean-up easier for us.  While Andrew was taking a load to the car another vendor came by and said there was a high wind advisory in affect and they were tearing down.  When Andrew returned, we decided we should start closing up as well.  It is a good thing we did! Not twenty minutes later the wind started.  We were running the last load to the car and only needed to go back to take down the canopy when the rain started. We waited that out in the car for about a half an hour and we took the canopy down and headed home.

All-in-all it was a great experience and we did well with sales.  I did discover summer time is not the time to sell crocheted items, and that is just fine. I did have several compliments and told my work was very well done. 

Freedom Festival Day Two

 We started on the Fourth bright and early so we did not have to compete with the road closures for the parade and all of the traffic for those who had not camped out the night before to get their spot.  We set up shop and waited.  We heard the parade start, and we had a couple of browsers come through during that point, but once the parade was out the crowds converged on the vendors. As you can clearly see part of that crowd was a brunette Captain America.  He was not interested in dresses.  We also saw Spiderman, but wasn't interested in dresses either.

This was our most popular style of sundress, and I am pleased to say we sold out of them by that afternoon. It was great!  We had a woman come back on the fifth looking for one and was very sad we were out

Freedom Festival Day One

Day one of the festival arrived.  We find our booth space and Andrew proceeds to unpack two cars worth of stuff.  Unfortunately I could not be of much help with the unloading as I was given weight restrictions by my OB for lifting.  That turned out to be a good thing because Landon wondered off and we lost him for about 5 nerve-wracking minutes.  So I stayed at the booth site with him and set up what we could.  

Our booth was between a trinket booth (who was also selling sundresses) and a Mennonite group who made the best donuts I have had in quite some time.  That worked to our advantage later because people would line up to get a donut and they would almost have to browse our booth. 

On a side note Landon left with grandma today.  He told us both good bye and walked of with grandma like he was the king of the world.  I was surprised and happy, but a little heart broken at the same time.

More Festival Prep

When I get home from work on July 2, Andrew tells me he has homework for me to do. SWEET!  First thing I need to create two signs.  One that is the price list explaining the offer and the other stating we accept credit cards (Thank you Square!!).  Putting the signs together was a little more complex that I thought it would be.  Vinyl letters and free-hand placement get interesting. In the end the signs were readable and looked semi-decent.











My next assignment was to put together the clothes rack from IKEA. It was simple - minus one thing. The little tiny allen wrench they included did not have enough leverage to actually move the screw past a certain point.  Luckily Andrew has a tool set that I could raid to complete the job.

My last assignment was to pack up my little guy so he could spend three days with Grandma, or mamas as he calls her.  This was bitter-sweet for me.  It was the first time he has ever spent the night somewhere without us.  More on that to come.