I love the white skate too!! That is a terrific idea & stars really make it along with the fur!! Gives me that warm & fuzzy feeling you get around holiday time,(I love the holidays)! Thanks for the skate paint answer. I would imagine larger town the price would be a lot more for a table or booth & "regulars" might get the "best" spots. Going somewhere else can be a worry, bad roads, weather turning bad etc. So I would consider all that & having to get up early to get there. Costs involved in going there count against your profits. We did Craft Boutique for 2-3 years in a woman's club & then over to bank we had a room they let us use. After we quit, Tole painting came in & I was still making crafts so our local park had tables to rent so GF & I shared a long table but they didn't do much advertising so we didn't sell much, few customers that came bought something from us but not many came as cold day & they bought little things so we took home most of what we brought. Shortly after that Craft Boutiques became jewelry & company made jams with country looking cloth with ribbon around or made in China stuff with that pulled off & ribbon added,etc.& I lost interest. I haven't been to any this year, few & far between, only couple I would liked to have gone to but had to do other things. Anyway check out distance ,costs before you go & also do you want to do it every year or make a lot extra so you can do your local 1 too. Jan

I am glad you sold some of your things. But spring and summer craft shows don't seem to do well around here either, even if advertised well. Things done in school colors may do better too (scarves, etc.)

I think the real long-term issue for artists is that now, in the information age, people are becoming accustomed to not paying for things at all. I was, in my first couple of years selling handmade artworks on eBay, constantly asked, why I'd make, sell, and ship original art pieces (gouache, acrylic, pastel, etc) often well below the cost of the materials. Everyone seemed to suspect I was lying, or cheating customers somehow. The real answer was, nobody was buying those pieces if I priced them above a dollar because a lot of people these days in the digital era seem to be irrationally conditioned to expect everything for free or nearly free. Problem is, nothing is really going to be free. Everything has a cost to it, and in these cases I pretty much absorbed the cost of the items I was losing money on, by doing other tedious jobs like transcription tasks for around $5/hr. The cost was my time, and all my genuinely creative projects moving forward at a snail's pace. The cost was that a lot of the things I've tried to work on, that people want me to finish, aren't getting finished any time soon. If every customer is this stingy, and everyone pirates everything, or wants everything available for free, it'll kill the software industry, games industry, movies, music, books, etc - or clutter them all with lots of ads like television. Sort of a 'prisoner's dilemma' situation, on a much larger scale. I saw this coming years ago and made a determination that I would never pirate anything. I'd be one of the ones who paid for digital products. I'm weird that way. There were some artworks back then that I made to order for customers, and sold for as little as a penny. And there were some listings priced at a penny that *still* wouldn't sell. Right now, now that I have 120 ratings on eBay, all positive, people are beginning to get that I'm actually doing this, that it isn't a joke or a trick. That's good, because now I'm actually able to sell some large art pieces at prices where I actually turn a profit on them. Not a big profit, mind you, it's more like $2-$3/hr, but at least I'm not losing money on all of my items. (Though, in between all my fixed price stuff, there are still listings with 99-cent opening bids.) An example of an ad I posted in a few places: My eBay shop The other thread discussing my work. A big thank you, BTW, to everyone who did buy from me, whether the amount they spent was a penny or a dollar or anything else, as those early ratings on eBay were key to establishing a track record there. It's really helped. I am excited about the future and how things are going now. I'm optimistic that soon I'll be able to ramp up development of indie games and videos and do some really fun stuff. So thanks, everybody.

I have a sewing/craft room set up, which I use almost every day. I can't find my camera cable right now, so I can't upload a photo, but I had a thought about your space. You really need a sewing machine space AND a table space because half of sewing is laying out the pattern, cutting, etc. I'm pretty sure I'm at my sewing table at least as much as I am at my machine itself. So, what might work really well for you is to get an old armoire from your local CL, and create something like the attached for the machine itself. Then you could position the table about a foot and a half out from the wall so that the person using it would stand between the wall and table, and could view tv. You could use the space under the table for wheeled carts which could hold storage supplies. Honestly the best storage I have in my craft room is the 8 foot long pegboard I put up. Everything hangs there: scissors, rotary cutters, rotary rulers, tape measures, etc. I can clean up in under two minutes, which helps me keep the area neat. The third element that is critical to the space is an ironing board. You could easily accomodate that by putting a fold-down board on the wall. They even have attractive cabinets for them now. Here is a link that might be useful: Sewing Cabinet from Armoire