Taking The Show On The Road

Ngaire and I were given the opportunity to have a booth at the First Annual ‘Slow’ Fibre Festival last weekend. The intention was to revive, promote and perpetuate the intrinsic concept of locally sourced and created products. This would be our first foray out on our own, so with a little trepidation we decided to ‘take the show on the road’. The first thing we decided to do was do a mock up of how we wanted the booth to look. Michael dragged his sawhorses onto the deck and we had a chance to try everything out.
Thankfully our display racks from the studio are portable and they stood up by themselves.We got to the Youth Centre in Summerland and saw that we had been assigned two tables against the wall. This was wonderful, we could really go to town and give all the scarves room to glow! We made a mistake on the tea towels by having the hang tags showing in front – they were soon turned over and the tags were put at the back. Most of the vendors were selling fleeces, roving, and dyed locks with some end products knitted and woven. We were the only booth with only hand woven accessories.We dropped the four Chenille scarves onto the table and with a bit of creative rolling, I think they look wonderful! This was how we left the booth on Friday night after set up; I think it looks pretty good! On Saturday morning, after getting up at 5 a.m. and driving for 1-1/2 hours to make the 8 a.m. opening we moved the lights to the front of the table and everything came to life.
Since we had been given an additional table, we brought another mannequin and more props and played around with the set up on Saturday morning. Unfortunately I didn’t take any photos of the improvements we made.

I’m so happy that we went to the “First Annual Slow Fibre Festival” as it was very profitable for us and it was such a nice first experience for Ngaire and me. The Desert Sage Spinners and Weavers Guild were our hosts and they were wonderfully organized and hopefully we will be there again next year!