Opening Our Studio

At the end of May we took part in the ‘Mid Island Studio Tours’, and that was a new venture for us and surprisingly much more work than I anticipated.

Besides writing up a short blurb to go into the brochure that is distributed Island wide, we had to make signs, physically price all of our stock and clean out the studio.  We decided to leave the looms in place (with projects on them) as well as the sofa and the small desk.

Our house, luckily, was well suited for the tour as we have a large foyer that opens directly into the studio.  A few days before the event, we started figuring out what to put where and what a learning curve it was.  How to show your weaving to it’s best advantage is a real dilemma.

I wanted to block off the access to the rest of the house, so the grid racks worked well for this.  We had to address any possible tipping hazard; so we attached two of the extra racks at an acute angle to act as stabilizers.  This rack held five shoulder busts and twenty-six flat hanging scarves.  We hung the scarves by colour families.

This photo shows the colours a bit better, but the rack is not in its final place.

We have five larger mannequins that were used to highlight a few of the shawls, these were placed in the foyer, on the fireplace mantle and in a corner by the door.

We moved a couple of sofa tables from other rooms to the centre of the studio for the table linens.  I find displaying flat table linens to be very difficult.  We ended up rolling them on tubes of various sizes and standing a few up to give height to the display. 

This spiral display rack was pulled out of its box and this is its maiden voyage.  We used it exclusively for shawls and extra big scarves.  We used black flocked hangers which minimized slippage and faded into the background as well as allowing the shawls to be twisted into interesting shapes.

I had a ladder style towel rack that worked beautifully to display tea towels.  We hung one of each style  on the rack and had the rest folded neatly on the wooden bookcase behind it.

We learned so much by doing this event and would change only a few things.  The rack that held the scarves needs to be modified so that the scarves hang forward facing, rather than side on.  I will switch the scarf rack and the table linen display as the scarves are more exciting and need pride of place and the table linens are a bit static.  I would also hang fewer scarves and give each one more space.  Our statistics for the sale are very encouraging, every fourth person bought something and they all used credit cards.  Thank goodness for the Square Reader. Now the trick for next year is to have more people find us!