Gearing up for this years Art Walks/Fairs

I am so glad it is Friday. This week seemed to go by pretty slow. However, it has been nice that its been getting dark much later....spring/summer is on its way. This year should be interesting once all of the art vending opportunities pop up with the warmer weather/seasons. I have been trying to create as much as possible so that i have a good many new product to offer up at the artwalks/fairs and whatnot. This year Danny( my hubby/biz partner: www.flickr.com/photos/lucidopticlab ) and I are going to try out the Saturday market in downtown portland. We had wanted to do that when we first moved up here in July of 08 but we were frantically looking for jobs and then i got into a really insane car crash that i am so lucky to have survived. That put a damper on our plans to vend at the Saturday market but we did get a chance to vend at the Last Thursday art walk on Alberta st. We did this 3 times and did fairly well + it was way fun and certainly a worthwhile learning experience.

This was our booth setup for last Thursday art walk on Alberta st the day before Halloween:

and this is Danny and I that same night on the side of our booth:
It took us awhile to accumulate enough funds to buy the canopy you seen in our booth photo, but we made the money in a month by selling our tie- dye at our local farmers market in Cedar Mill, Oregon. In this set up we are selling prints/mini paintings and such things on the table and we had our tie dye hung along the canopy. This was the first time we displayed paintings like that. It took us a little while to come up with the idea of creating some sort of display wall/rack to hang paintings from. For a few months danny and I would go down to the Saturday Market in downtown portland and check out the set up of other art vendors. A lot of them had bought nice industrial fixtures or pegboard to display their paintings on. Unfortunately, we have been a bit strapped for cash in this sinking ship economy that we couldn't afford anything too fancy. So danny and I went into home depot to look for some ideas. We decided to buy a common garden lattice and suspend it from the canopy using S shaped hooks and bungee cords. We got smaller SShaped hooks to hook the paintings on with. As you can see it worked out pretty well! This year we are certainly going to be at hopefully every last Thursday art walk on Alberta st in portland or and we are going to start out at the satruday market on sunday actually. Upon doing research about how to vend at the saturday market i must say its the most extensive/complicated and expensive process i have come across. You must have your product approved by a committee, you then have to pay membership fees that are pretty steep then ontop of that you have to pay 25 bucks per day you vend + you must have a registered business/business license and a number of other things. So, we have pieced all the requirements together and are ready to apply to vend. I found out that if you start vending only on sundays they wave the membership fee so we will be trying that first to make sure we will be a success there before paying membership fees. so we shall see how it all works out....exciting!
If anyone is ever in the area of portland oregon you must check out the saturday market in downtown its not like any artwalk i have ever been to. Last Thrusday on Alberta St is also really fun and a little bit more eccentric/anything goes. Sometimes they shut down the street for the art walk and the entire street becomes one big crazy extravaganza with live bands, tuns of local artists/gallery openings/freaks/the works. So come check out our booth some time!