Necessity, creation, etcetera etcetera...

This coming weekend is the Sunshine City indoor antique show at the Coliseum, a beautifully restored dance hall smack dab in the down town of St. Petersburg; readily accessible from the highway and main streets; free parking and air conditioned!! Again, it's early for the season, but it will be a good barometer of the economic condition we face for the coming year in our business.

We've changed our approach already in restructuring the allocation of space devoted to different types of items. It would seem that for the time being, ceramics and glassware are taking a back seat to costume jewelry. We therefore have concentrated more on trying to make our displays innovative and different from our neighbors'. We already purchased more of the standard glass top cases for earrings, plus scratched our heads as to how to make the affordable and fun bracelets more accessible for trying on. (A breakfast tray holding an array of bangles makes them much more inviting to try on than keeping them behind a locked case - after all, most of them are priced less than $20 and we can easily keep an eye AND ear on them. They make quite a clatter while being sorted through and tried on. So they are secure but still accessible.)

An influx of men's cuff links, tie clips, tacks, and rings into our inventory made us realize we should probably showcase this category on its own rather than mixing them in as we had amongst the other jewelry items. I wanted a display solution that would accommodate all these various types of items in a single place, so that a pair of cuff links could be shown with the coordinating tie tack close by. I would not have thought that a ring display would be the thing had I not seen another dealer (and then another, and another) using just this display item to do just this. I think it does wonders for showing the best the of the jewelry while hiding all the fiddly bits like the chains and fasteners. The finished case is shown in the photo at the top of the page.

Another display issue that came up was long, dangly earrings. The standard earring cases are great for most smaller pieces, but BIG, mega hoops, elaborate pieces from the Disco Age (long may it rest, but sell in our booth!), many fine ethnic examples of worked silver and brass simply get lost in a tangle when forced into those cases, even into larger sections. We've tried laying them out flat on the tables, and it just can't do a piece justice when it's supposed to be hanging down to one's shoulders. I needed to be able to hang these beauties up without having one hide the one below it. And I didn't want to buy the usual acrylic earring stand - boring! Overpriced!

I used my search engine skills and found directions for making my own earring display - which sounded Oh So Easy. One quick stop at your local craft shop (yeah, right!!) would be all I'd need to do to produce a cheap and pretty display for our long lovelies. Well, it took several stops at some various stores, but I did it! I found a reproduction of a luggage trunk (overkill - a smaller, briefcase sized object would have sufficed. What I found was life sized.) on clearance at a home decorating shop. I had to repair the hinges as they were ripped out. Screwed those in and hot glued them in place. Hot glued a bunch of places on the article because the entire case appears to be made out of paper board.

Then I hot glued strips of fabric ribbon across the insides of the case. Then I nailed them down because I could picture the glue giving way in the middle of the show. I think the overkill, given the size of the case, was probably a GOOD thing. Anyways, now I have this homemade, funky display unit for my long, dangly earrings (I fit 75 pairs into the thing during its dry run at home). All are earrings that would not have otherwise made it easily on to our sales table for the show. I took a picture of that, too. I spent $12 on creating this mahhvelous display.

Enjoy, and please don't laugh too loud or spray coffee over your keyboard looking at my handiwork...

The show season is trickling in

Like the snow melt at the start of spring, we've begin to see a show here and there get booked for the season which is almost upon us.

The first is a pre-season show, really, and such an exciting departure for us, because it's an indoor event. AIR CONDITIONING!!! NO WIND!!! NO SUN!!! (Can you tell I'm charged up about this one?) We'll be at the Fort Lauderdale Antique and Collector Faire on August 2nd and 3rd. We'll stay with Bob's folks and so will save on the hotel expense. We invested in some classy looking navy blue flame retardant tablecloths that reach to the floor for our tables, because we do plan to do more indoor shows in the future. The fees are higher than outdoor shows for a vendor, but the advantages - particularly at this time of year, with the weather so capricious, makes it a no-brainer for us.

We had considered doing a dry run of setting up the booth in advance of the show. On Sunday we cleared the garage of our vehicle and set up a table, put the new tablecloth on it (looks great!), and then kind of stood there... because it dawned on us that we didn't really need to do any more preparation than that. We've already determined that our merchandise is substantially better than most at the outdoor venues, and the last show we did we already weeded out what we would not be taking to an indoor show, by putting those items in a separate bin and marking it appropriately. So the work has already been done. I guess we were just a bit nervous, eh?

But I don't think we'll change what we take to the Ft Lauderdale show. Our teapots, the other porcelain, ceramic and glass items; books and jewelry; and pictures. As I've written here, Bob's done plenty of restocking for this upcoming season (ahem), so there's no worry that we won't have a good variety to bring. I do have confidence that the quality of our merchandise is up to the standards of any indoor show we've been to.

In September, we've got a show in Dade City booked, on the 27th and 28th. We did their spring event and really loved the setting and the show was a great one for us. I've requested the same booth space - since we prepay for the spot, rather than reserve it and pay on the day of the event, we'll probably be granted our favored spot. It was under several large trees in the municipal parking lot. We'll bring the shade canopy with us, though, since we won't be able to rely on the weather's cooperation on the day, and we've learned the trick to anchoring the canopy on pavement without being able to drive stakes into the ground. (That would be attaching gallon bottles of water to the canopy with bungee cords - that sucker will not budge. Sometimes you need to add a couple of cinder blocks to the base for extra measure.)

And a few weeks after that, we do another indoor show, this time close by in St. Petersburg. On October 10th through the 12th we'll be at the Sunshine City Antiques and Collectibles Show at the Coliseum. (A note about the link for this show - it hasn't been updated since the January 2008 show, grrr. Oh, and there's a typo on the title of the link too. I hate stuff like that! Why do they start promoting the shows when the websites aren't up to date? Drives me batty.) We've gone to this show as consumers every year since we've lived in the area, and started talking about having a booth there as soon as we bought the business. It will be interesting to see if it lives up to our expectations. The venue is rather wonderful - a Jazz Age dance hall that is still used for weekly Tea Dances, across from the Lawn Bowling Club. Can't get any more "old St. Pete" than that. It's always really well attended, with some wonderful vendors.

So the summer has barely started, and we already have the new season starting to get booked up. I think it's pretty wonderful - I guess I'm in the right business.

Here's a photo for today - another piece of Bunnykins. This is called a Hug-a-Mug. Such a cute name for a practical shape, made for little hands to easily bring a cuppa something safely to their mouths. This design is called Unravelling The Knitting, for obvious reasons! Everybody is pretty cheeky on this cup, even the design on the reverse side, showing a bunny with a piece of knitting wrapped around his head. You can see why I love these adorable pieces so much.