Boothy News.

I gotta be frank with you. June has been a suck-ola month for me as far as booth sales are concerned. I sold exactly one item last week and one item again this week. Not exactly what I would call an avalanche of sales! No buying frenzy happening here! I know that a big part of the reason is that I haven’t been able to concentrate on getting it well-stocked or even moving items around in any kind of creative way because of the move…this is hard evidence that paying attention to your booth and spending at least an hour a two a week switching things out, straightening, and re-staging can really make all the difference in the world. I finally got the garage under control and now have a neat, tidy place where I’m putting all of my stock so it should be a lot easier to get some new stuff in there in the coming weeks. I was also able to take a few new pieces of furniture down there on Thursday, so that can really change the look of things up. I get tired of it being so static all the time; I have one bookshelf left in there that I just HATE because I can’t figure out how to stage it in an attractive way. Instead, it just looks like THING. THING. THING. THING. ANOTHER THING. AND ONE MORE THING. And the bottom shelf just sort of disappears; anything that gets put down there is sucked into a black hole and never, ever sells. ANYWAY, this past Thursday was a work night, so I hustled down there and was able to spend a significant amount of time on stuff for the first time in almost a month.

I still haven’t sold those infernal wooden people. They’re the only things in the booth that have been there for a significant amount of time that I haven’t marked down — I’ve got them priced at $48 because they’re hand-carved from Italy and pretty big — like, over two feet. I was going to bring them home and put them on Etsy this week but I ended up needing something with some height to balance that area of the booth so I left them there, but their days are numbered. I am so glad to finally get that big chalkboard in the booth. I have had a comedy of errors with all of my projects over the last week or two. With the chalkboard, I kept scratching up the corners of it as I turned it to spraypaint from another angle, then I crushed the original chalkboard underneath the garage door and had to start all over again.

I had been selling an average of three prints a week until the last two weeks, when print sales came to a screeching halt.

I’ve been holding on to this pair of glass lamps for so long, waiting for lampshades. Found the little purple violet lampshades last week at Potter’s House and finally have them in the booth…don’t know if they’ll sell or not, though, because lamps really haven’t done well at all so far.

I love this little deer so much.

I drove three hours, round-trip, to buy these little glass-fronted tables. They looked both bigger and older in the photos on Craigslist and were priced super-low, so I thought it would be worth it. When I got there, they were a much smaller scale than I first thought, and not really old at all. Plus, they smelled like cigarettes — always a delight. I was pretty bummed and they sat in my garage for a couple of weeks before I finally got around to painting them. The Zinsser oil-based primer knocked the smell right out and I ended up loving the way they look painted cream, so it turned out okay after all. I painted the inside of them a pale, pale blue. Hope that wasn’t a mistake. I just thought they needed a little something extra.

I wanted to do a whole plate wall but don’t know if I’ll ever have the time to really do that right. So I had to settle with getting these little plates on the wall, in a most unimaginative formation.

Those four pillows fit perfectly on one of the old school chairs I got last week.

I am pleased that it looks significantly different, and that nothing is in the same spot as it was the week before. I took home a whole box full of stuff plus a piece of furniture, so that feels like a bit of a defeat, but I will week through it, donate some, put some aside for a future yard sale, and then some of it I think I’ll earmark for the Barn Sale in September.

Now I need to get started on stuff to bring up next week! It’s a never-ending cycle…