A few years back I was doing multiple craft fairs in a year. I also entered work in local exhibitions and made items on request. It takes a lot of time and effort to get yourself out there and create a following, to make your hobby make money.
Life got busier and I stopped doing so much creating, but also in 2007/2008 when we had the global financial crisis people stopped buying crafts. There is a bottom line for what you create, between the material cost and the time it took you to make it: usually you lose money on the time element. This was the case for craft stalls and I. Hours of time creating and a whole day sitting behind a table was netting very little profit and draining some of the love for what I did.
Something that can be hard to manage even when hosting a single craft stall is creativity vs. output. You can have a couple of different kinds of stalls: few products and higher prices, where even selling a couple of pieces leaves you breaking even; or a lot of products of lower values that collectively will make your profit. I've always had the latter. Often the basket of $2 bracelet would be what sold the most, to all of the little girls looking to buy something with their own money.
My beach glass dragons were higher value items, but materials aside (the glass did come free from the beach, though it took a lot of collecting time) they took hours and hours to make and people weren't very willing to pay what they were worth. It's a bit insulting when people try to bargain you down on the day!
I buy from local artists whenever I can, particularly friends. It pays to support each other and I generally found that was the attitude at craft fairs. I often did swaps with other stallholders, for items of equal value that we eyed off from each other.
I sew more than bead these days and do a bit of fabric printing and eco-dyeing. I don't want to compete with other artists in Darwin who sell a lot of the latter, but I also don't make clothes for other people, only myself. I think about having a stall again and there are certainly opportunities around. I would stick with my beach glass necklaces, because I haven't ever come across anyone who wires them together into collars and decorates them like I do, so they are a unique product.
It would take me weeks of dedicated time, or months of less dedicated time, to create enough for a stall and that hasn't been something I've been willing to do. If I knew someone who wanted to share with me it would be easier, as I wouldn't have to fill a whole table myself. But the craft fairs are also on Sundays when I have archery...
Aren't priorities hard when we want to do everything in life?
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