[ craft booth prep - part 2 ]

A HUGE PART of preparing for a show is deciding how to display all the items in the most attractive and simple way while keeping costs low. Having never done an outdoor show, I already had to purchase my Caravan canopy (which I picked up at Costco for $199) so I wanted to create a pretty display without spending a ton of money. With handbags, they can be hung from grid walls but I decided on shelving since they are easily picked up and make an attractive display. A trip to IKEA was in order! I chose Lerberg shelves which were lightweight, easy to assemble and each shelf unit was $20!! (a huge deciding factor!) I decided my booth layout would need 6 shelf units in total. This was cheaper than buying wood to build something myself.

My first thought was to preassemble them at home and then transport them to the park but decided it would be just as easy to bring them in their original packaging and assemble them on-site (and good thing since the vehicle was WAY too full to handle them preassembled). 

I picked up some wooden wine crates from the liquor store so that I could build up some height on my table to display smaller items. I'll cover them with the same fabric as my tablecloth. They work perfectly and they were free!

Remember the old wooden window screen I bought at Habitat for $3? I gave it a coat of grey paint and it will display my flower brooches.

I found some great display easels at the dollar store and thought they could work well for my clutches and smaller handbags. A quick coat of white spray paint will make them blend in with my white shelving.

I purchased a 6 foot banquet table at Home Depot for about $60 and needed to make a tablecloth for it. I wanted to make one quite tailored so that I could store stuff underneath and not worry about a breeze blowing it around and exposing my stuff underneath. A white cotton dropcloth did the trick for fabric. I just measured the top, cut out the rectangle, used a juice glass to cut the curved corners and then sewed a long straight piece all the way around. A band of grey grograin ribbon ironed on with Stitch Witchery adds a nice finishing touch.

I ordered a rubber stamp on Etsy from JLMould so I could stamp my plain white bags, stamp my tags to hold my brooches and stamp my sales books. I like that everything is consistently branded (including my sign - see yesterday's post).

And probably the most important thing of all were the tent weights my hubby made for me. A gust of wind can send your canopy flying so it needs to be weighed down. He created 4 weights for me using a 10 foot length of white 4" plumbing pipe which he cut into 4 equal pieces, 8 pipe caps, 4 big eye hooks and 2 bags of concrete. Glue a pipe cap to one end of each piece of pipe. Mix the concrete in a container and fill each pipe up to the top. Insert big eye hook into wet concrete. Let dry. Cut a hole with a hole bit on a drill into the 4 remaining pipe caps. Glue one onto the top of each pipe. Done! Now just use a bungie cord to attach the weight to the top of the canopy to weigh it down at each corner.

So after getting the canopy up and all the shelves in place, it's pretty much ready. I hung up some inexpensive IKEA drapery panels at each corner just to dress things up a bit and hide my weights. Just need to place the tablecloth, hang my sign and put out the stock. Stay tuned for craft booth prep part 3 to see the final booth up and running!

lisa