Friday/Sat/Sunday – 3 Days of Public/Retail Show
At the end of the 2nd day of the wholesale show, we did some booth re-arrangement and added my textile painting pieces, ready for the 3 days of the public retail show.
Ready for the Public show to start!
There were lots more visitors during the public show, big crowds especially on Saturday which was my biggest day of sales. It was fun to see some artist friends who came down from Philly and also meet some FB artist friends who live in the area and made it to the show – great to meet in person!
“Winter Wind”, a small hand-stitched piece I finished just a week before the show went home with one of my new FB artist friends. I like that it worked out that way, a part of me now in a wonderful new home in VA (thanks Louise!).
“Winter Wind”, 8″x8″, eco dyed silk and cotton fabrics, stitching, gallery wrapped © 2014 Ayn Hanna
Sunday tear down near meltdown
At 5pm on Sunday, the public show closed and the frenzy of dismantling booths began. We knew we had a midnight deadline to have our booth and all the artwork re-packed, stacked on the pallet, and be off the show floor – a 7 hr window to make it happen.
We got right to work and were still packing up the art a couple hours later as we saw many of our neighbor artists already done. Some were headed off to get their trucks and get in line to drive back onto the show floor to pick up their piles, some were just done…having piled their stuff on pallets that would be picked up and shipped away later in the night.
As the night wore on, there were fewer and fewer artists left, the forklifts were driving around picking up pallets and we were just barely getting started taking down the booth lights and walls. And we were getting tired.
And then there was One
650 Artists in the show and 649 of them left before us that night. Midnight came and went and we were still struggling to get our boxes loaded back on the pallet. We had worked straight through the night, no dilly-dallying and we still weren’t done. But we had to keep going, couldn’t leave until we had all the boxes re-stacked on that pallet.
We had to pack our ladder on the pallet and were having a hard time getting all the heavy boxes onto the top/second “tier” of the stack. The union guys were whizzing around us on their carts and forklifts, stopping long enough to confirm that they weren’t going to have to ship this pallet out (no, they weren’t going to have to lift a finger with this since we were paying Art in Motion to ship this, BUT we still ended up having to pay the union $719 in drayage fees, even though they literally did no work to move this pallet from the dock to the booth space…that’s another part of the “learning” of this show).
At 12:30am, Barbara spotted a rickety bent step ladder that someone had left behind as trash. She hauled it over and using that and all the strength we had left, got the rest of the boxes stacked on the top of the pile and some shrink wrap bound around it all.
At 1am we drug ourselves, our wheelie bags, and a couple of tubes of art that we couldn’t fit back on the pallet out into the rainy darkness and back to our hotel.
Was it worth it? At that moment, Hell no. Now? With the benefit of some recovery time and distance, Yes. Will I do more of these shows? Yes, in fact, the next one is coming up next month, in St. Paul, MN.
Want to know what I’ve learned by doing this show, how it’s helped me move my art career forward, and why I’ll do more of these shows? Details coming up in another post.
