Another weekend is coming up, bringing with it yet another show.  This weekend is the Sandy Springs Festival, just North of Atlanta.  The Sandy Springs Festival is ordinarily a large festival with 20,000+ attendees; however rain is in the forecast for this weekend so it could be good or bad.  If 22 inches of rain last weekend wasn’t enough, here we go again.  Fortunately, as we get closer to Saturday, the forecast keeps sliding around as to the amount and time.  I can only hope that it doesn’t show up until Saturday night.

I’ve been camped out in the shop for the past two weeks replacing inventory that was sold during the Paulding Meadows Festival.  Between days of waiting for glue to dry, I have also been building new shelving for my booth display.  The old shelves worked well once they were assembled, but it was a poor design that took up too much space while traveling and took way too much time to assemble and disassemble.   The new ones only take a couple of minutes to set up and hold more product.  I will post pictures of the booth and new shelves this weekend once I get it set up.  This show is a little challenging because setup is after 8PM on Friday.   It will be dark by the time I get set up.

Customers come to shows and see us sitting in booths, chilling out, and looking like happy campers.  What they don’t see is the loading of trailers, trucks, or vans the day before the show with product, canopy, and displays.  We drive to the show, usually the day before, and wait in line for a spot to park close to our assigned space to unload everything we carefully loaded hours or days before.  Sometimes we unload and setup in the rain, sometimes in cold, and sometimes in both.  We revel in our good fortune when we have sun and warm weather, and we hunker down and find ways to put on a smile during bad shows.  We watch the local weather channel like hawks and pray that 50% chance of rain will actually mean good weather.  At the end of the show, we break everything down, wait in line to pull our transport up to our booth, and carefully load it all back up again.  Oh, but the life of an artist and crafter.  If people only knew what we go through bring our handcrafted products to the masses.