Craft Fair

The past several weeks has had me consumed with the first annual homeschool craft fair!  It has all been worth it, but it was a ton of work!  Partly because we didn’t come up with this idea until Nov., so it left little time to plan.  Next year we will do it mid Nov so the weather will be better and there will be less to compete with in the area.  As it turned out it was below freezing (they were calling for freezing rain, but fortunately that didn’t happen), and there was parades, River Market and several other things going on at the same time….  so, given all that I was thrilled with how it all turned out!

We made signs and Clara had the best time going around town to put them out!  She thought that was so cool!  Lucy was at Grinch practice during this adventure.  Out of the 7 signs we made and put out, we were able to recover 6 of them, so that turned out pretty good.  Mike also made huge signs from pallets to put at the end of the road with arrows.  The winner of the raffle actually came in due to the signage she said. 

Throughout the weeks leading up to the fair I had vendors sign up and cancel and others sign up—it was crazy.  Then I had to figure out how to place everyone in the gym so that like items were as far apart as possible.  That was a challenge, but Lucy was a huge helper for that!  She was also a ginormous help for the signs! 

Set up was the Friday before for a few hours and a few hours the morning of.  About half the vendors came that Friday which was nice.  Set up went very smoothly, praise God!  The girls were huge helpers!  Clara helped Daddy with all the tables, and thank you bags, and got all the chairs out.  Lucy was helping each vendor as needed and they were so appreciative! 

The level of talent in our group was astonishing to be honest!  I was so super impressed with the homemade things these kids came up with!!  We ended up with a total of 27 vendors (I had as many as 31 scheduled at one time, but with several cancelations, there were 27 total the day of).  Of those, only 7 were not homeschoolers.  Next year I know we will have more homeschoolers as many said they would love to but were either out of town, had prior engagements, or not enough time to get their stuff together.

I love this kid!  He’s my son if I were to have had one!  Such a bond!! 

The ministry is what blew me away!  Of course, God is way bigger than we are, and MY plan with this all was for the kids to have a lower stress place to learn about business and feed their entrepreneurial spirits.  God saw something way bigger!  We had people raising money for their mission trips there, we had one girl that was selling items on behalf of girls freed from sex trafficking, the raffle and booth fees all went to Grace Place  (and we were able to raise them $500!!!!).  They were blown away when I brought that to them!!  So exciting!!  Plus getting the name of Stan and Alise’s church out there—who knows what all God will use this for!! 

I’m already excited about next year!  Since this was the first one, we have some kinks to work out, but overall I couldn’t have been more pleased with how this turned out! 

Even the men had a good time!!  I love it!