Flair on the Farm Holiday Boutique & Craft Show Display Ideas

It's that time of year again!

Saturday, November 22nd is another amazing show at Flair on the Farm.  I will have a booth there again this year and I'm so excited!  It's my favorite show of the year!  

I was thrilled to be able to participate in Flair on the Farm Spring Fling show in April as well.  Their shows always have great attendance and an amazing selection of vendors.  The Spring Fling show was no exception and I'm sure the Holiday Boutique will be even better!

My booth at the Spring Fling show in April 2014.

Vendor booths along side a rustic farm building.

The setting is rustic and charming!  Set on an actual working farm, there are vendors inside a antique barn and also outside on a manicured lawn area.

Shoppers outside the historic barn.

The spring show boasted over 60 vendors, a wine and mimosa bar, a food truck and tea stand.  The holiday show is expected to be another great one, with the addition of a gift wrap booth, dessert vendors and more.



My craft show display ideas and tips...

Each show is a challenge for me to find new and better ways to display my items.  I'm constantly adding and changing elements and no two booths are ever the same.

This past show, I had a lot more tea towels and had to be creative in finding ways to display them.  I finally settled on this clothesline approach.  I liked the way it separated my booth from my neighbor's booth without feeling like a wall. 

I also had extra towels laying on the table, but found I had to constantly fix the display after customers went through them or after the wind picked up.  I'm still thinking about a better way to display the towels.

For some of my smaller items, I used assorted tins and dishes to corral the individual pieces.  Paper gift tags were used for my pricing.  I've found if your items aren't priced you end up repeating yourself so many times during the show, it's better to label everything from the very beginning!

These wooden apple crates were a new item I added to my displays for this show.  They were an inexpensive and easy way to add some height to my display.  I found them at a local craft store on sale and spent less than $20 for two.  Eventually, I'd like to paint or stain them a nice color, but in the meantime they still look nice in the natural wood color.  Bonus--I used them to haul in other display pieces from my car!

Another thing I like to have at my shows is a little bowl of candy and a big stack of business cards.  The candy lures them in and the cards are a great way to get follow-up business.  This little mug was from my grandmother's set of dishes and it was just right for holding some hard candies.  The card holder was purchased off of Etsy from a shop called Creative Works.

Gorgeous farm buildings against a bright blue sky.

This show is one of my favorites and always has a unique selection of vendors.  Plus you can't beat the gorgeous setting.  It's a bit of a drive out to the country, but it's well worth it!  Hope to see you out there on Saturday, November 22nd!

My new friend, the blind barn cat.

View of the farm from the road.

Craft Show Display Ideas #2

The spring craft show season is almost here!  I'm scouring Pinterest and going through my photos of past events and looking for ways to improve my displays.  My booth is different each time I do an event, and over the years it's evolved and changed.

Last November I was honored to be chosen as a vendor for the fall Flair on the Farm show and I think this booth was my best yet!   This was an outdoor event so I used a large canopy with a white backdrop to separate my booth from my neighbor behind me.

I made a fun fabric scrap garland to decorate the back wall of the booth and hold my sign.  I really like how that helped identify my booth and added some shabby flair.  For my upcoming shows I am going to work on improving my sign with a bit more homemade character.  Maybe embroidery? Or applique?

This was also the first show in a while that gave me a full 10ft x10ft booth.  I thought I would have so much room, but there just never seems to be enough!  I was one table short of what I needed so I ended up using my chair to display items. (I reclaimed it later in the day when my feet were tired!)

I was also given the challenge of a corner booth, so my other side of the booth had to be viewable from two sides.  This ended up being pretty challenging, I spent a lot of time shuffling things around.  I also wanted to be careful what items I placed on that table to detract from any possible theft.  The benefit of this corner location was a lot of traffic which outweighed any display challenges!

I put smaller items like rings and hairpins inside the booth where I could keep my eye on them. (Recognize that hairpin board from this post? I'm still so impressed with that late-night creation!)  Trays full of black beans provided an interesting display for the rings.   The shutters I found at a garage sale a while back helped hang some totes and added some height to the display.  I also had a sale basket on the ground with odds and ends that I wanted to get rid of.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with how this booth turned out.  I think I need to add at least one more table, or two, and maybe some more height for visual interest.  I really like this idea using those cheap wooden crates from craft stores.

I will be participating in the Flair on the Farm Spring Fling show coming up this weekend.  My booth is in the center of an aisle so my set-up will have to change.  I also plan on using another table and some new display pieces.  I will be taking lots of pictures of my booth this time so you can see how it all turns out.

If you are local come say hi to me at the show!  Here is the info:

Travel with Kids - Travel Laundry Bags

We are in the midst of Spring Break season and I know a lot of families use this time to schedule a fun family vacation.  In the planning stages it sounds fun and relaxing, but traveling with kids is totally different experience than adult travel.  There is a whole different set of necessities and items needed for a peaceful, relaxing and fun vacation.

In addition to all the toys, snacks and electronics needed for the car or plane ride getting there, there are also little things that can make your destination with kids a bit more tolerable.

When we stay in hotels, we always seem to have a dirty laundry problem.  Maybe it's just my kids that haven't learned how to live out of a suitcase properly, but we inevitably run into the same problems every hotel stay.  The dirty clothes end up getting piled up into a corner, or worse mingled back into the suitcase with the clean clothes.  By the end of the stay there is a pile of stinky dirty clothes to try to stuff back into a suitcase.  If I wanted to stare at piles of laundry, I could have skipped the vacation and just stayed home.

Some hotels provide the little plastic laundry bags that I think you are supposed to use for the in-hotel cleaning services, but we usually end up using them for our own dirty laundry to take home.  But they must be the thinnest plastic ever made because they ALWAYS end up busting open when we stuff them too full.

Enter these nifty little bags I made up for the boys.  They are just simple drawstring bags, sized about 18" x 24" with a cotton cord drawstring closure.  They will hold most of the kids dirty laundry for a 3-4 day trip and can easily be hung on a doorknob or chair to keep the hotel room nice and neat.

BONUS: Upon repacking, just toss the bag into the suitcase and you don't have to touch the dirty clothes and it will keep them separate from any unworn clean clothes.  (I tend to overpack with kids, and I hate having to wash everything when we get home because of contamination, LOL.)

If you want to make your own, free tutorials on drawstring bags are easy to find online.  Ours are just basic bags because I was in a hurry, but you can customize these and make them as simple or embellished as you like.  Color-blocking, contrasting lining, appliques or embroidered monograms would make these bags truly special as well as functional.  I used a cotton cord for the drawstring (it reminds me of a clothes line), but you could also use ribbon or make a fabric drawstring.  The possibilities are endless!

Or if you are not a seamstress, there are very cute ones for sale on Etsy.  I love this bag by Swoon.  Just search for "drawstring bag" or "laundry bag" and you'll get lots of handmade options!

Happy (and organized) traveling everyone!