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08.01.2022
After 4 years of bullet journaling, I have found (kinda) new bujo set up that suits me best. And this year's planner is from my sister. The middle picture is my favorite habit tracker style, using dutch doors so that I won't have to repeatedly write the date. The pic on the right is some of my favorite non fictions book, highly recommended.
Anyway, how are you people? I hope you have a wonderful new year because mine obviously sucks. Stay healthy okay.
- Angel <3
I had a table at a small crafts fair this weekend. The event was the Thanksgiving Artist & Burner Bazaar, up on the seventh floor of a cool old loft building in South Boston. It was a fun laid-back affair, and I sold a fair amount of stuff. I have a bunch of photos of the rest of the event, which I may post later.
I had a table at a craft fair called stART at the Station in Worcester MA on Sunday. It was highly successful. Here is my table setup, with my boyfriend sitting behind. He helped with getting there and manning the table, and I would not have made it without the help.
This was my table setup while vending at Intercon, which is a LARP convention not too far from Boston. It’s a small convention, and there were only vendors, but it’s always fun. One of the other vendors also had chainmail, so I emphasized my leather work more.
A few of the pieces I had here were new designs that I hadn’t put up on Etsy yet, like the big sewn-together wolf mask, the cthulhu mask, the crazy rainbow spiked head piece, and a pair of segmented bracers.
Plus I had my most recent non-commission dragon tail there as a show piece. It’s the big loud rainbow thing with the wooden spade tip. You can’t miss it.
All in all, the convention was a success! Played a couple fun LARPs, sold a good amount of stuff, hung out with friends, traded art with some of the other vendors! Good times all around.
In a surprising turn of events, yesterday I got to vend at Arisia, Boston’s sci-fi/fantasy fandom convention. I’d been attending with my boyfriend and enjoying the weekend by wandering the convention dressed in a sequence of costumes (see second photo) and handing out my business cards. (I had applied to vend in the dealers’ room, but had been wait-listed.)
A friend of mine who makes chocolates had two tables in the dealers’ room. (She does fantastic stuff, by the way. Doesn’t have an online store for small sales, but is usually excited to do larger orders for events. Go check her out at Dark Matter Chocolate Laboratory!) But she’d had some prolonged sicknesses and lots of other work to do through last number of months, and her sales were outstripping the supply of chocolate she’d been able to make. Sunday afternoon she was looking at only being able to fill half of her space come Monday (the last day of the convention). The guy in charge of the dealers’ room was unhappy about the idea of having an empty table, and my friend suggested that I could fill in the open table with my stuff!
So after taking the subway back home, packing up all the stock I happened to have on hand, and dragging it back to the convention center, I got to set up my wares! Monday was definitely the slow day of the convention, but I made some decent sales, and getting a foot in the door with the convention staff is definitely a good thing. Hopefully next year I’ll get a table the whole weekend!
This was the other thing that kept me busy this last month: I was vending at a Boston-area LARP convention called Intercon. I’ve been attending and vending there for a couple years, and it’s always fun. It’s on the small end for selling, but it’s a great place for costumes and masks.
The last photo shows all the masks I’d made for it in the week leading up to the convention. A bunch of new copies of designs I’ve done before, and a few new designs. I’ll probably be photographing a pile of them and posting individual shots soon.
Photos of my vending booth at the convention I was at this last weekend. The convention was Intercon, a LARPing convention I’ve been going to for a few years now. It’s a fairly quiet convention as far as selling goes, since people are mostly there to play LARPs. Very different feeling from a typical fandom convention. But I always sell a decent amount of costume parts.
Sadly I was unable to get onto a laser cutter in the time leading up to the convention, due to things being down for maintenance. So I couldn’t restock masks, which made me feel bad. Though I’d forgotten just how many medium-to-large sized things I had stashed away, so it turned out I easily filled the table.
I think one of the cutters is back online now, so I should be able to make some orders people’d made through Etsy last week. I’m thinking about new designs to make again, so that feels good. Weather and lighting permitting, I’ll probably get some photos of some small things to post to Etsy in the next week. And I’m hoping to open for dragon tail commission requests soon, so keep your eyes open for that.
I'm at Arisia! Got me two tables filled up nicely with leather masks and armor and jewelry! Hooray for getting enough stuff produced to have a respectable booth, even though I only had a week's notice!
This last weekend I was in the dealers’ den at Anthro New England. It was my first time vending at a furry convention, and it went pretty well! I sold a bunch of masks, took a couple tail commissions, and got some art from neighbor vendors.
Between this and Arisia last month, it was good to get some insight into which sorts of things in my line of products resonate with people in those contexts. The most popular things for catching peoples’ eyes were the robot dragon drone hood, scale tail, and pet rocks; while the things that sold the quickest were the raven skull masks, scale mail bracelets, and leather fortune cookies.
I’ll definitely be looking into more conventions and other venues to sell stuff at. The big challenge will be logistics--since I don’t have a car (it’s way more trouble than it’s worth when living in Boston), getting myself to non-local cons will require making better friends with people who go places and carpooling. (Or I guess learning to drive and renting a car, but that’s even more expenses.)
I’ll also need to think about how to diversify my product range, because it’s definitely true that only a relatively small minority of people will actually buy a mask, even if they really like it. So I may resume working on everyday-carry sorts of things, like the notebook covers I’ve done in the past. I’d kinda like to do more leather bracelets again, but last time I had them at a con I only sold like 2 of them, so that didn’t seem to be a winner.
I’ll also be looking into cons with art shows, because I think the big hoods may have a better chance at selling in that sort of context.
Anyway, things were fairly successful on the whole, and over the next couple months I’ll be mulling over how to improve more.
Not the best photos, but I wanted to show what my table at Anthro New England looked like!
The convention went extremely well. Selling by myself the whole weekend was very tiring, but I was so excited to show all the new things I’d made in the last 2 years.
Closeup photo is of my shitpost corner. The pet rocks are classics that I always like to make. The slap bracelets I worked out specifically for this convention, because the theme was The 90s.
Here's some photos of my table setup from Anthro New England, finally getting around to posting them.
I had 2 nearly totally separate table setups, actually--one from the regular dealers' den, and one from the 18+ night market. The daytime table had all my masks and jewelry, the after-dark one had mostly collars and codpieces, with the big hoods and a couple harnesses thrown in for good measure.
The convention was my most successful one to date, but I aim to do even better in the future!
