One Craft Fair Down/One to Go!

Yesterday was Country Fest in Mt. Vernon, TX, and students on the DI teams I manage sold their wares outside of M. L. Edwards & Company Emporium on the square. While the stamps they used were SU! only, many kind people donated supplies for us to work with, and we were more than happy to use them!

We sold over half the bags of Autumn Trail Mix and Texas Trash that the students made on Friday afternoon. The rest will go quickly when we get back to school tomorrow. I'm very thankful to my friend, Ellen, for giving us the Autumn Trail Mix recipe last Wednesday. We started using it on Thursday, and it's been a BIG hit. Plus we're super excited to have something to sell that doesn't have to be coated in white chocolate almond bark first!

We had one table (the one with the green cloth) of $1 items that sold well. Besides the bags of trail mix and trash, we had the large decorated magnet paper clips, the garden pebble magnets, and the chocolate mints covered with scallop circle toppers. One set was white with ghosts. The other was pumpkin pie with spiders.

We also sold quite a few cards on this table. Most of them were my examples from classes I've taught over the past six months since some of our "helpers" on Friday managed to damage the majority of the cards the kids had ready to sell. Fortunately, most of them were not damaged beyond repair, so we should be able to rework them in time for our craft fair at school at the beginning of December.

Our other table had items ranging in price from $3 - $10. We sold almost all of the little trinket boxes we made (thank you, Dollar Tree!), most of the altered Halloween letters, most of the small altered frames, a few medium altered frames, and two large altered frames.

The kids were disappointed that none of their framed words sold. We'll need to decide if we should add more embellishments to them or lower the price, but in this economy, we had a hard time moving the $10 items.

One of the teachers at our school donated tons of tiles to us. We stamped small and medium-sized tiles with StazOn. We hot glued matching ribbons on the back to make them wall hangings and sold about 2/3 rds of the ones we took. We even got a special order for one from a customer who offered to pay in advance. That was one of the highlights of the day.

The main benefit of the craft fair (besides the money the students earned) was the fact that it was an incredible bonding experience for the children, and by the end of the day, they'd turned into very savvy sales people!