Serendipitous Show Scheduling

Some­times oppor­tu­ni­ties fall into your lap, and it’s up to you to rec­og­nize and seize them even if they don’t seem con­ve­nient. Last night I was help­ing out at the GPC–Dun­woody Open House, just stand­ing there talk­ing to prospec­tive com­puter sci­ence stu­dents. Sud­denly the woman my depart­ment head was chat­ting with turned to me and said “Julia, are you doing my craft fair???” I had no clue who she was, and the ques­tion was so far out of con­text that it took me a moment or two to deci­pher the non sequitur. Alli­son had sent out an email a cou­ple of weeks ago look­ing for stu­dents inter­ested in par­tic­i­pat­ing in a craft fair, but I hadn’t paid a lot of atten­tion since I’m not a stu­dent. As it turns out, she was look­ing for fac­ulty, staff, alumni, who­ever, to par­tic­i­pate. Well, once I found that out, and that she wasn’t charg­ing a table fee, it became a no-​brainer. In fact, the show is on a Tues­day (Decem­ber 4) dur­ing the last week of classes, and I have a sus­pi­cion that I just may be able to let my stu­dents have that day to work on their final projects and be there for the whole show.

Then last night I finally got an email back from Rick at Down the Street Bead Shows. I’d sent in a ven­dor request last week­end just in case there was space in the Atlanta show on the 17^th and 18^th. There is, so today I faxed a filled-​out con­tract to them. My friend Min­cot wants to do the show with me, so it’s a low-​risk way for us to try this one out and see how it does.

I’ve been fig­ur­ing that doing three to four local bead shows a year is a rea­son­able thing for me. Bead Mer­can­tile in March worked well, but Jane didn’t do a fall show in Atlanta and doesn’t have any­thing def­i­nite on the books yet for 2008. Yes, Jane and I go back a long way, but with that sched­ule uncer­tain and no more than two shows a year here from them, I need to try out other options as well. Down the Street is at the Cobb Gal­le­ria, which is cer­tainly much more con­ve­nient than all the Inter­galac­tic Bead Shows at the Gwin­nett Civic Center.

So I have two weeks to pull THIS show together, then two after that to pull together the GPC show. I do have plenty of mer­chan­dise for the first one, but after it I will prob­a­bly take some of the remain­ing bead stock and actu­ally put together fin­ished pieces for the sec­ond one. Thank good­ness for Thanks­giv­ing break!