To Market, To Market

This was my first weekend doing two markets - one on Saturday and one on Sunday. It was an experiment, if only to see if I stayed vertical the whole time. I did, but Sunday is not over yet....

Saturday's market - my regular one that I have done for 5 years now - went well, especially since the weather was way nicer than predicted. Can't trust those weather-predicting people! It was sunny and warm, but not too humid, so it was tolerable. Business was fairly brisk, and we had an okay day.

Lookey what I got:

Have you ever seen purple onions like this before? I hadn't, so it was the perfect reason to buy some.

And the farmer from south of us has these already this season. YUM-O!

The highlight of my day, aside from some pretty good sales :-), was the arrival of Krum's adoptive Mom with recent pictures of him, and he is gorgeous! He is just shy of a year old now - my, how time flies! She is going to make me a copy of one of the pics so I can show you all.

After I got home, I knew I needed to finish watercoloring all those townhouse cards, but I laid down on the couch, just to rest my eyes, you know. Two hours later, I woke up. Yikes! I spent the rest of the evening finishing the cards, and I actually got them all done!

This morning I went to my Sunday market for the first time. It is the first year for this market, and it is a lot larger than the Saturday one I do. They have several bakers, a guy making omelettes, today they had a cooking demo, and they have live music. I had a pretty good day sales-wise. Lots of new people who loved the idea of not-so-standard cards. :-) I sold one pack of the townhouse cards, plus I got a special order for 5 Thank You cards. And I met a LOT of great people. From what everyone told me, today was an unusually slow day, so I guess I could do even better with more traffic. I told them I'll be there next week, too.

But to show you what I do when things are slow ... I had my camera, so I decided to do a study in tent anchors. You know, those heavy things you put on your tent corners to keep it from blowing away when a big wind hits. A lot of people had empty gallon jugs filled with water or sand, but for me, I'd need to store them somewhere, so they are not really an option, so I had to be more creative. I was actually surrounded by a lot of tent anchor creativity, so here ya go:

Here's mine - 20-lb containers of kitty litter. They are compact (I can store them in my car) and useful (I bring one inside when I need one for the litter box.) I am actually down to three in the car since I dipped into the reserves, so if we had a big wind, I hope the three I have would do.

My booth neighbor had these hanging tubes, filled with something heavy like concrete or maybe just sand. Very professional-looking, but not very practical, in my opinion. But he's been doing this for many, many years, and maybe he has a bigger place than I do, and can store a uni-tasker like this one.











Across from me was a booth with wicked-good bread, and they had this on one of their tent legs. Practical, but not nearly heavy enough. But he was a pretty big guy, so I bet if he stood in the middle of his tent and just held onto the center, he'd be fine.


This is the sand bag version. Some tents come with bags you can fill with sand, but I think this guy went out on his own. Very heavy and very effective, if you have some place to store them, which I do not. Also, I think he actually needs to attach these to the tent for them to work very well. I wonder how many of these 'anchors' were there just to appease the market organizers. ;-)

You will notice the tent behind this one is not anchored at all. Baaaad people! :-) I'd probably bungie my tent onto the one with the sand bags ...

While I was taking these pictures, the photographer in the next booth came out to talk with me about my camera. I told him how the photographer at my Saturday market told me I need to upgrade, but this guy said since I am not blowing up the pics - just printing them for cards, there was no reason to upgrade unless I was not happy with the pics, which I am (happy). But he said if I do upgrade, I should get one with separate lenses, which sounded expensive, plus it would not fit in the bag I haul to the markets each week, so not upgrading sounds better all the time. Think how many stamps and how much paper I can get instead! Hey, I think I've just justified all my purchases so far this year!!! I love it when a plan comes together!

Then we noticed the cool clouds in the sky. It was supposed to be really hot and stormy and nasty today, and we kept looking for evidence coming our way, so that is why we were looking at the sky. So I took this photo. Like I said, a slow day. I'll try to use this one a card, somehow.

Right now I feel another nap coming on .... this may be my ticket to a decent Monday at the Day Job. Off to snooze a bit. Catch ya later!