Still...Getting Ready for Art Beat

As I continue getting ready for Art Beat, I'm getting down to it! I have gotten word about my booth location, and am thrilled to learn that I’ll be right on Michigan St., in the middle of it all! Not to mention, really near a great coffee shop… Ahhh! Coffee!

{The South Bend Chocolate Company}

{the counter where I will be lining up}

I’ve printed out some cute tags to use and spent Saturday evening cutting them out while watching a movie. So I have some tags that look like this:

Now the pain will be figuring out how to attach them to the various necklaces, bracelets, and earrings. My best idea right now involves gluing them to store-bought tags... But boy, if something better comes to me, I'll try it!

I also printed up some special treats for anyone who buys something from me. One is a coupon for 10% off in my Etsy shop for future purchases. The other is an invitation to my open house, which is coming up in November.

{side note - I don't have photoshop, and do my photo editing in Microsoft Office Picture Manager. So at one point this summer, I used this washout function to turn a picture of mine into a background. Too cool - I used it to make gift certificates. Then a couple of weeks past, and I wanted to do it again...but couldn't remember how I had done it! Let me tell you, I lost a day of my life trying to figure it out! (And probably earned a new gray hair or two!) It got so bad that I actually gave up, dropped it, and decided that I was hopeless. Randomly, a couple of weeks later, while working on something else, it hit me! The washout function was in Microsoft Word...(how could I have forgotten that I was in a different program...) I'll never forget that again. So if you want to wash out a photo for a background, and don't have any fancy photo editing software, here's what you do: Insert the photo into a word document and double click it. Under the photo tab, change the dropdown for color: to "washout". Done! And then you can write on top of it!!!}

My sign up sheet is all ready. Plus I'm working on my binder that will sort of serve as a catalog:

My biggest difficulty is setting up my booth in a way that doesn’t look kind of messy. I have no sewing skills, so table coverings for me are really just pieces of fabric roughly cut with a pair of scissors! I’m hoping to do better this year, but I’m not really sure how that will happen…

I’m working on collecting some display items to help get my jewelry up off the table tops. For some reason, I always find the BEST stuff at Pier One {pardon the poor photography - I was being lazy!}

And my newest acquisition... Halloween Schmalloween, I say a glittery black metal tree is always in season! I picked this up the other day and plan to hang some necklaces from the branches.

I hope everyone else is having more luck than I am in pulling together whatever it is that you are working on right now!