Convention Countdown - 4 Days to Go

My easels and acrylic risers came today. I am *almost* there with the displays now. I thought I'd share a bit about how I constructed my displays, not that I'm any expert, as the last time I did this, all I had were a couple of spinning wire racks and a few necklace stands...it was enough for the small space I had in the 'artist's alley', though.

I have visited a number of great crafts fair stalls (during our annual Art and Wine Festival) where the sellers have obviously put a lot of time and effort and imagination into their displays. Eventually I hope to be able to justify doing (and have the time to find the stuff) something fabulous, but for now I'm trying to keep costs as low as I can without coming off too cheap.

First the stuff I bought. I mentioned above that I got 3 floor easels and risers to give my display more vertical interest, instead of everything flat on the table. I bought 4 clear acrylic risers, two low and long rectangular ones and two squares. The squares are pretty cool - "corner turn" is the descriptive name, and they look like this:

The easels are made of antiqued copper tubing and stand 76" high. I got them on closeout sale from displays2gofor what I think is a pretty decent price. I can't share a picture from the website, but I'll be taking a photo of my finished display when it's up at the convention and you can see it then. They're pretty!

I wanted to have some of my lanyards hanging on some kind of backing that I could put on those easels - so I bought foam display boards, covered them in fabric and then used U pins to pin the lanyards on. I have to figure out what to do for trim around the edge of the fabric covered board, it looks rather plain right now. I thought about some kind of light wood molding, but I don't have a way to miter cut the edges...still pondering what to do about that.

Then I bought some small wire easel frames from the floral aisle at Michael's and some ecru colored counted cross-stitch fabric. I put the fabric inside "poster frames" - each part of the frame is a separate piece that slides over the fabric and cardboard backing until all four sides are captured tightly against the backing by the frame pieces. I embellished the black plastic poster frame with some brass stampings on the corners. I use U pins again to pin lighter objects, like eyeglass lanyards and earrings through the nice, evenly spaced holes in the cross stitch fabric, and then hang the whole thing on the small wire easel frames.

I'd already invested last year in quite a few raw silk covered necklace displays in multiple colors (you can see the coral and beige ones in the picture above), so I am going to use those, too. But I also bought some clear glass vases and sea-shells that I'm going to use to display my pearl lanyards. These will sit on cork circles about 7" in diameter.

I'm a bit nervous about all this - but can't wait to get it all set up and take some pictures to share. I hope I can make some sales, but even if I don't it will be a good experience and fun to be part of the convention.

I did have a few moments tonight to work on some new stuff - earrings and necklace with onyx lentils, iridescent Czech glass bicones, and silver ox floral links and silver ox floral stamping from Accessories Susan. The chain is about 20" and the floral pendant is about an inch long. The earrings dangle just over 2 inches from the earwire.