We had a mini craft fair on Saturday at a ham radio club flea market (the president is a friend). "Ham radios?" you may be asking yourselves, "how do Tory and Elise expect Funky & Delightful to go over in this world? These girls are wack!" Well, dear readers, we have a confession to make. Not to reveal too much about our real life identities, but Tory and I are pretty comfortable in the world of precision instrumentation; one might say we speak near fluent geek ourselves. So, when offered an exclusive gig selling our handmade wares at an event where 200+ men would be in desperate need of last-minute gifts in attendance on Valentine's Day we couldn't resist.
Given our last experience with local craft fairs, we had pretty low expectations for this one so we decided not to go to town putting together an entirely new collection. We managed to cobble together quite a few odds and ends left over from past events: bibs, onsies, wallets etc. Of course, we did add a few new items: Tory whipped up a few charming handbags and some coffee cup cozies and I put together a handful of patchwork scarves and some fabric flower pins. There were a few late nights and weekends spent in our respective sewing rooms, but overall it was a pretty low-key effort.
Saturday morning found us in a middle school cafeteria surrounded by vendors and collectors offering a huge array of vacuum tubes, resistors, radios and computer parts. It was really fun, we had lots of people stopping by to chat with us and just about everyone was friendly and interesting. I'd like to think that our amazing table drew people over, but I'm sure it helped that we were the only two women under 50. Someone, assuming that we were students at the school, asked us where the bathrooms were; it was pretty funny. As for sales, we exceeded our goal and are pretty sure we saved a few husbands from the dog house by making sure they didn't go home empty-handed. We even sold the one remaining apron from our very first craft fair which was a bit of a relief. As an added bonus, I managed to score a few cool items for myself. On a table of mostly technical manuals, I found a 1969 Sears Roebuck catalogue in mint condition plus a handful of vintage travel brochures. All-in-all, Geekfest 2009 was a roaring success.
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