Hey Everyone!
This past weekend in Sunny St. Pete was the Awakening into the Sun Festival. The 2 day even lasted for the morning and right into sun set. I had the pleasure of meeting many extremely talented artists who were all so nice and helpful. I also set up my tent, hung my painting, made some really great sales! It was a total leaning experience to (Some good, some bad). I can't wait to break it down for y'all!
So it starts on Friday evening, I had a late night at the office where I work and the earliest I was able to get out was 10pm. The plan was the Meet up with my girlfriend Bianca at my house to load the cars up for the festival. This worked out great as she was getting back from a girls trip and had gotten in at 10:30. We meet at my place, get some food, load the cars up and get out around midnight. We were able to drive over to the festival site with out a hitch and landed around 1 AM. By the time we set the tent up and got everything squared away it was 2 AM and let me tell you sleep sounded soooo nice. My parents were nice enough to let us crash in their apartment not far away, as much as I wanted to sleep I stayed up cutting labels and doing some final prep work. 3 AM rolled around and my head has never hit a pillow so fast!
Day 1:
My day started bright and at 6:00 (who needs sleep when there are paintings to sell), I attached hooks onto my paintings, finished up the last bit of prep work and I was off to hang my art work! The way the market was set up, there were tons of tents lining the sidewalks and then you have the WADA Arts district (That Me!). The idea was that we were supposed to be the feature for the festival, except we were out in this field and people were walking right past the entrance to our "village". This was detrimental to sales of the first day. It also didn't help that out circle of tents wasn't fully enclosed. Never the less I met the other artists attending and got to know these really nice people. Many of my friends and family stopped by to say hi and check out the market. Big thank you to everyone who swung by! I sold 2 painting the first day and was so excited!
Day 2:
Some of the other artist decided that is wasn't worth their time to hang around the market and left, yet there was still a lot of us. We inclosed the circle and placed a sign out front to guide people in. This helped dramatically, even though there was less total visitors to the market on the 2nd day, our village still had more people checking it out! My tent was initially set up with tarps in the corners making a "L" formation, on the 2nd day i decided to move one of the tarps to make a tunnel feel. this worked well at keeping the shade and provided a nice breeze. Unfortunately I underestimated the wind and one of my tarps acted as a sail and almost took my tent with it! Luckily, there were no flying tarps to be had. I ended up removing a tarp and everything ended up being ok. By the end of the day I sold 4 more paintings! I was going to have a plan to give out sunflowers to everyone who bought a painting but to be honest I was so excited when someone bought one I completely forgot! Overall I had a blast at the festival, it was so nice to meet so many talented people and I look forward to the next time I can sell!
Special thanks to my girlfriend for helping me set everything up and haul things and to my mom who kept me hydrated and fed all throughout the days!
Thank you all for reading and until next time!
Carver McCaskill
