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Basically, I got caught by the street dancing and the merry making. After 27 years of my life, this was the first time I truly enjoyed a festival fair. And that’s saying something, because I rarely, RARELY ever enjoy myself in any of these shindigs. So, what was different with this festival fair?

For one thing, I had realized that variety does indeed wonders for the shopaholic’s heart. When a person is faced with much excitement and happiness and revelry and all that pizzazz, the thing is that, his serotonin levels rise.

Serotonin makes people happy (you could call it the happy hormone if you like. Wink wink!) And when people are happy, it usually makes them go buy more, without the usual regard and limit for the budget (which is somewhat a bad thing for them and a good thing for you. Hey, it’s not the best way, but it’s one way of the world you can use to your advantage!)

So it’s a good idea to time your booth or your fair in a local town festival, instead of going solo or going pro. You’d need all the happy people you can get to indulge you in your craft. Remember, a happy person can be a good customer. Of course, you’d want to have a happy customer rather than a frowny customer now, wouldn’t you?

Another good thing about timing your booth or your craft table in a festival is that you never need to worry about publicity, exposure or a lack of audience. It’s a town festival. Everyone is expected to go there, or at least be there. And with that, you get the attention of a full range of demographics, from the youngest of the bunch to the oldest daddy senior of the family. You also get a full range of cultures, both home grown to foreign and exotic people.

There are a lot of food courses you can take should you be interested in taking up food crafting. Food crafting, even as the name sounds very misleading, is serving food as a way of making income during an arts and crafts festival. Food preparation is a craft in itself, as well as being able to prepare it with much gusto both for you and your customers. There are certain factors that should be understood should you delve in the world of food and food preparation.

One, you should be able to determine your specialty. Firstly, do you even like food preparation? Let me tell you that this craft is not for everyone. You should have the passion of a chef and a business man. Remember, you are not there to only cook and to serve, but you are there to also entertain and to manage your dealings. There’s more to just food preparation, is what I would reiterate.

Think of the food you would choose. For one, if it is about food crafting then it should be something that is not as cumbersome and complicated. Like say, chili for example. Unless you are really themed for chili, I wouldn’t recommend using chili as a forerunner for food preparation and serving, especially if you’re just a beginner. Chili is expensive, is quite hassling to make, another hassle to bring to the site, and a hassle for samplers. It is just plain messy, heavy, and not to mention, gas-inducing.

I would suggest you go with something simple, easy to store and serve, and ergonomic. I’m thinking finger foods, cupcakes or cookies, or anything dry; something easy to hold and eat with one hand. That way, the serving feature would be easier and the people would be more motivated to try out your goodies.

Think about it. If someone served chili on a craft fair, and they’re advertising it for purchase (probably a mix or a catering service), would you spend your time hanging around if there is no service area or table in sight?

Remember the hassled times when you went into a fair, realized you lugged so much stuff around and only to find out sooner or later that you really did not need the extra load? It is such a pain and a hassle to have brought all your stuff, only to just leave it in the car because you did not know what to expect in a festival fair.

First off, determine if the fair is for a day only or if you are planning to stay for the night. Festivals can go on for days or even a total week. And if you are the kind of person that had just come from the next state, without a hotel or a motel to stay in, camping out in your car is ideally, a very bad thing to consider. So make sure, that when you are taking cross-country trips, always bring with you a tent of some sort. One that could easily fit 2 people in the back of your trunk.

Needless to say, you’d need a sleeping bag to along with your tent. Sleeping bags are important to keep the morning dew away and to prevent nasty insects from chewing you up while you sleep or retire for the night. Sleeping bags are also convenient on those cloudless nights when you have half the mind to just set up a mosquito net under a tree and sleeping in the wild (make sure there aren’t any bears around in your area).

When morning comes, pack up your stuff and go for the drive to the site (or if you’re there, then pack up and continue your sight seeing spree). When going out in outdoor festivals, make sure to bring a wide-brimmed hat and some sunscreen with maximum SPF protection to prevent nasty burns or worse, skin cancer.

Replicating everything inside the house would be the perfect way to try and emulate the size and the amount of space needed for your table. There are a few more ways for you to cause disasters in your area, and it is best that you are able to cope up with them by being able to understand them and to detect them at the soonest possible time.

Practice how to set up, practice how you will face the customers, practice your routes on where to drop off your goods and your transportation to the venue or the festival area. After practicing for quite a while, try and adjust, observe, detect whether you can do better or if it is enough. Have the cooperation of your family to help you understand the necessary adjustments you have to make in order to improve yourself on your first day to the fair.

Set the large items on the ground, near to the legs of your table. Make sure to tag them so that they don’t get stolen or picked up randomly. (You need property claims and whatnot to be able to claim back confiscated goods because of not being tagged).

Small items, should be found on top of the table, arranged to whatever format that they should be in. Whether it is for utility, alphabetical, or just plain nutty; try and arrange them into something that would make it easier for customers to handle. High attention goods should go in the middle, so that the attention for the customer would radiate from inside out.

Ask help from your fellow crafters and artisans if you require the assistance. Most would be quite pleased to assist you in any way they can, for as long as it is within their resources and power. Utilize this information to help you on your road to craft selling.

My friend has some sizzling talent when it comes to making crafts out of beads and strings. She was always spending her idle time doing so, giving it to her friends, to her classmates, to her teachers, and also, even to me. How she expertly weaves her hands in and out of the threads and bobbles, and then making something simply beautiful still catches me in awe and sweet surrender to her skill. At a later point of our high school year, we became good friends and I suggested that she go try it out for our school fair. Told her that her craft is good, and I’m sure people would pay to have a bit of her work.

That was how she managed to pay off her miscellaneous fees, and how she had done her feasibility studies, all in one. Parents praised her, teachers commended her; she was set off into the beads and baubles industry soon after. And to think she started off with only thinking on how to fund her next day’s supply of beads and strings. Truly amazing.

So basically, she was a starter at the school fair that time, competing with the other school clubs managed by a whole class, teacher cookouts and class driven effort; how did she top it all off?

First, research. For one thing, the people who were given the necklaces had responded favorably to it. It was a hobby right? So she had already given quite a number of the trinkets to different persons. The demography was huge. From teachers who were grandmamas, students who were barely out of puberty, mothers of the parents that came by to see where their children got the necklaces from it was a business idea waiting to be discovered.

She had a good customer base already, because she had established relations with the customers even before the said fair.