Spashes of Colour!

Two of my fellow market vendors and buddies!

Character of the Historic Farmers' Market

Know how I always post that we are usually by the 3 Orange doors at the market

Here they are!

Instead of the spring Tweet, Tweet, Tweet, today we have Tweak, Tweak Tweak!!!

Well if you read my last blog entry, of changing, our clothespins on the rack, it lead to a complete re-thinking of display, decluttering, and retweaking!  My complete thought process changed to get ready for our next market, this coming Saturday, April 23, 2016.  When I get something new in my head I have to try it, I can let it be, I have to see it, to get a new prospective, a new feel!  So last night, we added all the new steel clothespins onto our display rack.  Blake, attentively attached them with little O-rings, and I began to tweak, tweak, tweak, in my head, and physcially to arrange for a new look!

One of the things I did do also, was to reinforce my long narrow basket to make it stronger.  It was getting weak from constant use.  This the basket I use for the overflow of baby hat stock, that I place on the floor for customers to browse through.  We also cut off one of the baby hat spindles from our hat stand and now it is independant. I have one small baby hat on it now. For photos reasons it was in the baby hat basket. But I did eventually decide to display it on the table with our business cards.  Just another tweak!  Our baby hat stand now has "6" spots rather than the previous 7, that is placed over head of the Sock display rack. Tweaked there too to make a smaller space, when the wire rungs of the rack will now be higher and closer together. Tweak, Tweak, Tweak! 

In the tweaking process, I also added more sock pair selections to each row of sizes as these steel clothespins allow for more items to fill the rows.  I also got creative and dug out my nail polish colours and painted the little dots in the clothespins centers, to correspond with the colours of yarn we use to match all the sizes.  For example in the previous post we might have noticed the center was Aqua, and that is the colour that represents Women's size 5.  

And, because we were able to add more socks to the rack in general, I was able to retweak the other space for our market table and use it more effectively.  I changed things around and displayed certain items differently.  All and all I/we think the improvements look good ,and that all changes physcially adjusted to the rack will help to make our step-up be more sturdy also.  Sturdy is a giant key now that the rack is holding more weight with heavier clothespins and more sock pairs too.  I did a dry-run set-up today, so that, with so many changes, I knew exactly what was where, and what the total out come would look like.  Looks grand, so onto to the next project!

 

Out with the OLD and in with the NEW!

Old Wooden clothespins vs. New steel Clothespins?
Ok Blake won out, we have been discussing this battle for sometime now, and I was bucking it all the way, and finally gave into the idea!!  I liked the "oldness" of the old fashioned wooden clothespins!  But our clothespins were getting over-used and needed to be replaced.  I replaced them a few times but could not find good quality, and the last time was a disaster with clothespins flying off our rack at any given time, even giving our customers a startle.  I was chasing clothespins and they were breaking.  And it was getting very frustrating.  I agreed to try the steel clothespin for half the rack this week.  They worked, wonderfully, as I hid my head under my spring jacket, sheepishly, not to admit that MrB was right :-)  So after the market yesterday we trekked off to Lee Valley to buy some more packages.  That lead to a complete overhaul of display, storage and new ideas!  More on that to come in the next blog posting....

To our Customers of Yesterday's Market

Thanks a bunch!