EdwardSowards's blog

Well dogarama is finally over so I don't have an excuse to not write about crafts or antiques.

OK here is one more shameless promotion. By now you have seen all of the ads on this site for dogarama, as well as the newspaper ads, the posters and every other way we could get the word out. If we haven't brainwashed you about this yet, we never will.

Anyway I just want to say that this is going to be a great event for the family including Fido and Fluffy. So come on out Saturday ALL DAY and join in the fun.

This time I am going to write about something entirely different. By now you have been hearing about something called dogarama. As I am a member of the Main Street Marketing Committee, I happen to know quite a bit about dogarama. Many of you have attended our past dogarama events. I have herd a lot of positive feedback about them not having been to one myself. The things that I hear are that it is always a fun event.

Believe it or not, it's time to think about Christmas. That is if you are selling crafts for the holidays. By now we all should have our list of desired craft shows and have most of them if not all booked and paid for. However if you are like me that isn't actually the case. Every year Jill and I say that we will get our shows booked early so that we can be sure to get into the ones that we want. I don't know about you, but that just isn't my human nature.

For those of you who are new crafters I have a little advice. If you are going to sell your crafts at shows, now is the time to be thinking about the fall and winter shows. We just got an invitation to participate in a show in Grand Rapids on December 6^th.

I thought that I might talk a little bit about selling antiques. While it’s true that many of us have antique collections, it’s also true that sometimes we just tire of that particular collection. This is certainly not always the case. For the most part we collect what we really like and simply can’t get enough of them. We just want to display them for the world to see, but mostly for ourselves.

I guess that it’s time to write something again. I was in a meeting with my friend Eleanor this past week. She was talking about a craft show that she attended last weekend. It is one that she used to do very well at. This year that was not the case. It seems that this show was very much like many others this spring very slow. Even though there were several people there, they just weren’t buying.

After trying spring craft shows for the first time this year I am not convinced that is the way I want to go. I am not convinced that people have the same desire to purchase at this time of year as they do in the fall and obviously just before Christmas.

My mother-in-law is coming to visit for a couple of days. This is a good thing. Friday morning Jill is going to meet her in Michigan City. They will meet at the Antique mall near the expressway. They will probably stay there until about lunch time, then after lunch head back. I think that they have planned stops in Coloma and then Saugatuck, (of course for antique shops) before hitting the ones in Holland and beyond.

Like some others around here, my work life has been very hectic. One would think since I have two subjects to write about that I would just whip something out. I used to believe that too. That is not quite so. We have been very buisy putting out our first edition of myZeeland the newspaper. This is the print publication that we have been promising Zeeland for several months. It is the sister media to this site, myZeeland.com.
I aboslutely believe that all of the very hard work and the seemingly long wait will prove to be worth while.