Nicolette’s Design Diary

The Frederick Festival of the Arts is the last show in my spring schedule. It takes place in the quaint historic section of Frederick, Maryland by a small canal and is also the first show of the year that takes place outdoors. Being the control freak that I am, I prefer doing indoor craft shows. Rain, wind, temperature, and humidity can kill a show and kill sales. This is the 13th year for this festival, but according to some of my fellow artists and customers, the last couple years proved to be bad ones weather wise. Last year, it rained all day on Saturday. The year before, a windstorm tore down several tents and tossed both booths and artwork in the quaint little canal. One artist lost $10,000 worth of work in 10 seconds because of that windstorm. A hazard of the trade I really prefer to avoid.

Being that I’m so paranoid about avoiding the weather-related perils of an outdoor show, it’s ironic that this weekend I forgot two cardinal rules of outdoor shows. I guess I’ve been spoiled by having all of those indoor shows at the beginning of the season….

Cardinal Rule of Outdoor shows #1- Always secure the roof of your tent against rain

Set up day for the show took place yesterday, on Friday. My husband James, and I arrived Friday afternoon, took about 2 hours to set up the tent and the interior display and then secured the booth for the night. That night it rained. Not a hard rain, but a slow, steady rain that lasted most of the night. I was mainly worried that the rain would continue on through Saturday. But as we left the hotel and headed toward the show grounds we saw that while the skies were cloudy, the rain had appeared to have stopped for good. The temperature was a cool 65 degrees and the overcast weather would help keep the temperature mild. I felt good.

When James and I arrived at my tent, we were in for a nasty shock. The steady rain didn’t roll of the top of the roof of the tent like it was supposed to and several gallons of rainwater had pooled on the roof of my tent. There was no question of leaving the water there. While the roof is water resistant, it’s not water proof. Which meant that the pool caused a steady drip of water inside the tent. To get rid of the water, James and I used a broomstick from a neighbor and prodded the roof until the water rolled off on one side. Fortunately, no one had set up on the right side of us so we avoided pouring several gallons of water into the tent beside us. Unfortunately, we were set up on a road that had a slight incline, so the several gallons water we prodded off our tent rolled down to the tents across from us. We were mortified. I went over to the artists and apologized for pouring water into their tents. As most artists are, they were quite gracious about the water and there was very little harm done. Further investigation showed that I had forgotten to secure the roof of the tent properly to keep rainwater from pooling on the roof. The outcome of that mistake resulted getting off on the wrong foot with some of my fellow artists and the extra 30 minutes spent cleaning up some of the mess caused by the rain that had filtered into the tent.

Cardinal Rule of Outdoor Shows #2- Always secure your tent from wind

Before arriving in Frederick, I had spent so much time checking The Weather Channel to set if it was going to rain this weekend, that I didn’t occur to me to worry about wind. Most outdoor tents can be prone to flying away in the wind because the frame of the tent has to be lightweight enough for one person to transport and set up. When you add canvas walls to the sides of the tent, it basically turns it into one big heavyweight kite. To counteract this, you have to stake the tent down if you’re set up on grass. If you’re not set up on grass or if you want extra security, you also have to anchor your tent down with heavy weights. Unfortunately for me, I had forgotten to pack my weights for my tent. Even more unfortunately, we were set up on asphalt, so I could not anchor my tent with the tent stakes. Worst of all, that nice, cool, overcast, morning turned into a nice, warm, sunny day with wind gusts of up to 29 miles an hour.

With every gust of wind we were sent running to grab the corners of the tent to keep the frame from being blown away. To add to the fun, my clever way of using mini-blinds to display my earrings only made it easier for the wind to blow my earrings off their displays. We had whole sections of earrings blown off in one gust of wind and several times the frame of the tent actually began to lift off the ground. After a while, it almost seemed that the wind was making our lives miserable on purpose. As soon as we would re-hang earrings that were blown off in the last gust of wind, the wind would shift and blow off another section. Or the wind would blow a section off into the faces of the customers browsing through the tent. Eventually, James and I spent the last couple hours of the afternoon standing at the entrance of the tent, each holding the corner as the wind because the wind was gusting almost continuously. Finally in desperation, I went to the show managers and asked them if they had any extra weights that I could use, because I didn’t want to spend the rest of the weekend holding on to my tent. Eventually volunteers came by and used some asphalt nails to stake my tent to the road. Didn’t know these things existed, I’ll have to remember find some to include in my set up equipment.

The day didn’t turn out to be a total bust however. The flying jewelry and moving tent didn’t seem to drive people away and James turned the whole situation into a running joke with visitors to the booth. And I had plenty of volunteers to help run down flying earrings. One person actually bought a pair that flew off the wall and landed in her shopping bag!

We ended the day with an awesome meal at a local Frederick italian restaurant called Taurasos Ristaurante located on East Street in the Historic District. With great food, a nice outdoor seating area (which we didn’t use because, hey…we’ve been outside all day), and reasonable prices it was a great end to a somewhat difficult day. If you’re ever in the Frederick, Maryland area, be sure to check it out!

[tags] jewelry, craft shows, artists [/tags]