Nicolette’s Design Diary

1. Spaces were always the same size.
2. Everyone stays in their space.
3. There aren’t any immovable obstructions in your space.

In general, booth spaces at most shows are a standard 10 foot by 10 foot. Sometimes if you need the extra space and have the extra cash, you can get a 10 x 15 foot space, or even a 10 x 20 foot space. But for the most part most artists design their booths to fit in a 10 x 10 space. If you get anything smaller than 10 x 10…that can be trouble.

Well, things here at Gaithersburg appear to be a bit different. The Sugarloaf Gaithersburg show takes place at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds. The show consists of a number of exhibitors setting up outside in the Fairgrounds with some setting up in open sided barns located throughout the grounds. There are also a number of buildings on the grounds in addition to the barns. Booth spaces outside and in the barns are the standard 10 x 10. Those located in the buildings are 9 x 8…or 9 x 10…or 8 x 8…or some such thing. Now I was aware of this before I arrived at the show site. My booth is pretty flexible, the four walls of my booth can be as small as 6 x 6 and as big as 12 x 12.

So I arrived to claim my space, and saw immediately instead of 10 x 9 space, it was going to be closer to 9 1/2 x 8. One reason was because part of the back wall of the building jutted out into my space. Since the back wall of my booth can’t curve around this part of the wall sticking out in my space, I would have to shorten my booth by almost a whole foot. What also made matters worse is that the lines marking each space appeared to be off by almost a half a foot. Now 10 x 10 foot space is not very big…so 9 1/2 x 8 feet is just miniscule. Why such a fuss about how big my space is? Well, when you’re paying for booth space, you start to become very keen on making sure that you get the amount of space that you paid for. Because I have to shorten my booth in order to work around this piece of wall invading my space the back of that space it essentially becomes dead space…unusable. It’s also unfair because I’m paying the same price as those who have a true 10 x 9 space, but I can only use 9 1/2 x 8 feet of it. Needless to say…I was not a happy camper.

But as it turns out, I wasn’t the only unhappy camper in the building. My neighbor to the left of me arrived around the same time as I did and discovered that her space was lacking a half a foot. Unfortunately her walls are fairly inflexible and she had a carpet that was going to overlap in my space. The crafter to the left of her had already set up…so she couldn’t shift to the left. The crafters to the right of me had already set up…so I couldn’t shift to the right. Someone was going to have to lose some space. I was already somewhat irritiable, I had gone to bed at 1:00 a.m. last night and woke up at 6:30 this morning so I could make the drive from Chesapeake to Gaithersburg before noon. All I wanted to do was to set up my booth so I could check into my hotel and take a nap before dinner. I also wasn’t too keen on losing more space, especially since my booth was already going to be short to begin with.

Fortunately, we took our concerns to the show director and we were able to “make it work” without either one of us losing more space or without me taking a sledgehammer to that back wall. As it turns out, that dead area in the back of my booth space makes for pretty good storage.

[tags]craft shows[/tags]