The giant St. Paul Craftstravaganza post w/ pictures

Two Cities Two Wheels style, here is a photo tour of the St. Paul Craftstravaganza (SPC). I'm glad we got some pictures, because I was so busy this weekend that I missed a lot of it.

On Friday afternoon, Jenna and I started measuring and taping the booth spaces and sorting tables and chairs for the vendors. Vendors began drifting in for setup around 4:30 and stayed till 7:30. The building still looks pretty bare at this point, but you can see our own table semi-set-up in the foreground, and vendors and friends milling around in back.

Here's the same aisle the next morning (I think?), just about ready for the show. We greeted each vendor as they came in, if we saw them in time, and by 8:30 every vendor had arrived at the building. After people had their own stuff set up, they went around to other peoples' booths to shop. I planned to do my purchasing during this time, but I was already quite busy assisting. Mostly I felt compelled to run around and ask vendors if they needed help with anything, which was probably not necessary.

The show started at 9:00 AM sharp. Andy Lambert carted away the free Peace Coffee, the Roe Family Singers played, and the shoppers began trickling in. Before we opened the doors, I purchased this pre-selected shirt from Nate at Withremote, just across the aisle from our booth. A bargain at $10, and still available via his online store. I was stylin'. This is how I looked during our interview on WCCO TV news at 10:00.

We don't have photos of the interview with me and Jenna, but you can see us for a limited time on the WCCO site, supposedly, though I can't find it. Here's Maya Nishikawa interviewing vendor Tara Burns. I hear they also showed Aisha Celia spinning yarn and buttonmaking at the Crabby Sisters booth.

I wasn't sure if a workshop at 9:00 would attract enough participants, but the Yarnery's learn to knit class was probably the best-attended one all day. Jenny Harada's workshop on making stuffed animals looked like lots of fun too!

We gave away lots of free stuff during the day. Here's one of our swag tables before it was decimated by 2,000 attendees! It's too bad we don't have any crowd shots, most of these photos were taken before the fair or right after it started. Foot traffic was actually fairly steady throughout the day, and it was a big building, so I don't think the vendors realized we had over 1,700 shoppers plus family friends volunteers media etc. I don't want Blogger to freak out, so I'm going to post this now and follow up in the next one with photos of vendor booths and our bands. What a great--but exhausting--weekend.