Market trading

The two posts below have been copied from the blog I began with the idea of promoting Roman Road arts and crafts market. Sadly last Saturday proved to be such a fiasco with vans parked where our stalls should have been and so on and so forth that I and another trader decided to call it a day and cease trading there.

It's a little sad that this enterprise is now over before it really got going but I made some good contacts and got on very well with some new friends and that is always satisfying. I also got some valuable feedback on my artwork but frankly working outside in the freezing cold soon lost its appeal. I've decided that in future I'll only trade under cover or at a one off event when the weather is better and hey now I have Saturdays free which means we can enjoy weekends away again.

Saturday 3 January

So, the weather was -3 degrees celcius when I left the house and it managed to rise to the dizzy heights of 2 degrees by the time I got home six hours later so the weather forecasters weren't wrong and they weren't exactly right either.

There were great hopes yesterday that there would be more people around Roman Road as the monthly Farmers' Market was also on. It was definitely busier than the Saturday before Christmas had been when the market had been as quiet as a graveyard but only two food stallholders turned up and they looked fairly cold and dispirited. That matched the number of craft stalls we had going which was also two. We decided we would stick it out until 3pm and I made my only sale of the day as I was packing up to go home.

That was my fifth Saturday trading at the market and, apart from the biting cold, I enjoyed the day chatting to Ruth next door and swapping tales and because I did make one sale I intend to be back there next Saturday so long as it doesn't pour with rain.

Forecast for Saturday 3 January '09

This is a photo from my mobile phone camera of my very first stall.

The last few days have either been very cold, or slightly less cold, or windy but I haven't cared one way or the other because mostly I have been inside a nice warm house. But now I am checking the weather forecast for Saturday. This has become a preoccupation of mine since I became a stallholder at Roman Road arts and crafts market back at the end of November.

I've had two weeks away from the market because of the Christmas and New Year holiday and I'm getting prepared to spend the day out in the open on Saturday. Since the forecast is 3 degrees celcius and cloudy I will be wearing thermals underneath and over trousers on top along with hat, gloves and my amazing new Christmas scarf.

This will be my fifth Saturday as a market trader and I'm hoping there will be more potential customers around than there was on the Saturday before Christmas when the market was as quiet as a grave yard. I am an artist and I sell greetings cards based on my paintings and sketches plus some of my original drawings.

Roman Road market has been around for donkeys years but the arts and crafts market only started back in September and a few of the traders have loyally turned up week in and week out since the beginning. Sadly two of our traders decided to throw in the towel just before Christmas and we will miss them around the place. So I am hoping that it won't rain all day or be very windy because either of those eventualities will be driving me back home before too long.