Fall Show Season is Upon us - Building Display Fixtures Also Matters!
In about a week's time we will be participating in the first Arts and Crafts show of what we might consider the fall and holiday season. This one is a pretty big deal; both juried and very limited number of vendors.
Being an artist who also does the commercial end of creativity isn't all fun and games! For this upcoming event — and for events ahead — we've been trying to spiff up our vendor booth displays a bit.
The final version of what I was working on today
So my wife had an idea for some things we could do to improve our displays (Something better than just baskets and otherwise having the stones sit on a flat surface), and part of the challenge is the fact that we wanted to do these without spending money, and basically using supplies we had around our house.
Boards and bricks? Less than ideal...
At first, I was going to repurpose some boards from a couple of wooden shipping pallets we had sitting around back of the house, but getting them apart caused too much damage to the boards and they ended up looking rather too rough and beaten up.
Then I remembered a small screw and nail cabinet the previous owner had left behind, which was sitting up in the garage attic and so I ended up getting six pretty nice pine boards from carefully taking it apart.
At first, we considered using bricks for the upright supports at the sides to create a stair-step effect but they turned out to be both impractically heavy and not really all that stable... aside from which they were not in the correct measurements
Which led me to have a closer look at our wood pile where I realized we had some pretty nice and quite straight maple logs from a tree cut down earlier this summer, and that could be cut into different lengths to use as side supports.
It was actually a lot of work (and rather tricky) to cut them all to exactly the right length with flat ends, but in the end I made out pretty well with them.
Part of the idea here is that we wanted these displays to be easy to assemble and disassemble, and to pack into a fairly small space for going to and from shows. So a simple support with a single dowel to anchor and stabilize each shelf seemed like the best possible option.
But first, let's do a test setup!
Yeah, my wife was right... this will look nice!
Of course, I didn't have any ready-made dowels to use with the shelves, so I would have to make some.
Thankfully, I had some lengths of dowel rod in the garage, and even more fortunately I happened to have a good length of rod that also matched one of my larger diameter drill bits! Not much point, if you can't match the holes and the pegs!
Home made 2 1/2" hardwood dowels
Next up, marking the boards for where to put the holes for the dowels, and then drilling the deeper part of the hole into the base logs so that the whole thing would stay fairly stable and hold together, once assembled... but at the same time not requiring tools.
Not the most beautiful thing, but it works...
Drilling in pine boards: not so hard. Drilling in not entirely dry maple logs, from the end grain: a lot harder!
Yes, I typically use the tailgate of our truck as a workbench. I prefer doing dusty stuff outside, whenever I can.
Of course, I'm actually building two of these display units, so everything has to be done double!
The final step was to plane out some shallow 1 1/2" holes in the boards in a zigzag pattern to indicate where the stones would be displayed, and it also keeps them from sliding off these fairly narrow shelves... particularly if someone bumps the table a bit, which will invariably happen!
There, that should do it!
They will now hold 11 stones per shelf times three shelves per display unit, times two display units so that is a total of 66 items now raised neatly up off our tables and looking a lot more interesting than just having them sit out flat on the table. Then we can have our usual baskets with the small stones sitting out around on the rest of the table.
Ready for showtime!
So, it was a different kind of creativity today. And sometimes that's actually a good thing because it gets my brain thinking in a different direction from painting tiny patterns on stones!
Thanks for taking the time to stop by and have a look at my display adventures today! Feel free to leave a comment, if you feel so inspired... engagement is part of what makes Hive such a cool venue!
If you enjoy painted rocks, do check out The Hive Rocks Project and help spread the word about Hive, while also being creative!
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2023.09.01 AS-TXT-168/136