#staple!

Initial stages of building the wooden stand.

First table setup at Staple! Independent Media Expo 2016

Though my location wasn't ideal for the setup I had designed (I was in a rather shadowy area, and my stand only cast further shadows on the rest of my space), everything came together well! And I had barely a week to recover before packing everything back into my car and driving to Dallas for Texas Furry Fiesta.

In the Artist's Alley at Texas Furry Fiesta 2016.

This was the moment I had created my stand for, actually; Artist's Alleys at furry cons don't allow you to use the space behind you (except for perhaps a banner) like a lot of other events do, so I built the stand exactly to the allowed table specifications to make as much use of the space as possible. On the whole, TFF was a tremendous success; I made three times my goal for the weekend, gained confidence, and got to meet some great friends, new and old. But being in the Artist's Alley was way too stressful; table spaces were given out on a daily lottery, which meant that day to day I didn't know if I'd have a spot, and hauling all my stuff up and down each day was draining. Lesson learned: Furry cons can be great, but I'll definitely be doing Dealer's Den from now on! The last show of the spring was Havencon, which is a local LGBTQIA Geeks & Gaming con in only it's second year. I was nervous to go, but it honestly wound up being my favorite of the lot-- I'll be doing a separate blog post about it soon, but suffice to say, it had a great atmosphere and everything came together really nicely for it! The issues I had had with lighting at the two previous shows were not at all a problem, and I felt really good about the reception when talking about my trans paintings project. Honestly, I can say that my experiences tabling thus far have been positive beyond my expectations, and I feel I can credit a lot of this initial success to all the time spent soaking up knowledge from One Fantastic Week, both watching the show and attending the workshop. But I've been piecing together my own concepts along the way, to mixed results, and I want to pass these learnings along as they come, just as others have done for me. So once I work out a couple more kinks in the design, you can expect a blog post going over how to construct a stand similar to my own, for those interested! In the mean time, my next show is the Fan Expo Dallas, which will be a significant step up in terms of show size! But after how things have gone thus far, I'm really looking forward to it. I hope to see some of you there!