big bang lessons

Ever since I started vending at craft shows, I used brown paper bags for buyers to take their purchases home with them. I normally stamp them with my Life In Progress stamp, to keep the handmade and eco friendly theme going. Last week I came across this tutorial. My mind was jumping with ideas and I was thinking, What! I can use my home ink jet printer to print my logo and contact information. Why didn't I think of this? Well, my attempts failed miserably. After ten tries I only had four printed bags. The brown paper bags kept jamming my printer. At that point I gave up. I believe I have an extremely sensitive printer. I even adjusted the printer settings. As great as I think the above photo looks with my design printed on my ink jet printer, I'll have to keep thinking of ways to make it fancier within a timely matter and keep the look I'm going for. Does anyone have any suggestions? Until then I'll keep brainstorming. 

The photo above is from last weekend at the Big Bang Bazaar. It was fun to do an out of town fair. The anticipation was a great thrill. Right before the fair my anxiety level was high because I was worrying about small details. How would people react to my display and my items? 

This fair was well organized.  I'm glad Life In Progress was a part of it. It's nice to know I was part of something that was promoted at a local newspaper and on groupon. Every fair has been such a different experience, I'm learning it can't always be valued in dollar signs. Which would make it very shallow if it was. However, making money is the big picture goal. This particular fair reminded me that I'm doing this for the passion. I keep telling myself as long as I'm learning something it becomes worth it. And right now, I'm still learning and growing. I learned that I forget to let people know I've also made boxes which I've screen printed on as shipping boxes. I'm learning that most of my towels and screen printed items are given to people as gifts. It would only make sense to promote the boxes as gift boxes too. Practice makes prefect, whatever that means.