Festival of Fools - 2016

                   ~slowly opens the creaking door, turns on the light and starts brushing away the cobwebs.~

I really need to find a way to be better at updating this thing. Sadly life gets a bit hectic and the blog tends to be one of those things that gets set off to the side and given little thought, then when I do think of it, I'm usually driving or have just crawled into bed.

So bear with me as I try to get back into the swing of things and figure out how to manage this and the 50 million other things going on in my crazy life.

Anyhow, on to the real reason I came here and dusted off the keyboard.

Festival of Fools presented by Dreadfully Punk
April 1-3, 2016
Antique Gas & Steam Engine Museum
Vista, Ca

I love Steampunk, and I love the people involved in the Steampunk community, so when I heard about it , I jumped at the chance to be a vendor at the inaugural event (the booth fee was quite enticing too and the people putting it on are pretty damn awesome). I was also excited because the event was local(ish) to me and there was the opportunity to camp out for the weekend.

Let me just say that I had a wonderful time.

Though the event had its minor things to work around, it was a great time and came together really well for only two people running the entire thing. Yes, I said two people. Now, they weren't alone in all things, quite a few of the vendors I know helped promote the event with flyers and posters at their tables during various events and there were other great people like Drake & McTrowell that also helped out as well. There was Facebook posts cross posted between the various local communities and events as well. Dreadfully Punk also came to the Steampunk Meetup and chatted with the folks there.

The event started with load-in at 10 am on Friday, April 1st. Now since I had been going 6 weeks straight with events, having one weekend off to try to catch up on laundry, housework, making new stuff to sell, and then my kids being on Spring Break the week leading up the event, I was a bit slow (read: lazy) in getting myself in motion. I didn't get the truck loaded and on the road until about 11:30 am which put me in Vista about 12:15pm.

My usual partner in crime, Cindy, wasn't able to make it as she was in the process of running around like a chicken with its head cut off while on fire. See, she recently got accepted to the LA Times Festival of Books to promote her first two books in the series she is writing and well, it is her first time going out and working an event on her own for herself (My baby is leaving the nest so to speak ~sniff~). So yeah, she was under a wee bit of stress (probably still is honestly). So I was on my own, for the most part, for set up. I did get some help from a couple of my friends over at the League of Supremely Evil Revolutionaries (L.O.S.E.R) when I needed to get the tent and the pop-up set up, but after that it was all me and well, I was still feeling lazy, but I got everything up and even made a couple sales before things closed down at 5.

I was planning on camping both nights, but since my mom was still in town I wanted to spend a bit more time with her before she took off to go back home. Big thanks to her for coming down and taking care of the kids for Spring Break while my husband and I both worked. Of course going home also gave me the chance to pick up anything I may have forgotten as well as make a food run for stuff to munch on throughout the day while I vended.

Saturday I got all my camping gear together and loaded up, made a stop for some food for throughout the day and headed back up to Vista for day two of the event. I arrived right at 10, unloaded the truck, parked it in the lot, changed into my costume and opened the booth for the day's business. My booth was set up near the stage so I actually got to see the Doc Synchronous Medicine Show with the rest of the L.O.S.E.R crew as well as Drake & McTrowell's Hot Potato School of Writing, things I don't  get to see when I vend at other events since they tend to be in other areas of the event. I also enjoyed Scott from Frenchy & The Punk playing throughout the day.

The nice thing about vending for me is I get to see almost everyone who makes it out to the events, whether it be in passing or they're stopping in the booth to see what items we've added to inventory. Sparky says that we're the best place for her to come when she needs to finish an outfit.  <3 br="">
Towards the end of the day I was able to sneak away and see Casey Cousins at the Event Master Photo booth and had some great photos taken of me in my outfit I wore on Saturday. If I had thought about it, I would have taken the opportunity to get a Tin Type photo done over at Bailey Denton Photography.

As the day's vending was winding down, the guys from The Velveteen Band set up their merchandise table under one of the awnings of my popup and we visited while we watched Frenchy & the Punk play, at some point a Steampunk Conga Line started and a good portion of the crowd joined in, me included.  Once they were done, The Velveteen Band took stage and and continued with the merriment.

After the final set was over, I closed up the booth for the night and headed out for a grocery (read: wine, whiskey & food) run with some of the other vendors and we all sat around chatting and getting to know each other a bit better. I think I finally made it back to my tent to bundle up and pass out for the night around 11 pm.

Sunday morning arrived, and there is something to be said to waking up gradually as the sun rises versus having a cold dog nose in your face or a 6 year old whining about being hungry (even though they know how to get their own cereal).

My friend Michelle came out and helped in the booth for a while, which gave me the chance to wander around the vendor areas and talk to some of the other vendors that either didn't camp or I just hadn't had much of a chance to talk to.  I also pulled Bethany away from her project so we could get a photo together since we were dressed alike.

The of course came the daunting task of breaking down and packing everything up, which with two of us takes about an hour a half. This time it took me about 4 hours, but that also included at least an hour of sitting down chatting with Bethany and Justin because we don't get to see a lot of each other due to crazy life schedules.

All and all I had a wonderful time at Festival of Fools, and I can't wait to attend it again next year and see how much it grows.
<3 br="">
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Gaslight Gathering 5 - September 18-20, 2015 (Part 1)

As I've said in the past Gaslight Gathering, held here in San Diego at the Town and Country Hotel in Mission Valley is probably one of our favorite shows to do. Part of it is because it's a local show and the other and more important part it, the people attending are fabulous and this year was no exception.

Normally we load in on Friday morning and do all the set up work, which means we're usually putting things out right up until the doors open. This year we took the opportunity to bring everything in on Thursday evening and set up the tables, grid wall, t-shirt storage (and t-shirt) as well as the banner so we could put out the rest of the merchandise on Friday morning without feeling rushed.

After some tweaking and shuffling we finished the booth infrastructure and headed out for some food before heading home to finish any last minute prep/projects/etc for the rest of the weekend. Because there are *always* things that still need to be finished.

Friday morning, I loaded up everything from the house that we needed to take with us and then headed to the shop to grab a couple bins of merchandise that we hadn't been taking to some of the other recent conventions. Halfway to the shop I realized that I forgot my cash box, not too big of a deal (though there were a couple colorful phrases said), because I could swing back by and pick it up after I picked up Cindy & Jen. What was really the icing on the cake was that the elevator was *still* not working at the building my shop is in. For anyone who hasn't been to the shop, my work space is on the 4th floor. Insert more colorful phrases and expletives on my part.

This killed any plans that I had of bringing the old steamer trunk I got earlier this year as a display piece, so I began shuffling items from that into a couple of plastics bins that I could carry down the stairs. Once those were loaded I grabbed everything and headed out the door. Chatted with the business owner across the hallway who had been climbing the stairs all week on a fractured ankle (yes, the elevator had not been working for the entire week).

I maneuvered my way to the stairs and decided that since the tubs were light enough I would just brace myself in front of them and slide them down the stairs. Thankfully the tubs and I survived the adventure unscathed, though there were a couple times I fully expected to end up like a cartoon character with tub imprints on me due to them running me over going down the stairwell. ;)

From there I got the tubs loaded into the truck and headed over to get Cindy and Jen. From there we made a stop at my house to get the ever important cash box and made our way to Mission Valley.

Now you have to understand, I don't work on Fridays, my work schedule is such that I work Sun-Thurs and enjoy Friday & Saturday off, (it's a bit of a blessing and a curse, but that's another story), so I always forget that traffic at 8:30 (I get to

work at 7 am) in the morning sucks, A LOT, and that morning it happened to be no exception. While I muttered and mumbled about crappy drivers and slow traffic, Jen kept us entertained with her commentary of her IM conversation with Shawn from Pendragon, A quick stop for breakfast and coffee was made and we headed to the Town and Country hotel to finish setting up.

Did I mention, I had been up since 5:30 am and not had any coffee yet?  ;)

Dropping off Cindy and Jen and the two tubs or merchandise, I parked the truck and we made our way to the vendor hall.

Since the infrastructure had been set up the night before we took our time getting the rest of the booth set up, changed into our outfits for the day and waited for the customers to start coming in at 1pm when the hall opened.

Now anyone who knows Cindy and I, knows that when then two of us are together, we are not quiet in the very least. Couple that with Jen, who was working with Mike & Shawn at the Pendragon booth next door and the volume increases as does the joking and banter back and forth. This weekend was no exception.

We were in our usual spot in the vendor room with Pendragon to our left, Seven Deadly Fairies across from us with Steampumpkins next to them and our friends Joe & Lex behind us.  It definitely made the 6 hours fly by and before we knew it, it was time to head home.

On to Part 2

End of Summer Event!

Southern California!! 

We've decided to have a End of Summer at our Lemon Grove,CA  shop! 

Come out and join us for food, fun and some great raffle items, which we'll be posting photos of as we put them together!

We hope to see you there! Please feel free to share this event as well.

Long Beach Comic Expo 2015 - Load-in & Setup

Our second show of the year was Long Beach Comic Expo held at the Long Beach Convention Center.

We attended this show for the first time back at the end of May/beginning of June and had a great time. I loaded in on Friday and then my friend, Maico, came out and gave me a hand in the booth on Saturday and Sunday.

Load in this year was 180 degrees better than last year. Last year, the event was held in one of the smaller rooms in the main portion of the center and we had to load in via the food and beverage loading dock.

Now, when I hear loading dock, I think of a big platform area that has ramp attached to it and you can roll hand carts or pallet jacks up. No such luck. There were stairs but no ramp. Fortunately I was able to convince the security guy to let me pull my truck up to the ramp to unload it and then go park it before I took myself up to the vendor hall. I think he's still impressed that I got the truck unloaded and moved in under 15 minutes. ;)

This year, the load in was amazing! I got up to Long Beach about 12:30 pm and had to wait in line for about 15/20 minutes before I could unload the truck.

Since the event was in a bigger hall,  I actually got to drive my truck onto the vendor floor and unload one row over from my booth! The same went for load-out! To date that has been the best load-in/out at any show.

Long Beach Comic Expo and it's sister show, Long Beach Comic Con, are only two days, which leaves Friday for load-in and set up. After unloading everything, I went and parked the truck and checked into the Hyatt next door to the convention center, yeah it's more expensive to stay there, but it means I can get up 30-45 minutes before I have to be at the vendor hall and wander over, no driving or trying to find parking. Yes, I'm lazy. ;) Besides, the hotel is right across from our favorite Long Beach restaurant, The Auld Dubliner, which is of course where I went for dinner after I was done setting up.

I got 90% of the booth set up by 6:45 and since the hall was closing a 7pm, I decided to call it a night and head out to dinner. Of course I didn't think anything about whether or not there was another convention going on, so I didn't expect every table in the place to be either filled or reserved. Fortunately our favorite waitress, Suzie, was working and she got me a seat at the bar pretty quickly.

Since I didn't know how full the place was going to be Saturday night, I took the precaution of making dinner reservations so that when Tawmis, Maico & Amiee arrived, we'd have a table for dinner.

As usual, the food was amazing and since Cindy couldn't be there to help out, (Friday was her birthday) I ordered a glass of 18 year old McCallan along with a Guinness and toasted her for her birthday.

After dinner I headed back to the hotel to wait for Macio to arrive from San Diego. and incidentally ended up passing out about 15 minutes before he was dropped off by Tawmis & Amiee. I was conked out so hard (I blame being exhausted from set up and the whiskey!) that I didn't hear him knock. Fortunately, his name was on the room, so they gave him a key and of course true to Murphy's Law, I woke up when he opened the door.

 We sat and chatted a bit over a glass of rum and coke before we went to sleep.

HRM Steampunk Symposium 4 - 2015 - Recap Part II

For those of you who missed Part I, you can read it over here

Saturday morning we pried ourselves out of bed, made coffee in the french press,  dressed for vending and headed up stairs to prep for the onslaught of customers.

We made some minor tweaks to the displays and put out the books that we got from Drake & McTrowell on consignment, which is now available at our online store, we were ready for business, well mostly, there was still more coffee to be had and some food too!

Saturday was crazy for us! When I said onslaught of customers, I wasn't kidding.We had a constant flow of customers come through the booth all day, with very little down time.Come 4:40 pm when they announced that the vendor hall was going to close, Cindy and I looked at each other in shock. I don't think we've every had a day of vending go by that fast. It was such a whirlwind that it took me a bit to remember that I did indeed have lunch and what it was.

Once the vendor hall closed and we covered everything up, we headed to the room and changed into some more comfortable clothes. We relaxed a bit while I added up the numbers from the day and made sure that all the sales were logged and recorded (I swear I'm going to get a barcode scanner one of these days)

From there we again headed to the Auld Dubliner for dinner and then came back to the hotel. We considered heading out to the ball, but we opted to stay in and relax mostly because we didn't feel like getting dressed back up into Steampunk gear.

Sunday was another busy day though it slowed down at the end when most people opted to head home and not stay the extra day.

Monday we drug ourselves out of bed for the final day of vending and since it was such a short day we wore our every day clothes so when it came time to pack up and load out, we didn't have to go change.

Load out went pretty fast, I think we were packed up and on the road in about 2 hours, from there we made our usual stop at Dairy Queen for food, before getting back to San Diego and unloading everything at the shop.

HRM Steampunk Symposium 4 Recap - Part I

Home, unloaded (mostly) and already powering full speed ahead into planning and prepping for our next event, but before we get to that, let's recap our first event of the year, Her Royal Majesties Steampunk Symposium.

This show is the first show of the year for us and we always look forward to gearing up and spending the weekend on the Queen Mary for the weekend. This year was no exception.

Normally we leave around 2 or 3 pm to get up to Long Beach between 4 or 5 depending on whether or not someone has dorked traffic one of the freeways. This year we didn't actually hit the road until 7pm, because Cindy had to work until 5 and then had to fight her way out of downtown La Jolla, those of you who live in San Diego for any period of time know what I'm talking about. Of course, this also means that since we were slated to load up and go when she got home, the Traffic Gods[tm] decided to be extra rude and made the drive home much slower.

It all worked out since I still wasn't done loading up. Between herding the kids, and having my day discombobulated from having to run all over town, I was a bit behind in what I needed to do.

We finally hit the road about 7 pm and made our way to Long Beach by 9 pm. The Traffic Gods[tm] must have felt bad for the earlier mess and gave us a clear path, except for the road work that we had to navigate through up near Camp Pendelton.

Once we got to the Queen Mary, we unloaded the show stuff and dropped everything in our booth space, leaving the step up to be done first thing Friday morning when we had access to the vendor room. We usually try to get at least the grid wall up the night before, but Cindy and I just wanted to get unloaded and then check into the hotel room and then find the bar for a much needed drink.

The antics and adventures we had when we checked in can be read about over here.

Set up always tends to be an adventure no matter how many times we've put up the booth in different locations. This year was no different.

The vendor room was in a new location from last year, which meant new placement in the room. We didn't really pay much attention to the space when we rolled in Thursday night and dropped off all the grid wall and tubs, Friday morning we were whistling a different tune.

Normally our booth space is 10 feet x 10 feet, this tends to be standard for most conventions that we got to, however, do to the layout of the room and there being two huge pillars along the side we were on, our space was 8 feet wide x 12 feet deep, which gave us 96 square feet of space to work with, instead of 100 square feet. While 4 square feet (2 ft x 2 ft) doesn't really sound like much, when it comes to display space it's actually a lot of room to put stuff.  Now, we're down 4 square feet, but we have a new set up to try out for the t-shirts which gets them off the table and stored (in theory) in a much easier way to control inventory and get at the certain sizes. So on to the grid wall set up we go!

Loading in

We really have a love/hate relationship with grid wall. It's the best way for us to set up the booth and display a good portion of our inventory and it's also great for space delineation. What it's not, is great to move around, it's heavy, and bites the heck out of your fingers if you get them in the way. Thankfully, we were able to get rid of the 8 foot pieces we had and now only have to deal with 6 foot x 2 foot panels and 5 foot x 1 foot panels.

So in comes the grid wall along the back wall....oh wait...that's not a straight wall, it had a built in cabinet that curves outward into the booth, which of course means, we can't put a table along the back. ~scowl,grumble,swear~

Putting up the banner

Time to rethink the booth layout, which at this point Cindy makes the smart move and goes for more coffee as I sit there working things out in my head and cursing under my breath.

After some shuffling and creative thinking, we got the grid wall up and used the curve to our advantage, though it did cost us a couple extra feet of display space and the second table that we normally have, but we were able to get everything in the booth displayed, though it was a bit too crowded for my tastes. Of course, us artists are our own worst critics too.








Here we are all set up and ready for the first customers on Friday, not to bad for not having our usual amount of space.

All set up and ready for customers

 We ended up tweaking and rearranging things throughout the weekend, but over all we were happy with the set up that we cobbled together.

Cindy & Colleen

Once the doors opened for the day, things flew by, before we knew it they were announcing that it was 4:45 and the vendor hall was going to close 15 minutes later.

While we both devoured lunch at some point during the day, we couldn't wait for the room to close down so we could head out and get dinner.

Glorious Guinness

True to form we, went to the room, changed and headed out to the shuttle to have dinner at our usual haunt, The Auld Dubliner.

In past years the vendor room has closed at 6pm, which usually doesn't put us at the Pub until 7/7:30 depending on how long it takes us to change and take the shuttle over. This year vending closed at 5pm and we were at the pub by 6pm, which of course, was packed to the gills. Thankfully there was a couple leaving and we were able to get a table pretty quickly.

Selfies or ceiling photos ?

With drinks & dinner ordered, we chatting with Mike & Bre, from L.O.S.E.R, who were sharing a room with us. Of course what dinner isn't complete with a few fun(ny) photos and some photos of the Pub decor:

Pennyfarthing

The bar area, with a rather impressive whiskey selection

We're not sure if Mike is trying to serenade Bre or eat her brains.

First show of 2015 - HRM Steampunk Sympsium

We're back at it for 2015 and I'm hoping that I can be a bit better at the upkeep of the blog and the goings on of Wyng'd Lyon. I'll do my best but I can make any promises.

Last night, January 15, 2015, Cindy and I loaded up and hit the road for Long Beach for our first show if the year, HRM Steampunk Symposium.

After leaving an hour later than we wanted last night we got to the Queen Mary with an hour to unload, which for Cindy and I is an amazing amount of time. 

We checked in with the vendor coordinator, found our booth space and had everything out of the truck in a total of 30 minutes.  The whole evening was a comedy of errors though, from the dolly having a mind of its own in the hardwood floors of the Promenade Deck, the wheel of my suitcase deciding that it was going to stop work and literally go sideways, right down to checking into our room and discovering that I booked a room with two twin beds instead of two queens. Certainly not conducive for sleeping 4 people, so back to the front desk to upgrade the room so no one had to sleep in the bathtub.

Once the room issue was straightened out, we went to find the bar and settled in with some friends for a couple hours of laughing and swapping stories.

  After finally turning in a bit after midnight, we both slept like the dead and are now working on caffeinating ourselves and waiting for the maintenance guy to come fix the shower. Yep, the fun continues! 

Oh look the maintenance guy just showed up and I need more coffee.

More to come as the day progresses!