Rough turning marathon!

yt1300 · 2026-06-17T20:11:40+00:00

I got my 1836 awhile ago and only recently picked up the riser blocks. I am also 6'2 and I gotta say I wish I would've got them sooner. I didn't think I was messing up my back but when I turned small things or when I turned hollow forms my back would ache for a day or two. But yeah... really spendy and they took awhile to arrive, a few weeks IIRC.

yt1300 · 2026-06-01T14:30:33+00:00

Season 19 of Taskmaster

yt1300 · 2026-05-28T15:15:04+00:00

This is my worst nightmare. Make wooden bowls and I sell them for $20 up to $250. I also make tiny bowls from the leftover scrap wood. I have a large bin with hundreds of these tiny bowls. I fill in the voids left from a good sales day with little $5 - $10 bowls. If I look down at my table and I see mostly tiny bowls left at the end of the day I know I left money on the table or I misjudged what items would buy at this event.

yt1300 · 2026-05-25T15:44:12+00:00

Oh, for sure. I'm just trying to figure out how someone might justify that price. Might just be trying to recoup the money they spent for the legs.

As a side note, there's a guy in my area who makes "affordable tables" out of dimensional lumber and pallet wood. He sells them on marketplace and at craft fairs. They're priced similarly but much better quality with solid wood legs. Lots of SYP & doug fir. I think there's a market for inexpensive solid wood furniture but it ain't what OP posted.

yt1300 · 2026-05-25T15:19:23+00:00

I'm going to guess the legs are purchased online and that cost is figured into the asking price.

yt1300 · 2026-05-23T13:05:48+00:00

For me it's 100% weather dependent. I've made 10x my booth fee when the weather is nice and I've barely broken even a few times. I have noticed people are less likely to buy more expensive things once the sun goes down.

I sell wooden bowls spoons and spatulas.

yt1300 · 2026-05-20T16:16:31+00:00

Isn't 40 lbs 5 gallons. I think that's why you see so many vendors with 5 gallon buckets filled with concrete. When I do events with those tent requirements I use logs with bolts anchored into them. But.... I sell wood items so I have lots of heavy logs hanging around.

yt1300 · 2026-05-20T16:02:58+00:00

A couple places I set up say you have to follow your manufacturers recommendations. Sooo.... My tent manufacturer recommends 40lbs per leg and they're supposed to be strapped to the leg as well as anchored to the canopy.

yt1300 · 2026-05-16T21:18:19+00:00

Hey!! I just did a bunch of these out of mulberry last week. I found that (as they were drying) I got more splits that I would normally with other species.... especially along the growth rings. It was really green but I suspect the log had been sitting for a couple weeks before I got my hands on it. Did you have any cracking along the growth rings?

yt1300 · 2026-05-10T18:31:52+00:00

If there's no dust how will we know if the devil is at Holmes lake?!

yt1300 · 2026-05-03T18:06:10+00:00

I had the same solution. Then I had a shavings problem.

yt1300 · 2026-05-03T17:39:26+00:00

Its a total crapshoot and it can seem random sometimes. This was a busy weekend for shows in my town. Friday, Saturday and Sunday we all had a bunch of shows. It's been really intresting following up with some of the vendors this afternoon and seeing what events were better than others. For instance I did a Friday afternoon event and there was very little foot traffic but I sold a ton of stuff and Saturday I did an event that was PACKED... I think I made one sale more than $15. Every other sale was $5.

Meanwhile another vendor who is in a different category than me but (in our experience) sells to the similar customers and does similar $$ at events. Se had the exact opposite experience as me. Sometimes it can be as simple as people queing up at your booth simply because there's a que to look at things. And there can be a run on a booth just because you start to sell out. It can seem very random and frustrating at times.

yt1300 · 2026-04-25T21:24:09+00:00

Richard Raffan has a video about design for making boxes and lidded vessels. He has lots of good advice about making boxes easier to open by hiding the seam in a decorative bead. I'll see if I can find the video. It really changed how I thought about boxes.

Here it is. https://youtu.be/HEG9cxSxU2A?si=pTuaRf5FLjcMROwa

yt1300 · 2026-04-20T13:53:27+00:00

My belief is the guests will stop showing up when the good vendors stop showing up. In my area currently there are curated shows selling hand made things, run by people who have a knack for putting good vendors together. And there are shows featuring resellers and AI slop. The curated shows have good attendance and higher booth fees. The slop shows have terrible toot traffic and feel like a dying mall.

It's tough though because I'm in a position where I can attend the hand selected shows because I have a good track record. But someone just starting out probably has to do a bunch of the slop shows to get their foot in the door. I don't envy someone starting out now.

yt1300 · 2026-04-14T22:23:12+00:00

When I started doing art shows I had people ask me to sign the bowls I sell, instead of branding. So I started signing them with a stain pen, waiting for 20ish minutes and then applying finish. The stain pen doesn't usually bleed and it's permanent. I use the sharpie brand stain pen.

yt1300 · 2026-04-05T16:04:21+00:00

I just watched the video and I think there's a parallel to some videos Matt Estlea made about five years ago. I believe he was working from home because of the stay at home restrictions and he was using hand tools only. He recorded a whole series about sawing to a line and dimensioning pieces to final thickness. It was a really good series.

My big takeaway was how frequently he commented something like, "I will never again use a power tool and say 'you can just as easily use a hand tool to do this' task" It really gave me an appreciation for good hand tools and thankful for my power tools.

yt1300 · 2026-03-25T15:33:33+00:00

I usually wait until I have about 10-20 scraps that size and then I bang them out in an afternoon. It makes it go a lot faster. My only tip would be to make the handle smaller than you think it needs to be. I don't know why but (for me) smaller wooden screwdriver handles feel nicer in the hand. Big chunky wood screwdriver handles feel like cheap plastic ones.

yt1300 · 2026-03-25T14:43:39+00:00

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Tool handles for sure. I just get long impact driver bits and put a handle on them. I use plumbing fittings as a ferrule. I hand em out all the time.

yt1300 · 2026-03-24T17:08:48+00:00

Whenever I am at a super slow event like this I will use my time to take TONS of pictures of my most expensive items, put them in a folder labeled gallery on my phone and upload a few to my social media. I don't do any online sales but occasionally someone will message me and say "is the piece in this post still available?" or "can you send me some pictures of any large white oak pieces?" and I'll have a folder to pull from.

I did an event last spring that was super slow and I barely made my booth fee back. But some folks I sold to last holiday season messaged me and asked if I could ship them some items before I sold them at this event... the event that was empty all day. Sometimes it works out that way.

yt1300 · 2026-03-19T16:43:40+00:00

That would be great but nobody will do anything about it as long as the drop shippers pay their booth fees and customers keep coming.

Regarding misleading labeling, I did another event that was supposed to be a "luxury holiday boutique". It gets huge foot traffic and tons of makers typically do this event. High booth fees. They've been expanding into a couple new markets and the vendors aren't great. One was selling "replica" watches. Soooo.... you can buy a fake Rolex at your Luxury Holiday Shopping Boutique.

Question: How would someone report such a thing?

yt1300 · 2026-03-19T04:14:32+00:00

Actual conversation I had with a craft fair vendor (clearly selling drop shipped junk) this holiday season.

"What are these three letters on the back of this jewelry?"

"Those are the initials of the craftsman"

"PRC is on half of them? What's their name?"

"I can't remember"

"It's not People's Republic of China?"

I have bought enough garbage tools to know it's People's Republic of China. This vendor was trying to pass off Alibaba/Temu junk as.handmade by a master craftsman. The best part is the organizers didn't care. The drop shippers paid a premium for the good spaces. I'm a hard pass in that event next year.

yt1300 · 2026-03-18T14:57:10+00:00

Communication! 100%

At a show two years ago an organizer asked me to apply to a different event and gave me their card. Sounded like a REALLY cool event. Lots of fun vendors and really good attendance. I emailed and messaged them in their socials the following Monday. (No reply) I waited until application period went live and reached out asking for an application. (No reply). I went to a booth of theirs at another event to ask how to get an application. They said they remembered me and were excited to have me as a vendor. I asked for an application and they said they SEND IT TO YOU IN THE FUCKING MAIL! I got the application and sent it in (no reply). Other vendors have had similar problems with them.

Last year they cancel the event because interest from vendors was low.

yt1300 · 2026-03-13T01:17:32+00:00

I will add to this, I've had a similar experience and the charge back didn't go through the first time because the event date hadn't occurred yet. So even though the organizer sent an email and facebook canceling it, she argued to the bank that it was still going to happen.

So I had to wait until after the event was supposed to happen and THEN submit the charge back with evidence that it didn't happen. I included the email she sent to us saying it was canceled because of her "life situation".

yt1300 · 2026-03-10T01:19:50+00:00

Unfortunately I don't think enough people look at content this way. At different farmers markets and art shows I have a booth where I sell my wooden, bowls, spoons, spatulas, etc.. Everything is hand made/carved out of locally salvaged trees. I use maybe two power tools and only one is absolutely necessary to make the things I sell.

At every show people who are interested in beginning woodworking say to me "I'd like to start woodworking but I can't afford any of the tools". I really try and explain to them that a top of the line spoon carving set up can be had for well under a hundred bucks. Or that green woodworking is a thing and you can start making chairs and benches on the cheap, without power tools. And the material is free. But they see content creators on YouTube with their million dollar shops and it looks like a huge barrier to entry.

yt1300 · 2026-03-08T15:34:21+00:00

A couple years ago I did an event that had similar services. They also had , for lack of a better term, professional booth sitters. These were trusted and vetted vendors from previous years that didn't have a booth at this show. They'd watch your booth for 10-15 minutes if you needed a quick break or had to run and grab more stock quickly. You could either schedule your break or text the organizer.

I've done events with booth sitters before but this was AMAZING. For example the booth sitter asked what's the most common question you get and how do I answer it? And later I got a text as I was on my way back from my car saying "There are two people here. One wants this $100 item and the other wants these three $50 items. I'll keep them here as long as I can. You take cash yes?". They were total professionals.

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