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Sep 07
Living a Fairytale
Posted by Christine

This morning I took a walk with Bronte through the Kansas City Renaissance Festival site. I’ve been to a Renaissance Festival or two in my time, and this is the most magical grand faire in which I have ever had the pleasure of spending some time.

It was a cool morning. A magical mist hung in the air.

The fairegrounds were quiet. All the shops were still closed.

And it was wondrous.

As I walked with my girl through the village streets, images of childhood fairytales filled my head. Dragons, pirates, and fairies filled my vision as I ambled through the earthen roads. The tudor shops are nestled among beautiful trees, ponds, and waterfalls. Charming paintings of damsels in distress or young lovers stealing a kiss in an alleyway are interspersed within the marketplace. Grand stages for entertainment and bawdy pubs for merrymaking complete the scene.

It was absolutely delightful, and I reflected at how fortunate I am to make my living in such a magical place.

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Sep 04
KC Challenge
Posted by Christine, On The Road...

We arrived at the site for the Kansas City Renaissance Festival a day earlier than expected. It’s a good thing, too, because the booth we rented was in worse shape that we thought!

And that’s a gross understatement.

Whomever rented the booth last year courteously left all their trash and recycling for us to take care of. It was, of course, infested with ants, wasps, and other insects, having been vacant for a year. It’s painted this horrible blue, but then has huge spots that still had an older, more horrible blue that hadn’t been repainted with the new horrible blue!

Here’s a short video of us cleaning it all up.

I think I’ll video myself making a journal today, so that should be up for Video Tuesday!

For more videos, visit our media page or go straight to TheTuberRose on YouTube.

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Aug 24
*LOVE* Cherokee Strip!
Posted by Christine

These people know how to treat their vendors!

This small faire had it’s first year in Arkansas City, KS. From the moment we arrived, we knew it was going to be good. We’ve been doing this for 10 months now, and there are faires we’ll be returning to next year… and those we won’t be.

This faire, schedule willing, we will happily return to.

First and foremost, they treat their vendors very well. No nickel and diming for “extras” like electricity and camping.

We travel with three dogs and a cat. This means we have to have our Geekalicious Gypsy Caravan relatively close so we can tend to our canine family during the day. Normally we don’t pay extra for camping because “camping” for an RV at RenFaires is usually parking. We can park for free in Vendor Parking.

We learned that lesson at Hoggtowne this past January, where we paid $100 to park on a dirt road in a forest. Really?!

So now we either park in vendor parking (for we just take up two parking spaces with the truck and trailer) or we find nearby (preferably shaded) street parking for the weekend.

But neither was necessary here!

The organizers of the Cherokee Strip RenFaire had camping about a block away WITH ELECTRICITY! Great thing because there was no shade. With the electricity, we were able to keep our dogs cool in the 85+ degree days instead of roasting in a hot box!

Always a plus with us!

Secondly, they had a reasonable vendor fee for the crowd. It was a small faire, sure. We didn’t expect to make a fortune, but then we didn’t have to pay a fortune either. First year $50 for a 10×10 space. We broke $1000 for the weekend.

That’s an excellent weekend! Although it’s a little below our average, it’s still 20x the vendor fee! That’s enough to pay for our travel expenses and some bills.

Compare that with the last faire we did, which we will NEVER do again: The Washington Renaissance Faire.

They charged $275 a weekend for a 12×12 space, and we were packed in like the proverbial sardines. Great if they brought in the 60K people they claim to.

They don’t.

Not to mention it was a 10 minute hike to the “camping area” (read: dusty corn field without electricity), for which they charged extra. To their credit, they had a shuttle that ran all day from the faire site to the parking/camping area during the weekends. And the guy in the blue van worked tirelessly!

We made more at this tiny, first-year faire in KS than we made any single weekend at WA RF. For the entire $825 it cost us to be there for 3 weekends, we barely broke $2500. That’s barely 3x just the VENDOR FEE, not to mention the trek out to the West Coast and other business expenses. And it wasn’t just us, other vendors said the same thing.

We’d lose our house, our Geekalicious Gypsy Caravan, and our shirts if every faire was like that one!

Needless to say, we won’t be returning to WA RF next year.

But Cherokee Strip is okay in my book!

As an added bonus, they have the most wonderful community here! I saved the life of a small kitten who needed medical attention… and the entire community helped pay the vet bill! Chevalier Catherine headed up the collection, and they raised enough to nearly cover the entire bill!

Then, this really great jester named Jaqueimo agreed to give the kitten a new home. Although we called him Shakespeare, Jaqueimo is calling him Rennie.

Even on top of that!! They KNIGHTED ME for my compassion and the King presented me with the basket in front of the entire shire!!

Yep. We love it here.

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Aug 15
Green Man Journals
Posted by Christine

We finished our first batch of handmade Green Man journals. They turned out rather nice!

I hope to make a video on the process during the next batch, but I’ve been quite lax with the video making these days… as you might’ve noticed.

I sculpted the Green Man on the cover. Ethan & Geahk did the corner knotworking and made the mold.

Ethan makes the paper pages from 100% post-consumer junk mail and other paper. I cast the Green Man cover in the same paper “slurry,” and then I paint the cover, hand-sew the pages together, and assemble the rest of the journal.

See a few steps of the process in pictures here.

We have three kinds: completely handmade, as described above; one with 100% recycled printer paper as the interior pages (hand-sewn with the handmade/painted cover); and one with the covers attached to an already-made 100% recycled, lined notebook.

We’ll have all three out this weekend to “test the market,” as it were. We hope to have many to choose from by the Kansas City Renaissance Festival in Sept/Oct.


Call your representative today and tell them you support
Health Care Reform!

It’s high time we, the richest country in the history of the planet, take care of our own people.
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Jun 19
Olde World Renaissance Faire
Posted by Christine, On The Road...

We had a wonderful time at the Olde World Renaissance Faire last weekend in Twig, MN. It was a beautiful and magical faire. It was like we had truly passed over into the Otherworld. I wish I could’ve captured them on video! Hundreds of dragonflies (read fairies) zipped around through a misty forest. Truly magical.

I tried something new with the video. It’s a sort of montage of sights and sounds. Let me know if you like it or if you prefer the vlogs. . . or perhaps a mixture!

I hope to have one from the Celtic Festival in Ft. Collins on Tuesday for you.

Have a great day!

There are still chapters left to claim in our community audiobook project!

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Jun 14
Let us entertain you
Posted by Ethan

If you happen upon us at some event where we are signing books, it is very unlikely that you will find us just sitting behind a table. We will be interacting with everyone coming by, and between times we will probably be creating works of art.

Our philosophy is that we are not sitting in the audience.

We are putting on a show.

Granted, Christine with her natural abilities with theatre background puts on a better show than I do. To be honest, you would be lucky if you could get me to talk, but I try. Meeting new people and talking with them is one of the great pleasures of our gypsy lifestyle.

It’s even better when people we’ve met before come to our booth at a new event, often to tell us how much they enjoyed Rowan of the Wood.

So come visit us when we are in your town, and we will do our best to entertain you. You can see our schedule of event in the right sidebar of this blog.

We still have half the chapters yet to be claimed! Be a part of the fun! Claim a chapter for the Community Sourced Podiobook today!

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Jun 08
Northward Bound
Posted by Christine

I’m typing this blog via my new MiFi wireless internet. It’s totally badass! It’s also rather expensive, especially when I learned this past weekend that I could’ve just gotten an AT&T 3G data card for $60/mo UNLIMITED internet! I’m a little miffed.

But Verizon’s MiFi is still rather badass.

This week will be spend primarily driving. We’re traveling from Dallas to Twig, Minnesota! I’ve never been that far north in Minnesota before, so I’m really looking forward to it!

We’re about to pass my alma mater Texas Woman’s University in Denton, TX. While attending school there c. 1993, I first heard “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” by my HS buds’ (Toby & Todd Pipes) band Deep Blue Something at Rick’s Bar (or something like that). I knew they had a hit the first time I heard it!

Now all these years later, Toby has a new band called Little Black Dress, and they’re new CD “Snow in June” is now available! It’s excellent, so I highly recommend you get a copy right away!

That’s right!

:-D

Also, we’re doing a crowd-sourced audiobook of Rowan of the Wood. Please join in the fun!

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May 25
Better Days Ahead
Posted by Christine

Yesterday was a slightly above average day for us overall, but for this year at Scarborough Faire, it was AWESOME!

We average about 50 books a weekend at these events. We had extremely high hopes for such a major Renaissance Faire as Scarborough Renaissnace Festival outside of Dallas, who get over 200,000 visitors a year. We were invited as guest artists for the last two weekends.

Our first day we sold 11 books. Yep. Eleven.

The second day we sold 20 books. Better, but still below average. We are, of course, grateful for every new reader, please don’t get me wrong. At the same time, we want lots of new readers and to be able to pay our bills! ;-)

The third day we sold 13 books!! What was going on? Had we flooded our market? That day was sunny and hardly rained at all. Floods of people were there… but sales were still depressingly low. I could see our house slipping away.

Finally, on the fourth day (which was yesterday), we sold 35 books! That’s more like it!!!! We outsold the first weekend just yesterday! I guess we haven’t flooded this market after all! WooHoo!

So we have even higher hopes today! Every vendor claims that the Memorial Day show is the best, so keep your fingers crossed for us! :-D We might make it out of this hole yet!

Kindle contest update: Although many people LOVE my Retro Diva Kindle Video, and it is pretty fricken awesome if I do say so myself, people are still not rushing to enter the contest. C’est la vie.

You still have another week to enter to win a Kindle 2!! Only one comment is all you need to enter.

With a little luck, we’ll make enough today to buy a Kindle for the winner AND myself! :-D

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May 24
New Plan
Posted by Christine

Okay. So the New Hope from yesterday morning is now dashed and bloodied all over the rocks below the cliffs from which it threw itself out of complete despair.

Think I could get another prepositional phrase into that sentence?

Today. New Plan.

We’re guest artists at Scarborough Faire for the last two weekends, as many of you already know. We’re sharing a building with 3 other artist. Two of which are doing about as good (read poorly) as we are here, and the third made $700 yesterday just on selling roses! That doesn’t count the higher priced items they have.

Do they have a quality product? Yes.

Do they have decades of experience over us? Yes.

But what they also have is street-side display & a demonstration. We and the other two artists are kinda set back into caves. Yesterday we put out a street-friendly display of my rock dragons, and we sold as many rock dragons as books (which is usually by far what we sell the most of).

Now we’ve done a lot of events in the Dallas area, so our market might just be flooded here as far as the book is concerned. I mean, numerous people recognized us from other events and have already bought (and loved) our book. So that’s possible as well.

If that’s the case, the TX Scottish Festival will be a bust, too… I’ll let you know!

So today, we’re changing our display to be more street friendly. Pulling up and out of the cave… we’ll see if that helps.

Every show we learn something new!

Namaste.

(OH – and watch our Retro Diva video. It’ll make you laugh! If you enjoy it, please spread it far and wide. We’re trying to go viral with it! ;-D) Enter the Kindle contest here: WWYD4aK2

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May 23
A New Hope
Posted by Christine

Today begins our second (and last) weekend at Scarborough Faire, and although rain is forecasted, it’s shaping up to be a normal hot, humid Texas day. Not too for my comfort, but hopefully good for the patrons.

Ethan and I have been busy little bees over the past week, improving our display & stocking up on inventory. I made 60 dragons & a few more Green Man oil pastel drawings while Ethan made another display table, a display rack, and framed my artwork. He even churned out a few more magic wands.

With regards to the overwhelming bills staring us down, we hope this will be a more successful weekend than last. We have every hope that it will be!! We’ll make enough to pay off the new unexpected book design/publishing/order costs, promotional printing costs, absurd amount of gas used to Ohio and back for book signings, normal living expenses, car/trailer payments, and still have enough left over to buy the Kindle for the contest winner in early June! Optimism rocks!

I’m writing your today from the campgrounds outside Scarbrough Faire (inside the Geekalicious Gypsy Caravan) by courtesy (and a rather high monthly payment) of Verizon’s MiFi.

I’m a little concerned about the 5 GB/mo limit… but it will all be worth it when I can work on the road from wherever. I’m choosing to think of it as a high-tech, financially-inspired way to control my internet addiction.

:-D

Hope you all have a wonderful Memorial Day weekend… and, if you have somehow missed it, you absolutely must watch the Retro-Diva sing about winning a Kindle karaoke style.

Enjoy!

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