My Hair Bobble Dilemma

I was asking my Facebook fans to help me out with a dilemma yesterday and although they came up with lots of lovely suggestions, IKEA had the solution in the end. I’ve never really known the best way to display my hair bobbles and everytime I do a craft fair, I really struggle to find something that works. I’ve gone through so many ideas and after each fair I’ve always come out thinking ‘there must be a better way’.

I’m doing a craft fair in July – the weekend of the 10th/11th to be precise. Summer in the Loft at Ardross Farm – near Elie, above the farm shop – the same place I did the Christmas in the Loft Craft Fair – so if anyone’s about that weekend it’d be great if you popped by and said hello. All the details are on my homepage.

Anyway I make little cards for the hair bobbles to fit onto – you can see what I mean in these piccies:

At craft fairs, I’ve tried displaying them flat on the table, but find that they take up too much room and people pick them up and never put them down neatly and I spend most of the craft fair tidying up my display.

I also tried displaying them without the cards and put them all on a piece of plastic tubing that I attached to my little white shelves – this also held my elasticated button bracelets and safety pin bracelets and as soon as I got some sales I realised my mistake.

They all looked great but it was a pain to deal with as inevitably someone always wanted one in the middle of the display or at the inaccessible end and I had to take all of them off to get to the pair they wanted and then spend time putting all the rest back on again – which is far from ideal.

So another option I’ve tried is to punch holes into one corner of the cards and then hung them at an angle from pins on one of my painted cork boards, but in the end decided this looked messy and unprofessional.  People would take them off and find it tricky to hang them back up or the corner would get ripped if people pulled on them by accident.

So I opted to put them in a small container instead but found people  didn’t even give them a look in – they went totally un-noticed and I also think they looked pretty messy and unconsidered, so maybe that’s why nobody paid them much attention, so that was a bad idea too.

At the last craft fair I did I cut long strips of thick card and cut little slots into them so that I could slip the bobbles onto the slot via the elastic and the slot would hold them in place – this looked great, but again in practice it was a bit of a disaster. People could see them all clearly which was great, but as soon as someone wanted a closer look and took them off the holder, it was a total nightmare for them to put them back and I had to intervene and this made for an awkward situation with them apologising and me saying it’s all OK etc.

And that was it…

So I’ve got a craft fair coming up in July so yet again I’ve got the dilemma again. So that’s why I asked a question on Facebook today to see if anyone had come up with the perfect solution – lots of ideas were thrown into the pot, but I didn’t think any of them would be suitable. So on my way to pick Colin up from the airport tonight I popped into IKEA and found the most amazing item! It’s an Inreda DVD rack. I think you’re meant to slip in inside a drawer and use it to keep all your DVD’s in line and tidy. It’s made of soft rubber and I tried it out for displaying my hair bobble cards and they rest within the grooves perfectly and look great! It’s 51cm x 33cm so it’s a bit big, but I feel quite confident that with a sharp stanley knife I can cut it in half and make two long strips instead of one but I will have to see once I get organised and start playing around with my table layout.

Chuffed to bits as now I can display loads of hair bobbles in an organised and neat and tidy manner and they look great – they’re accessible and easy to see, pick up and put back in place – hopefully this will help with sales.