I got this little guy in time for Bazaar Bizarre / Maker Faire, and I love it soooo much more than the Bartizan 4850 tabletop imprinter I used to have! Not only is the Bartizan 4200 more compact and therefore easier to pack, it’s just way easier to make a credit card imprint with too.

The old tabletop version took up valuable table space, and I’d often have trouble getting the credit card info to come out clearly. Jimmy was better at it, but I didn’t want to deal with the hassle at Maker Faire because I knew there’d be loads of people and very little space in our 6×6 foot booth.

So I went back to Mr. Imprinter’s eBay store and picked up this listing for myself, which includes the imprinter and a pack of 100 credit card slips for $26.50 shipped. A couple of things to note: The slips that are shipped with this listing are the longer 80-column sales slips, but the unit also takes the shorter 51-column size. I sent Mr. Imprinter an email to ask before I ordered but never got a response back. Wah.

80-column sales slip

51-column sales slip

 
images from Mr. Imprinter

Also, the listing says that this unit doesn’t take merchant plates but in fact it does. It’s “set up for use with a 3 line embossed plate of .014 – .016 over material height” (this is from the manufacturer’s website, and you can also see that there’s a place to insert a merchant plate inside the unit). I guess Mr. Imprinter just doesn’t sell that type of plate, but you can get it separately from Addressograph (I’d check with them to make sure that’s the right one!). Merchant plates, if you’re not familiar, are these customizable metal plates that are mounted on the inside of an imprinter so that your store/contact information are imprinted on sales slips along with the customer’s information.

Here’s Mr. Imprinter’s:

There were a couple of things that were not so great but only one specific to the product itself. For the price and in comparison to the 4850, I’m a huge fan.

Pros:

• The compact size  (1.75″h x 4.125″w x 7.75″l) is lightweight (0.61 lbs) and easy to store and transport.
• You don’t have to sit the unit on a flat surface to get an imprint.
• Produces a clean imprint with one swift pull of the lid.

Cons

• If you slide the credit card in too far on accident, it gets stuck and is hard to pull back out.
• Merchant plate can’t be ordered from Mr. Imprinter but is available from Addressograph. I just ordered a rubber stamp from Simon’s Stamps and got help from my dear friend Jenn to stamp my shop info on all the sales slips. Heh heh.
• I think the shorter sales slips would be easier to manage inside this unit than the longer ones that are shipped from Mr. Imprinter.

And that’s my imprinter recommendation for the day!Similar Posts:

• A knucklebuster to call my own
• My craft fair production schedule
• Feelin’ the love at IndieSacramento

1) I had the honor of submitting a guest post to Etsy’s blog, The Storque, and it went live today! And Etsy readers are so full of love and kind words. I love it! The Storque gets a whopping 2 million pageviews a month — that’s a lot of eyeballs! So we’re taking the liberty of feeling semi-famous…at least temporarily. Read on, if you please: “It Takes a Village to Craft a Handmade Wedding“.

2) A lovely gal on Etsy sent me the sweetest note entitled “Spotted your bag in the wild”. She said she saw a girl with a cute bag at Whole Foods in Oakland and asked where it was from, and it was mine! Awesome that that happened, and double-awesome that she went to the trouble to let me know about it. I am oozing with love and gratitude.

3) Our entire house is strewn with fabric and pouches and sewing implements because I’m preparing for the Bazaar Bizarre craft show at Maker Faire at the end of the month! I’m SO excited to get to be a part of the show this year, as I’ve always been in awe of Maker Faire. I’ll admit I’m intimidated by the amount of people that are expected to be there (the number 80,000 has been floating around), but I’m much more psyched than scared!

4) Earlier this week, I found out that I also get to be a part of Renegade Craft Fair SF again this year – YEA! The event will take place July 18-19 from 11am – 7pm, at Fort Mason’s Festival Pavilion. It was such a great event last year, and I’m sure it will be just as grand this year!

5) When it rains, it pours?! The folks over at Madison Marquette, which owns a bunch of shopping centers here in the Bay Area (amongst other places), are looking for an innovative new business to help them grow San Leandro’s Bayfair Center mall and are running a contest called Retail*Star. The grand prize winner gets a FREE one-year lease on a retail space in the mall, plus a good chunk of seed money to get their business started. I was one of 66 contestants to submit my business idea to the panel of judges via a 3-minute presentation and 2-page written description, and I made the first cut as one of 15 semi-finalists!

6) There are a bunch more little mini things like the fact that I just had Henry’s Hunan Hot & Sour Beef for dinner followed by a bite of dark chocolate. But I’ll end with the fact that I just scanned in this photo that we had taken last weekend at a Mother’s Day brunch at the Marriott, and it makes me smile. They caught Gramma in a blink, but that’s not anything Don won’t be able to fix in Photoshop I think. But it was just such a great family-filled whirlwind of a weekend, from pitching my Retail*Star thing Saturday morning and booking it over to SFO to get to Santa Monica Pier to celebrate Mom’s 65th birthday then crashing at Ah-Yi’s; to this all-you-can-eat-plus-complimentary-family-photo brunch, followed by more family time and then off again to LAX and back home in less than 48 hours. Phew! Though it was short, it was event-filled and somehow particularly fulfilling. This photo cracks and warms me up all at once.

In conclusion, I have plenty of things to be happy about. And therefore I am!Similar Posts:

• Bazaar Bizarre / Maker Faire – all I imagined, and more!
• Blessings to the Bartizan 4200 portable imprinter
• Happy 2009!

The hubs and I were delighted by the number of friendly Sacramento residents that came out to brave the cold weather and rain to shop IndieSacramento‘s May Market in Fremont Park! We had a great time meeting neighborhood folks, people from neighboring cities, park support staff and other vendors taking breaks to check out the scene. Given the wet weather, I didn’t know if we’d get much foot traffic, much less any sales, so Jimmy and I were that much happier with each and every transaction!

IndieSacramento was my first outdoor show and as we were getting the canopy up in the rain and then trying not to let my products fall over into wet grass, I thought to myself: never again. But then I thought, crap. I just blew over 100 bucks on this enormous 10×10′ canopy, which by the way is this one right here and worked out for us just fine in the light wind and rain:

I HAVE to do another outdoor show! At least a couple of them to spread the cost a little. But, once we got our setup in place and all my items fairly well-protected and on display, I relaxed a little. Then as people started showing up and coming into the booth, I started to get energized. And once I got to talking with customers and then that first transaction came through, I was like: this is awesome! When’s the next one?! Heh heh heh.

We were also lucky to have camped out next to a great couple selling adorable flower barrettes and headbands, and they helped make the time pass during the lulls in traffic.

As usual, Jimmy was so incredibly supportive and patient. He provided all the muscle for lugging my stuff to and from the car and doing the setup and breakdown; he picked up coffee, tea and lunch; he manned the booth when I had to go stretch my legs or check out the rest of the show; he made the 1h 40m drive to and fro and let me crash out on the way home; AND he bought me a bag of See’s Candies to congratulate me on a job well done. All these things are more than I could ask for, but what I love the best is that he is ENTHUSIASTIC about it all! Seriously, he is the. best. EVER!!! Sigh and swoon…

Of course, I made my own rounds of the fair towards the end of the day. I picked up an “asininely bitchin’ tee” (that’s their tagline) from Wear Yeti as my show souvenir. I haven’t taken a photo of it yet, but it’s a grass green shirt with a red design of birds carrying a bike on strings. I thought it was cool. I mean, bitchin’.

What I loved:

• The organizers, Stacey of Bouton Blue and Amy of Peptogirl Industries, were friendly, helpful and supportive. I think they put on a great show in a great spot, and I’d consider applying for it again!
• There must be something good going on with the Sacramento drinking water, because every last booth visitor I spoke to was SO friendly! Take Ruthie for example, who shot a photo of my booth and me for her awesome craft blog, Chubbycraft. I didn’t even need my jacket because there was so much of the warm ‘n fuzzies in the air!
• The booth fee was really reasonable, and I liked the idea that part of the fee was that each vendor had to send in a quantity of swag for the swag bags that were handed out to the first 150 patrons.

What I learned:

• Make a booth display backup plan! A small card table, a covered ironing board and a garment rack do NOT provide enough surface area in a 10×10 foot space when half of my products are pillows! IndieSacramento didn’t provide tables as part of the booth fee and I didn’t want to lug our giant 6-foot table up to Sacramento, so my booth setup included hanging some products off the perimeter of my canopy as well as a couple baskets of pillows on the floor. It would’ve been pretty cool actually (or so I think), but that plan got rained on, literally, and alas I had no backup.

All in all I had a great time and considered the show a success! Thanks to everyone who came out to look, and a special thanks to those of you who came out to buy! XOXOXOX!

More event photos:

• IndieSacramento’s photos
• My photos

Similar Posts:

• Bazaar Bizarre / Maker Faire – all I imagined, and more!
• Deliver de banner, de sooner de better!
• My craft fair production schedule

I’m so ready to start dreaming up some new bags/pouches/wristlets and of course keep whipping up those Big Lugs! Looks like I’ll be busting out that craft fair production schedule again, woohoo!

Thanks Bazaar Bizarre team!Similar Posts:

• Making progress
• Introducing…our Fall 2008 Newsletter!
• Bazaar Bizarre / Maker Faire – all I imagined, and more!

The schedule reveals much behind what went down here at home, behind the scenes. Basically I started production 6 weeks before the show date. I had planned to calmly and steadily produce between 8~12 items per week. That’s laid out, good intentions and all, in the “Planned” top section of the spreadsheet.

What really happened was a different story. See “Actual” section, bottom half. Week 1, I did a great job. 9 items planned, 9 items produced. Zero variance! Week 2 I floundered about a bit. 8 coin purses? Didn’t happen. Not that I wasn’t thinking about it or working towards the overall goal in some shape or form; in fact, I spent a lot of time sketching and prototyping a handful of new items to see if maybe I ought to work those into the mix instead of the items I’d originally planned. That’s kind of where I got into trouble – didn’t stick to the plan. The plan! Ultimately I did end up working in 2 of the 4 new designs I made, so the time investment wasn’t a total loss. But, it may have been if I didn’t make that major push during Weeks 5 and 6.

Because, by the end of Week 4 I was in a panic. OMG, I only have 27 items for a 10×10 booth?! That lit a fire under my butt and poor Jimmy didn’t get a single home-cooked meal for the next two weeks. Well, maybe one. Or even two. But otherwise it was pretty much take-out, frozen or canned foods, or one of his own concoctions.

The things that helped me most about my schedule were:

• Countdown: This cell contains a formula that calculates the show date minus today’s date, which automatically updates to be the date that you are looking at the spreadsheet. I specifically recall starting to panic when the Countdown reached 14 days, because by that point as you can see I was already 14 items behind schedule and a whopping 38 items behind my targeted total! =/

• Cumulative Variance and Variance Against Total: How far behind am I based on my week-by-week schedule? And how far behind am I against my target 65 items?

• Planned section vs. Actual section: My background is web project management, so it was a no-brainer for me that I’d need to have something that laid out my specific goals for “the project”, alongside something that measured my progress against those goals. Otherwise, how would I know how freaked out I ought to be at any point in time? It’s all about measuring panic, after all.

I didn’t track my other to-do’s on this schedule, just items to be made. But, there was a long list of other stuff that had to be done especially since this was my first gig. Those things I worked in along the way (like buying an imprinter, picking up some shopping bags, signing up for a credit card processor) and of course we had a few long nights just before the show to do some things that I didn’t get to earlier since I’d fallen behind schedule (signage and tags, primarily).

And, here’s the XLS file in case anyone should find it useful!

>> Download Craft Fair Planner.xlsSimilar Posts:

• Bazaar Bizarre! Bazaar Bizarre! Bazaar Bizarre!
• A knucklebuster to call my own
• Bazaar Bizarre / Maker Faire – all I imagined, and more!

Whee! My Bartizan 4850 Tabletop Imprinter and 100 imprinter slips arrived today, thanks to eBay seller Mr. Imprinter.

I had a really hard time deciding which imprinter (aka knucklebuster) to buy but in the end decided to go with the low-end version since the contraption is only supposed to be a backup to the merchant account I intend to sign up for with ProPay.

All this of course is in prep for the upcoming Renegade Craft Fair SF, my first ever craft fair. FIRST EVER CRAFT FAIR! Yeeeeeaaaa baby.

My thanks go to the experienced Etsians who’ve so generously shared their knowledge about how to accept credit cards at a craft fair in the Etsy seller forums.

All told, the Bartizan 4850, 100 slips AND personalized imprinter plate – set me back $21.49 including shipping. Not bad right? Hopefully it doesn’t bust my knuckles as the nickname implies. I’ve yet to try it out. Ex-ci-ting!

image from Mr. ImprinterSimilar Posts:

• Blessings to the Bartizan 4200 portable imprinter
• Bazaar Bizarre! Bazaar Bizarre! Bazaar Bizarre!
• My craft fair production schedule