We were a little nervous about going to sell at the market day at Tea in the Trees in Chintsa West on Sunday 7 December 2014. We’d sold not one thing at the Gonubie Main Road Christmas Market at the library the day before.

We need not have worried, though. We had a good market day (for us) at Tea in the Trees. We took R725. Our market costs were about R70 for petrol for the car for the trip, and R50 for the stall space. Our market day profit was thus R605.

We also got a custom order for a piece of driftwood with 12 small candle holes in it that we will sell for about R180. If the customer does not buy it once it is made, we can always sell it to somebody else.

And of course I got a thorn in my hand. Well, not really “of course”, but it’s happened three times before at Tea in the Trees and we’ve been to a market day there less than ten times so far. Well, with a name like Tea in the Trees, and being out in the countryside, I should expect the place to have a few thorn trees. I love thorn trees but I don’t like getting thorns in my hands!

My one son asked me just yesterday how it was possible that I got thorns in my hands at Tea in the Trees. I told him that on a market day at Tea in the Trees we hang some of our craft market products in the tree branches above our stall, and there are some little twiggy and thorny branches we have to get the string of our items over.

The worst thorn in my hand incident for me at a Tea in the Trees market day was when I was patting down some plastic we’d put on the grass, and I patted my hand right onto the long sharp thorn of a little twig lying on the grass beneath the plastic. What we don’t go through to try making an extra buck or two from selling at craft markets! All in a day’s work, though, and it’s all still fun in the end.

There were some foreign visitors to the Tea in the Trees market day on the day, which we appreciated. Three of our bigger sales were made to somebody from the U.S., somebody from the U.K. and somebody from Switzerland. It often seems to us that visitors to South Africa seem to appreciate the things we make more than the locals do. This shouldn’t be too surprising to us, though, as we see similar craft items to ours on American sites often being sold for three, four, or more times the price of our things.

It was a fairly busy market day at Tea in the Trees on Sunday 7 December, but it got quiet before long. We packed up and headed home in the early afternoon, happy with how the market day had gone for us.

© Copyright Teresa Schultz 2014