Manifest is over for another year! As with SMASH a couple of weeks earlier, I shared a table with some fellow artists and sold my crafty things. I was a lot happier with my setup than I was with my SMASH table – having more space to work with, larger frames to display items in, extra bits that arrived (button badges and printed bookmarks), more appropriate packaging and generally being better organised definitely helped.

The ChiGarden table

In terms of sales… well I had a better idea of what to expect after SMASH. An anime convention is definitely not the ideal place to sell (relatively) expensive, original, handmade items. A reasonable amount of my stuff sold, if at a significantly lowered price, and in the end I made enough profit to pay for my trip over to Melbourne. I think I’ll be sticking to handmade markets from now on, but I’d say it was definitely a worthwhile experience. If nothing else, at least Sam and I managed to hand out the rest of my 250 pack of business cards!

What really had selling at Manifest fun was hanging with Sam, Lisa and Cathy at our table and our fabulous table neighbours! On one side we had the fabulous Adre-es (I’m sorry I’ve managed to forget your real name!) and her friend Clea.

Lolita table neighbours!

And on the other side we had the very talented Ms Rósek and her posse.

We are so high fashion.

Meeting new and interesting people and catching up with old friends is why people really go to events like this, and I feel like I really lucked out in that respect!

With a day free on Sunday, we managed to talk a big group of Hetalia cosplayers into doing a photo shoot, again at Sydney Town Hall.

I’ve only ever had the chance to take a few hurried photos of friends in cosplay before, and I like to think my photography skills have improved a little since then. This time we had four photographers and something like ten cosplayers for about 4 hours in a pretty cool location, and despite my lack of confidence I think we all worked off each other really well and came away with some pretty cool shots!

The cosplayers were absolutely fantastic – from my own dabbling with sewing and cosplay I have some idea of how much work goes into a costume, and these ones are pretty damn detailed with some really impressive craftsmanship. Everyone was also really patient with explaining their characters to me, as I’m not familiar with the series, and coming up with cool poses.

I think I’m getting better at overcoming my shyness and just chatting with people I’ve only just met. Not like we have nothing in common, we’re all geeks! It really helped to talk to the other photographers and draw from their ideas and experiences – I would probably have been a bit lost if I was working on my own.

I did make the mistake of not getting everyone’s contact details though, so I’m not really sure how I’m going to share these photos with them! I think some have my card, so maybe they’ll stumble across this site…

A massive thanks to everyone involved, I had so much fun and learned so much! If anyone is interested, the rest of the photos can be viewed on Flickr and Facebook. If any cosplayers want higher res or non-watermarked versions of the photos, please get in touch, I’d be happy to supply them.

Gosh it was a busy weekend – so much that I’m going to divide it over a few blog posts for the next week or so. Lots of food, lots of ogling fantastic costumes, hundreds of photos and not a whole lot of sleep!

First up, the main reason I went to Sydney for SMASH – to sell my crafty items at a table with Sam!

Myself and Sam, looking very tired after a day of selling

I have to admit, I was severely under prepared for this event. Some important bits and pieces I realised I needed at the last minute were ordered too late; I didn’t have time to make any prints or illustration based work; I left some important things (like little envelopes for people to take their purchases away in!) back in Canberra; Sam and I were madly sorting things out at 2am the night before.

With all that, I think that I actually got a pretty good response considering the terrible disorganisation! The anime convention crowd is very different to the handmade market crowd, which is something I should probably have anticipated and been less disappointed when I had to halve most of my prices in order for them to sell. In the end I sold most of my stuff but just barely broke even with travel expenses, which was a little disheartening but definitely a worthwhile experience.

I think one area that I let myself down was presentation, which was hurriedly put together and didn’t end up giving a very professional appearance to my work. It’s definitely something that I’ll be working on in time for my table at Manifest in just over a week.

I wish I’d had time to check out the rest of the convention as there were some excellent international guest artists and interesting sounding panels, but even when I went to walk around I felt too burnt out from the late night before to really do too much. I spent a lot of time sitting at our table eating jellybeans and chatting with our table buddies.

Table buddies George and Patrick

Definitely a lot of food for thought from this convention, and I’m hoping to iron out some of the issues before the next one!