NSS RECAP PART 2 {BOOTH SET UP}

I worked long and hard designing my booth. This year, I decided to purchase foam core walls from Manny Stone so that I could have the appearance of walls in my booth. So, in preparation for setting up my booth, I went to the art store and bought a large piece of foam board to practice on. The main reason for this is because I decided to use a grass paper on the walls. I needed to figure out how to get in onto the foam walls. I also wanted to make sure that my booth design would look right.

We arrived the day before the show which gave us only about 7-8 hours to set up. This included us staying past the 6pm deadline but they don't enforce that rule at all.

Here is a shot if the Javits Center during set up. You can see that some people have finished and hung up fabric to hide and protect their booth overnight.

And here is a shot of my booth while we were still putting up the fabric. Before getting to the show, I went ahead and adhered the pieces of fabric together with stitch witchery. I then rolled them up and shipped them in 3 separate pieces, one for each wall. Putting them up was a process. We tacked them up initially and then worked on pulling, stretching and straightening until they were perfect. It was my greatest worry that it would look right on the wall, but it turned out fabulous.

Here we are almost done. Once the fabric was on all the walls, we put all the trim on. Before the show I cut, painted & nailed all the trim. Putting all the nails in the trim before hand allowed us to just press it into the foam walls.

Then, we started putting up the shelves which I made before the show as well. I took a square dowel and put all the nails in just like with the trim. Then I used wood glue and clamps to attach another flat price of balsa wood on top. This hid the nails and made it into a shelf. Putting up the shelves was a little complicated because they need to be level and at certain points on the wall. But having the nails in the shelves ahead of time allowed us to just press them into the wall once they were in the right spot.

You can kind of see the lights that we used as well. Again, they were very cheap plastic ones from Ikea. Lighting is very important and I'm so glad that I brought them since my booth was in a very strange location in the center for lighting. I think next year, I'll try to get a booth else ware.

I framed my logo 3 times in the cheapest Ikea frames and painted them to match the trim. I hot glued these on each wall. All of the white signage was cut by me out of thick white paper and pinned to the wall with straight pins.

Tomorrow, the full reveal!