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This festival is held at the Seattle Center each Memorial Day weekend, this year was the 40th annual festival.  The festival focuses on music and dance performances and always draws a large crowd, usually around 250,000 people.  The art booths are really a mix of arts and crafts, not many really high end arts.  I did hear that attendance was a bit lower than usual this year and donations to the festival were also down a bit.

This was our third year participating in this festival.  We were assigned a new booth location, at our request, that was much more prominent and visible, the weather forecast was decent for Seattle.  2 years ago the weather was perfect, last year it rained all 4 days, this year was forecasted to be sort of in between.  Having done well both of the previous years and knowing that people come out for this festival regardless of the weather we were anticipating a good show.

The show is well organized, a hospitality room is available, our section leader brought water and snacks around several times, other volunteers brought coffee around a few times.  Load in on Thursday night was very easy, I hear Friday morning was a bit more challenging.  Monday night load out is always difficult in that cars are not allowed on the grounds until after 10 PM so most of us hand truck our stuff.  This year they had a city bus parked in the normal loading zone and it created some chaos at load out until they could get the transit people to move the  bus.

Unfortunately this year our sales were quite a bit lower than previous years, in the end we ended up with sales that would be acceptable for a 2 day local show, not a 4 day grueling show schedule.  Most of the artists around us were experiencing the same pattern, everyone that I talked to who had done this show before was experiencing lower sales, new artists were not doing any better than those of us who had done the show before.   It really didn’t seem to matter which medium, jewelry, fiber, wood, glass, etc. everyone was saying their sales were lower than prior years.  2 different artists we know who have done this show for 14 years and 17 years told us it was their worst ever FolkLife.  This year’s show seemed to attract a younger crowd for a larger portion of the weekend than usual, especially on Friday when sales were particularly horrible for most of the artists.  Saturday was a little better, most of us had our best sales day on Sunday when it seemed like there were a lot more families and older couples in attendance. Monday was about the same as Saturday for most of the artists, although one artist we know had a fantastic Monday after having very low sales all 3 other days.

It's an expensive show to do with a $300-400 booth fee, 15% commission on sales over $700. Parking in downtown Seattle is not cheap, although on Sundays and holidays, street parking was free if you got there early enough to find a spot close to your booth.

Based on 2 out of 3 years of strong sales at this show we'll most likely try this one again and hope this year was an anomaly we won't experience again.