Holiday Craft Fairs

Since I moved to the Island, I've tried to stay on top of the vast and varied craft fair scene here, considering the amount of time (lots) and money(very little) I had to work with.
To begin with, I had never sold out of a tent before...always in the past, if outside, I would simply utilize whatever nature provided...paerhaps a tree, or some rocks, any sort of protuberance or leaning device I could muster always seemed to work for me, and, if nothing else, the good ol' blanket on the grass, sidewalk or ground was good enough...
Most of my fairs, at least the seasonal ones, were all inside, and since everyone on this side of the pond (across the Salish Sea from Vancouver, to Vancouver Island) seemed to have access to these ten- foot- square pop-up tents, I realized that in the summer I would get heatstroke, my jewelry would become too hot to handle, and hats? forget it..if I didn't conform...  and get a pop up canopy or cabana as they are called here, with four posts and a cloth roof, some also with removable side partitions or "walls" made of canvas or other material...
I also needed a table of some sort, since people here seemed averse to bending deeply from the waist and looking down...and I could hardly blame them...no I would have to have a table,  or two...
Am I the only person in North America who remembers folding card tables? Try and buy one on an Island that has almost nothing necessary to the crafter for survival...
I haunted thrift stores, hoping for a chance discovery, but those kindly lady volunteers all shook their heads, smiling with a touch of pity at me, and telling me that they disappeared as quickly as they came, which was almost never...aha!!!
So, they were "around", but I would have to be patient...however, the season was rolling along and I had to do something, so, when they went on sale, I bought myself a tent canopy (not a pop-up) and a folding table, supposed to be inexpensive, lightweight and resilient resin, which cost a fortune, weighed a ton and cracked the first time it slipped from my grasp...it only fell a few inches, thank goodness-I had visions of it shattering in a million pieces...and the tent, called easy-up, was of course anything but,,,
Looked with  increasing panic at the maze of differently-sized white tubing I was supposed to put together to form the top and legs of the tent, which of course came with no instructions,( the hardy Islanders presumed born with the knowledge of occult camping setups from day one...) luckily, a woman at my first tented fair, in a tiny place called Crofton (buyers? not often) took pity on me and showed me how to put it together..it was supposed to come with directions and every pole was to be  numbered, but neither of those things were true, which was probably why I got such a good "deal" on it...
It took a half-hour just to put up the tent and of course it wouldn't fit into the bag it came in after once removing it, so I ended up with armloads of slippery PVC tubing to carry back and forth each time...I soon went into debt for the actual pop-up type, although of course not the best of the breed (a mortgage payment of a tent!) but it was sufficient unto my needs...
I now possess a sort-of pop-up canopy, two cracked but servicable resin tables, a used bar-type stool that took forever to find, and now, of course, that I am semi-properly geared up, the outdoor season has ended...and once again, vast debt firmly in place, I am doing the indoor fairs...