*see the edit at bottom of this post please... Now that I've had more than ten minutes to digest my thoughts on how the Cotillion went, I wanted to share my two cents.
I met with my business partner last night to critique the event and figure out a game plan for the next faire. We both agreed that the event was a success! Considering we just met in July and it was our first time planning a such an event, we both are feeling pretty good about it.
Is there room for improvement? Yes, always. The biggest problem was clear. The mansion where we held the Cotillion was our only real sore spot. The venue was too chopped up and quite cramped for the amount of foot traffic. (Yes, we had foot traffic! Yippee!) Would we use this venue again? No way. Sadly, the event person we had to deal with at the venue made things pretty darned unpleasant for our vendors, to put it mildly. At the end of the day we gave out surveys to all of our vendors, and each and every one of them commented on just how unpleasant a couple of the mansion folks were to them personally. OK, new venue for sure next time.
I think our shoppers liked the products we had, but, with this being said, we ended up with only about half of our participants selling true "vintage" items. 
Many had quite charming things, however, they were newly manufactured items that were mass produced and purchased from suppliers. We will work on developing a more real vintage grouping of products and display ideas.
I had goodie bags for all the vendors, as well as muffins and juice in the morning, but we all managed somehow to forget about lunch! Let me tell you, by 5:00 we were all starved. We'll include shoe box lunches for our vendors next time, for sure!
On the big plus side, our musician was beyond fabulous. A beautiful girl with a beautiful voice, and a delight to chat with as well. She sold out of CD's before noon and had to run home for more. The crowd of attendees was huge, and so very friendly, despite having to brave the coldest day we've had this season. Oh, another big plus- all of our vendors said they would like to participate in another faire...so we've begun planning our next Tumbleweed Cotillion, scheduled for early to mid summer (Exact date yet to be decided...later this week!) ...oh, but don't be surprised if you hear that we're doing a holiday Trunk Show somewhere...
*edited to add: I hope you all don't think we felt the event was bad or a failure! Quite the opposite. We are wildly happy with our first attempts at throwing a vintage faire, and we had excellent sales (and yes, the Robin's egg blue buffet sold!) It's simply that we want the event to grow to be a completely-top-shelf, waiting-list-of-vendors, wow-what-an-incredible-event kind of thing, and it is going to take one or two more attempts to be that. Oh, and we will have such fun getting to that point!
