A HOMEMADE WEIGHT TUTORIAL

As you most likely know by now, I have a handmade business called MADE BY Y that I operate mostly from home. I sometimes hold a stall at markets too. I generally have my spot indoors but it is not an option at times and last month, I had one of those outdoor markets. I do not own a marquee but a family member was kind enough to lend his to me for that day. The only issue was that his tent was not designed for concrete floors and I needed to make sure that it stayed firm and stable on a hard surface. That meant that I needed some weights for each leg of the marquee. I was tight on budget and time and had to come up with some homemade options.

I could have gone for a solution similar to the one in the pictures below,

or something l like this

but I have decided to go for a different weight option.

I happened to have some 5lt plastic containers at home. We bought some self adhesive contact paper to cover the writings on the containers, 4 hooks (we used whatever scrap horizontal metals that we had around to stop the hook from getting out), and a packet of (20kg) concrete premix from a hardware store and it all cost us just over $10.  

The first thing we did was to cover up the containers with the contact paper that we had bought. We didn't have to do that but it looked much nicer when we did it.

After that, we started getting our containers ready. Tip: You can put some rocks on the bottom of the containers if you don't have enough cement and that is just what we did to one of ours when we noticed that it was not going to be enough.

We placed the hook as seen in the picture above and put the hook through a small tree branch and hung it.

Mr. Hubby made cement using water and the concrete mix. 

Then, we poured the cement into containers and put them aside over night to dry and in the morning, it was all ready to use! All I had to do on the day was to use some strong ropes to weigh down the marquee.

Feel free to let us know if you have other ideas/options that you use or can think of in the comments section.