Crantock Summer Craft Fair

Just wanted to post a quick note about an event I'll be attending tomorrow: it's the Summer Craft Fair being held in the Village Hall at Crantock near Newquay, Cornwall from 10am to 4pm.

If you're in the area, drop in - it'd be great to see you!

We Make London Summer Fair

I follow the UK Handmade group over on Flickr and recently read there about a promotional opportunity.

There are going to be 70 tote bags for sale at a nominal price at the We Make London Summer Fair to be held at Chelsea Town Hall on 26th June.

Anyone can contribute 70 promotional items to go in the totes, so I decided to do just that. Seems like a great idea to me!

One of the items I've come up with are mini-skeins of my hand-dyed yarns. When I rewound my laceweight yarns after dyeing I wound off any broken lengths into little balls and have kept them aside. They are perfect for making into mini-skeins!

These are so cute. I had a look at the patterns on Ravelry and it struck me that there are many patterns using laceweight yarn for smaller projects. So these mini-skeins are useful to the buyer too - they can be used to make a bookmark, jewellery, etc.

They also make a great "taster" for somebody wanting to try out lace knitting without being overwhelmed by a full-scale lace shawl type project.

I think I may work up a little pattern and sell some mini-skeins in my Etsy shop in the future, with the free pattern included.

A day at the Fair

Last Saturday I had a stall at a local Craft Fair, and we had a great day!

It's a well-established event - well organised and attended, with over 100 stalls.

My eldest DD came along to help, and was very keen to run the stall by herself whilst I went off to browse the other stalls. She did very well too! We made quite a few sales, which is really encouraging.

The necklace display stands from Boo's Jewellery templates worked really well. I learned a few more lessons too:

• My items need more labels - a pull-on cowl is obvious to me as I made it but I had lots of people asking what it was
• I need to get a better-looking piece of fabric to cover the table with - I may invest in a length of black velvet for the next fair
• My own invention of the hand display stands for my fingerless gloves worked well
• Using our bathroom cabinet without the drawers worked well to add height
• Some kind of backdrop would help to focus attention on the items on the table rather than whatever is behind it.

More thinking to do for the next one then...

Boo!

I have struggled to find an inexpensive but effective way to display my crochet necklaces for a while. I purchased some bust displays from ebay only to find they are tiny and not at all useful for my long necklaces.

During my Etsy wanders, I stumbled across Boo Jewellery and her blog, where there are several very useful tutorials. One of them is a tried and tested necklace display stand template has been developed and is freely available for all to use.

I first tried it on thick mounting card and found that it didn't work (the bottom flaps to stand it up broke off as the card was too thick to be flexible). Then I read the note about not needing thick card!

This time I've used a pack of A4 240gsm silver card - 99p for 4 sheets. I enlarged the template a little to get one stand instead of two from a sheet of A4, to accommodate the length of my crochet necklaces.


Here's the result in very little time - great! I'll be using these at the Local Crafts and Gift Market I'm doing in Falmouth on Halloween.


Thanks Boo for sharing your experience and template - I can recommend it.