Homespooled

As many of you know, this past weekend was the first event at which I presented my crafts for sale.  I shared a booth at the 41st annual Northern Lights Festival Boréal with Little Squirrel Designs, a business run by my crocheting genius of a sister-in-law.

I had no idea what to expect and I must say, over the weekend I learned A LOT.  I learned how great it feels when people love your creations.  And how hard it is to listen to people criticize your prices when you know how much material, time and attention went into making something by hand.  I grew frustrated when we went an hour without a sale, but chalked it all up to gaining experience.  I grew more comfortable talking about my work and started to find it fun to try to make deals with people.  

At the end of the last day as we were all packing up our tents, a customer from the day before passed through while walking his dog.  His wife (I'm not sure if they're married or not, but let's assume they are for the sake of my story :)), had purchased a full apron the day before and he told me that she loved it, and that he would like to buy her another one as a surprise.  With almost all of my aprons packed into bins, we rummaged through them all to find him the perfect one.  That was such a fantastic way to end the weekend.  I will never forget that couple and their words of encouragement.  With that, I am excited to do more shows/festivals in the future but for now, let's take a look at how this one went!

Here I am setting up.  Someone must have done something funny...

T - 2 days!! The Northern Lights Festival Boréal is this weekend and the weather is expected to be spectacular.  I couldn't be more and less prepared, all at the same time.  My house is filled with products to sell, tables, a tent and chairs, shelves, clothing racks...and piles of aprons still in need of sewing! Ahh!

But look!  We have purple and green t-shirts to stand out in the sea of vendors and hundreds of recyclable bags in 3 different sizes to fit anything that can be purchased.

Cushions make great accent pieces and kids just love them, especially if they are soft, cuddly, colourful and have a cute character on the front.   It's a shame though that many cushions need to be thrown in the wash as a whole when they get dirty.  And kids make things dirty.  Really dirty.  Throwing the entire cushion in the wash really adds wear to it and changes the way the stuffing feels.  A lot of the time it's just the cushion cover that needs washing anyway.

Cushions with zipper closures can look very nice.  But the zipper can scratch certain surfaces like your furniture, or your kids face...so, let me show you how to make an envelope cushion cover that can be easily removed when it needs to be washed and that won't assault your children in any way.  

In Part 1 of this post, I showed you some of the child & toddler sized aprons that I will be selling at this year's Northern Lights Festival Boréal.  Here is one of the three styles of adult sized aprons that I will have available.  The design for these is the same as the child & toddler sized aprons and a lot of the materials match with them, making them a great combination gift.

As promised in my post about the Northern Lights Festival Boréal, here is an overview of some of the aprons that I will have at my booth.

I created the pattern for these myself at during the holidays last year when I made an adult version for my sister-in-law, with a matching one for my 2yr-old niece.  I've since made up the template and will have, in this design, 25 toddler size (2-5yrs), 25 child size (6-10yrs) and 25 adult size aprons available at the festival.  I will have more adult size aprons in other designs available as well but, more on that later.

I made all of these myself, with the exception of my mom helping out by sewing on some buttons one night while we were sipping margaritas.  Thanks mom!

Here are some of the Toddler size aprons:

In a previous post, I showed you how to make stamps using potatoes.  Now I'm going to show you how to use that technique and incorporate into a piece of art.  We are going to make this owl painting:

In my first post titled Use it or Lose it, I made mention near the end that a goal of mine for this year was to sell some of my completed projects at a festival or craft show.   WELL, do I have news for you!!  I just got word that I've been accepted as a vendor to the Northern Lights Festival Boréal in Greater Sudbury happening this July 6th, 7th and 8th.  That's two months away!!  Ahhhh!  Good thing I've been kind of preparing!

As proof of said preparedness, I present to you SOME of the things that will be available for you to buy from me on that ridiculously awesome weekend in July.

For my first festival, I want to get a feel for things so I decided to pretty much stick to a common theme.  Most of the items I'll be selling are geared towards children.

I will have some baby booties in sizes 6m and 12m: