Sunday 30 November 2014

Chrismas Craft Fayre. Some afterthoughts

I took part in my first Craft Fair last Saturday. I mean - as a felter and on my own. I've left it rather late so when this village fair came up (it was their first year) I grabbed the palce immediately.
In general it was a good and pleasant experience. Venue was warm, light and suitable decorated, stuff was very helpful and everything was arranged nicely. (Thank you, Ruth!). Fellow crafters were very friendly and quite a lot of local people turned up. Here are the pictures of my stall. Unfortunately my camera is out of order at the moment so I'd to use the old one hence poor quality pictures, sorry!


Chrismas Craft Fayre - Getting ready

Chrismas Craft Fayre - In process



I've sold quite a few items so it was fine from this side too. But still there were some disappointing things and it seems they are general and regular for practically every fair or show which are not large scale craft shows:
- the buyers of my staff were mainly friends, friends of friends, members of stuff and other makers. General publc - very few.
- people attending were not ready to pay more than ...The most of my items were out of that range even if I was selling them cheaper than usually in the shop.
- the majority of visitors had no idea about felt, what was this "fabric" and so on... I am thinking about doing demonstration next time!
All this is quite understandable, but still frustrating. I need to think it over and learn the lesson.
Hope you have nice time with your fairs if you are taking part in any!

Tuesday 11 November 2014

Sometning new

I can't resist Christmas! I just feel I need to make something Xmassy! And here we are - white snow, dark night, red birds!
Kindle Case "Christmas night"
Kindle Cover, Christmas, Red and Black, Bullfinch, Robin

What is new apart from the theme? New type of closure, with elastic loop and wooden button. I like it, need to use it more...

Monday 10 November 2014

My new storage system

Sounds a bit too grand for a few boxes of wool and yet...
These are "Before" and "After" pictures - a small bureau and stack of plastic boxes (a lot more plastic boxes throughout the house). I don't have a working room and work in the kitchen - light coming from two sides, water always at hand and wooden (not carpet!) floor. I like it there but I didn't like running through the house collecting all wool I need at the moment. So my husband decided to organise my stuff a little bit. Now it's a large unit with variety of boxes. The thing is IKEA. I am not a great fan of IKEA's stuff but we could get all boxes in matching sizes and many colours. Now all my wool is in one place.

Before
After





















I even have a few drawers! And some holes to put my papers and smaller boxes in.
Storage3 Storage2


If you look carefully you can see that one of the top boxes stores a lot of juice cartons! All my Kap merino wool colours are in them:
Storage1 Storage4





Not very glamorous but very convenient if you (like myself) need a lot of colours at the same time and amounts are small.

Sunday 2 November 2014

New Scarf and experiments with cotton scrim

I've made a new nuno scarf and I wanted to try dyeing and using different fabrics. Mainly they were silks - raw silk, silk chiffon and more silky stuff I don't know the name. I dyed chiffon first, the others were already of the colours I wanted.

So this is the scarf.
Scarf3
It's rather small so it needed a button or brooch to keep ends together. I didn't want to make a large brooch or make a button hole so I've just made a small brooch of this lovely ceramic button!
Scarf2
As for a cotton scrim it was not that good. You can see than the dye doesn't work on it, after felting it returned to original off white colour.I need to think more about it...
Scarf4 Scarf5