I attended my first craft fair as a seller today. It was the annual Christmas Fayre where I do my day job. I approached it as a marketing opportunity so was pleasantly surprised by how much of my work sold (about 10% of the stock I took with me).
It was lovely to chat to the people I normally work with about crafting and had one person sign up to join our arts and crafts group which was a bonus :o)
I’m afraid the pictures I took are a bit rubbish but hopefully this will give you a flavour:
Inspired by Ruth Lane’s stitching on her ammonites shells, I put the free motion embroidery foot on my machine and started stitching, these are the results…
I turned this piece into a tablet case with some silver and blue embroidery.
This is the back, I can’t decide how to hold the flap closed, I’m not keen on velcro and don’t want to use press studs or magnetic clasps for fear of damaging the tablet. I’m leaning towards an elastic strap over the top that the flap will slide under but I’m open to suggestions?
The foil flowers became an iphone case with a cute little flower-shaped button to hold it closed on the back.
I also got around to sewing up some flexi-frame pouches.
This is a really interesting technique I learned from the Sew Sister stand at Woolfest this year. They recommend machine embroidery but I mostly used hand embroidery (chain stitch) and needle felting for these cases. The method involves stitching a piece of fabric to a prefelt base and then felting it in the washing machine. As the prefelt shrinks the areas that have been stitched remain flat but the areas in between become rippled, resulting in a very thick, padded fabric.
