Flower Shawl Sticks

I've been away from home for about three weeks caring for my 90-year-old mother.  While I was at her house, I did manage to do a bit of claying and here are the results:  shawl sticks which can also be used as hair sticks.

The pansies or violas are colored with Genesis Heat Set Oils and the flowers below are colored with soft pastels.

This is the display I will use to show them off at craft shows:

My first craft show

I did it!  This weekend I participated in my very first craft show, the Kitchener-Waterloo Knitters Festival in Kitchener, Ontario.  I wasn't sure how I would like doing shows, but I'm pretty gregarious and really enjoyed the process of talking to people and trying to convince them that "you don't really need a shawl to wear a shawl pin.  It can be a brooch, or a scarf pin or".....you get the idea.  I sold about $900 worth of pins, a bit jewelry and a handful of buttons, so after a booth fee of $200 and $75 for liability insurance (required by the show), I ended up with over $600.  I think that's pretty good given the low cost of the items I'm selling.

There were a few glitches.  After all that work to build my own tables and make custom coverings for them, I wasn't allowed to use them.  The venue made me use their tables and their fire-resistant table drapes.  Apparently the fire marshal is quite strict.  And then my credit card reader that fits on my iPhone wouldn't read cards.  It had worked fine when I tested it at home.  Fortunately people were very nice about paying with cash and I don't think I lost any sales.

Next I will do the Woodstock Fleece Festival in October.

Button, button, who's got the button?

I've got the buttons.  Lots of them.  I've been working flat out for the past couple of months building inventory for my very first show, a Knitters Festival.  After that, I'm doing a Fleece Festival.  In both shows I will be selling my shawl pins, buttons and knitting-themed jewelry.  I've also been creating a booth for the shows, making tables and table coverings, making pegboards, and buying grid walls, lamps and other accessories for the booth.  So these are my excuses for not blogging for over a month!

Here are some photos of my booth.  It is set up in my basement so the backgrounds are a bit messy.

Tall revolving Pegboard with bags of buttons.

Big buttons in containers and square buttons on the pegboard.  An Ott Lite for color matching.

The big buttons

Table with shawl pins

Examples of using the shawl pins hanging on the grid wall.

An attempt to get around the "But I don't have a shawl" problem.

My homemade fitted table covering.  I made three of these.