A crafty venture

Am I going to manage a blog post in February? Well, yes, but only by writing it about crafts, because I haven’t been doing anything model horsey lately!

I’m just starting to dip my toe into selling the stuff that I make (cards and jewellery), and February turned out to be a busy month for that. Firstly, I signed up to have a stall at the Second Surrey SteampunkConvivial. I was planning on attending anyway and figured that having a stall would actually be a good way of meeting and talking to people! Then I was contacted by Surrey University Students Union, asking if I would be interested in a stall at their Affordable Arts, Crafts and Vintage Fair. My first stall had been at the Boileroom in Guildford before Christmas, and they had passed on my details. The Students Union event is a little more expensive, but has a considerably bigger potential audience. Also as it’s on a weekday, it does not take me away from my family at the weekend. As it was only five days after the steampunk event, I figured that it would be a good incentive to make lots of things in preparation for the two.

This was my stall at the Steampunk Convivial on Saturday:

I worked quite a lot in the week before to create steampunk-style greetings cards and jewellery, including some bracelets inspired by Jules Verne:

On the day I did reasonably; my cards were my most popular item and received several compliments. I also met lots of nice people and had a very entertaining day (notwithstanding that the contents of my stall were almost dragged to the ground by a human snail at one point…) I was also rather pleased with the fascinator hat that I made myself for the occasion:

Now I’m busy preparing as much as I can for the University event which is in two days’ time. I’m making a new batch of my jigsaw jewellery:

 – this is quite time-consuming as at the moment, each letter of the wording has to be transferred separately! I’m also hoping to catch the marketing opportunity of the moment by making some Mother’s Day cards if I get time.

Once this is over, I’ll be putting away my craft boxes for a little while and getting out the horse paints, ready for my first live show of the year – Yvonne Dunn’s Southern Roundup on 16 March. So, patient readers, you can look forward to some slightly more on-topic blog posts – maybe even something about pedigrees at some point!

I now have a Facebook page for my non-horsey craft stuff so if any of you would like to follow my progress with that, please pop over there and ‘like’ my page. I may have an Etsy or other webpage at some point too, but it’s early days at the moment.