Sunday, April 15, 2018

Recovering and Getting Back on Track

So I realized I hadn't posted since March and now the Fibres West Show has already come and gone.  It was a very busy time and I must say I am glad the show is over so I can catch up with other things.  Unfortunately, life does get in the way and I recently came down with pneumonia and so now trying to get over that.  I guess I was pushing myself a little too hard and I think I have learned my lesson about taking care of me better, which I now plan to do more of from now on.

In the meantime, I thought I would share a few photos from the Fibres West show and will try and post more often again to keep you a little more up to date on things.

We had a wide range of our hand crafted accessories available at the show such as buttons, seam rippers, crochet hooks, stitch markers, etc.


These (shown below) are our new line of ergonomic crochet hooks we created in my "Moonscapes" pattern.  I say "we" because my friend Linda played a large part in helping me with these.  While I love making them, the entire process can be very labor intensive.  With Linda mixing up all the clay colors for the bases gave me more time to cover and hand shape each hook and then add the  patterns.  After baking, the two of us spent days sanding and then polishing them.  I am glad to say I now have them listed in our Etsy shop and also our online store (Canadian).  They are available in every size from 2.0 to 10.0.  The colors all vary as they coordinate with the color of the hook so you can mix and match the size and color you want.

Moonscape design ergonomic crochet hooks
One of the highlights of the show was seeing our buttons in use.  I have started making custom buttons for Lynn Anderson of West Coast Color.  Her and her husband have a sheep farm here at the Shuswap not too far away from me.  We spent some time together a while back color matching my clay recipes to most of her yarn that she hand dyes herself.  This is her holding up one of her darling sweaters with my Rainbow jellyroll buttons.


And a little better close-up view of the sweater and our buttons in 2 other color combinations.



Some of you may have seen this picture I posted on Facebook and Instagram of this sweet little girl.  She is actually Lynn's granddaughter and she was wearing a sweater Lynn made for her and was the perfect little model.


The other section of our booth at the show consisted of various items from our Snap Decisions Collection (Interchangeable Fashion ... in a Snap!)  We mainly focused on accessories that worked well with scarves and shawls plus a few other items to coordinate them with where the snaps could all interchange.


The two most popular items, however, were our interchangeable shawl sticks and our "Build your own" scarf jewelry.  We basically provided a selection of scarf bails, snaps, pendants, etc. and the customers enjoyed mixing and matching to create a scarf necklace in their own style.  Most of them were knitting, crocheting or weaving their own scarf from the fibres they purchased at the show.



We already had this concept in our online store (you can see it here) but since the show, I decided to expand on it a little more.  I am busily working on adding some of our more popular items and should have a nice selection up in a few more days.

1 comment:

Marian Hertzog said...

Glad you are recovering! I love that sweater with your buttons. And your scarf jewelry is really cool too. Sounds like a fun show with lots of creative people around!