Category Archives: Christmas

Craft Stall Update and Review

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Hello Again!

This week I thought I’d have a look back at some of the craft stalls I’ve done over the last year or so. I’ve made much more effort to get ‘out there’, although it’s quite difficult trying to balance the place to be with the costs of doing the fair. As my cards and gifts are generally low cost items to purchase, I need to sell a lot to even cover the costs of the table and there have been times in the past when that’s about all I’ve managed and that is very disheartening I can tell you.

Anyway, balancing act aside, I did a few stalls last year. I ended 2022 with a successful stall at the local primary school Christmas fair. It’s a good cause to support, the table money goes to school funds and they ask for a raffle prize for on the day. With it being after school on a Friday, it only lasts for a couple of house as well (and there’s the bonus of only having to transport my things down the road). It’s hard work but good fun and I can always nip home if someone asks for something specific! I could do with more like this.

Into 2023 and I arranged to have a small stock of special day cards in my local Post Office. I’d missed the boat for Valentine’s / Mother’s Day, but I did get a decent collection of Father’s Day cards in there. They went down quite well, so I also did some thank you teacher, Halloween and Christmas cards, and then some Valentines and Mother’s Day cards this year too. The cards don’t sell in huge numbers but as the ad says ‘every little helps…’

Back to 2023 and I discovered that my local Dunelm has a community group and they offer a table at weekends to local small businesses in exchange for a donation to their charity fund. I thought it was worth a try to see how it went, so a booked myself in for a few dates. It’s a long day (10-4) and I was on my own for a large part of it – definitely one to limit drinks! Crafty-Teen (craftykid has grown up) dis accompany me on a couple of occasions but didn’t stick it out all day. I did the weekend before Father’s Day last June in the hope I could sell some sports shirt and trophy cards. I tried to make at least one for every football team I could think of! The weather was ridiculously hot. so it wasn’t the best attended stall I’ve ever had but I did sell some things and get my name out there. I had another table in October, this time in a different location in the store. Once again the weather wasn’t on my side as it was very wet. I focused on Halloween themed items and sold a few knitted pumpkins (new for 2023) and some little tassel ghosts. All in all it was a better day than it had been in June.

At the end of the Summer term I attended the primary school Summer fete again. I always take lots of teacher thank you cards to this but hardly ever sell any which I find very strange. However, the small knitted/crochet characters went down well with the children. I guess small mascots at pocket money prices area winner. It was nice this year as we were able to have the tables outside and it was very well attended (I was starving at the end though as I was very close to the BBQ station).

I had another table at Dunelm in November with a focus on Christmas cards. I find it difficult when to pitch Christmas as lots of people don’t want to see festive things until December, but with making and selling cards I really need to get them out there well before Advent. This was the earliest stall I’ve ever done for Christmas and I launched my £1 card collection which did reasonable well , along with my regular recycled cards. I did a few bundle deals too which seem popular so I will continue those again next Christmas, It was my best stall of the three at Dunelm but it really is a very long day on your own, with long periods of nobody stopping to chat. Thank goodness for some friends dropping in to say hello!

I managed to get a table at Clark Crafts in Ramsbottom at the start of December. I was really lucky to get a last minute cancellation place as I had somehow been missed off the initial listing. I was really looking forward to this one as I had been double-booked for their first market in the Summer, so missed out and it had been really well attended. It was cold! Snow on the ground (and we didn’t get much over Winter) but the Ramsbottom Maker’s Market was on so my fellow stall-holders and I were hopeful. I think the weather must have put people off because we didn’t have lots of customers. I still managed to do ok, but it was a long day and several stall-holders didn’t make their table money back. The highlight was a lovely lady selling Thai curries and she gave us all some of her tasters – much needed on such a cold day!

I finished 2023 with another table at the school Christmas fair and again it was the little knitted characters that sold to the children. It’s a fun way to end the year, but it wasn’t as well attended as previous ones and my sales were down a bit. But it is very local and not a long stand! The time does go very quickly with lots of people to chat to.

Total sales from the stalls:

Cards – 51; Knitted/Crochet Characters – 44; Gift tags – 35; Christmas decorations – 29; Chocolate orange covers – 14; Keyrings – 6; Pumpkins – 6; Hat/Gloves – 5 Ghosts – 4 Poppies – 3

And from the Post Office: Total 20 cards (to date)

Father’s Day – 3; Teacher/Thank You – 7; Halloween – 1; Christmas – 6: Valentine – 1; Easter 2.

So those were my 2023 efforts to get out and about a bit more. It was hard work and I must thank my husband and Crafty-Teen for their help with transport, setting up, lunches and packing up. I have learned a lot about what people are prepared to buy/pay at these small local fairs and I’ve met lots of lovely people (fellow makers and customers). I will definitely continue with the school fairs and need to have plenty of pocket money characters ready for these. I shall keep taking a view on my stock before making a decision on doing Dunelm again, but I have got my name down for Clark Crafts again and I will get my Father’s Day cards back in the Post Office soon. Then it’s back to updating my Facebook page!

Happy Crafting

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(Last week’s Parkun 44:52)

Dance accessories

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A couple of years ago, I made Alice a pair of legwarmers and a pair of wrist warmers for here to wear on her way to dance classes. She’s never been very good at remembering to wear them, but she did a couple of weeks ago and it would appear everyone wants some now! I think the little cold snap we’ve had has seen some chilly legs both in and out of dance class.

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I haven’t done any knitting for a while so it’s been nice to get out my needles again and start scaling up patterns to the right size. Fortunately, Alice is quite a good guide for her dance pals size. It’s also been fun sorting through my immense yarn stash. Trying to get perfect matches for dance uniforms isn’t easy, but I’ve not done too badly with a deep raspberry pink soft baby yarn and a bright turquoise for the younger children. Some of the older ones have a real love of sparkle, so along with the relevant Mums, we settled on some bright pink with a sparkle running through it for 3 of the girls, a navy blue with a blue sparkle in for another two and a black with silver thread for another.

It’s been touch and go getting these all finished for the big day (and before dancing finishes for the Christmas break), but they are all now complete. I hope they all like them when they open them under the Christmas tree. I can’t wait to see them all being worn in the new year!

Happy Christmas crafting
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School Christmas Fair Preparations

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Once again we have the school Christmas fair to look forward too. I will be having a stall with all my tree decorations, some garlands and plenty of cards. This year, it’s being co-run by the newly formed friends group of parent volunteers, who all have their own ideas on what will work best.

One thing that hasn’t changed is the request for each child to fill and decorate a plastic pint pot for the Pot Goody stall. This is one of the most popular stalls among the children. Plus each class has a prize on offer for the best decoration. So this week we have been thinking about how we can do something a bit different. We’ve done several Christmas trees, a snowman and Santa getting stuck in a chimney, so this has not been an easy task!

Alice has been set on making a reindeer, though I can’t quite work out how she thinks we’ll make one. So after much discussion, we settled on a Christmas Cracker, filled with sweets and decorated with lots of bits and bobs from old Christmas cards. I think it looks fantastic. I hope for her sake that she wins, she’s been so disappointed in previous years.

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Fingers crossed.
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New Christmas Traditions – Satsuma Thrifty Christmas Campaign

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Last year I decided to start a new tradition for Christmas. I was fed up of buying the same cheap little chocolate advent calendars year on year, and while my daughter liked them, I could never find anywhere to put them and they just didn’t seem to be very Christmassy. So I started to crochet some little stockings and made them into a perpeptual advent calendar.

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It looked lovely up in the hall last year as a Christmas garland as well as being my daughter’s favourite part of the run up to Christmas. I filled it with individual wrapped chocolates, so it didn’t cost a fortune to fill either.

This year I’m looking round for inexpensive little gifts to fill it with again. At seven (almost eight), my daughter is becoming a little more difficult to please with sweets and chocolates. I’ve bought a couple of selection boxes and will add those to the stockings. I think it’s always nice to see something peeking out of the top of the stocking. But I also want to add something other than sugar loaded treats. The stockings aren’t very big so I can’t go mad with gifts, but I think a couple of packs of her favourite (My Little Pony) Stickers and perhaps one of the mystery bags as a treat for Christmas Eve. She also loves to draw, so I’m going to get a pack of pens and split them up putting a different one in each stocking.

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It’s great to think that this will be a tradition that we can carry on and hopefully she will enjoy the individuality of her calendar. I know I certainly enjoyed making it and have great fun thinking of things to fill it with. And it doesn’t have to cost a lot either. I’m going to stick to a budget of £10 maximum to fill it. Who knows I might even find some of the stocking fillers I put away last year and forgot about!

Now I just need to hang it up high enough that the meddlesome cats don’t attack it!

Not long to go.
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See mine and other ideas for a savvy Christmas here

Christmas Card Collection

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This year I decided to work on a full collection of five or six card designs for Christmas.  I was asked recently to provide the cards for the lovely gift shop Hearts for Homes in Ramsbottom, so this idea of a collection has become more relevant and important.

I’ve had my Christmas craft materials out for a few weeks now and have rediscovered some beautiful papers and patterns.  I found a stack of twisted pyramage with some lovely winter images.  I particularly like robins at Christmas, so thought I’d revisit this style of papercraft.  I’ve really loved the embossed and aperture style cards I’ve been working on this year, so keeping with that I found a lovely couple of embossing folders to work as backgrounds.

The snowflake embossing folder is by Darice.  I think it’s so pretty.  The snowflakes are all different and very delicate.  I think it works well with the twisted pyramage robin.

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My next card style in the collection is the large poinsettia.  This is a Bigz die by Sizzix and it works so well on all types of card, paper and fabric.  Here I’ve used some Kanban papers and combined it with a circular die cut aperture and embossed snowflake background.

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The third design in my collection uses some gorgeous rich cardstock I bought at the creative craft show .  This green is so sumptuous it just cried out to be used with gold mirror card.  I added a snowflake cut using an X-Cut die.  I think the gold ribbon bow and gems set it off a treat.  Don’t you?

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I’ve had such fun routing through my crafting arsenal of dies and materials.  I bought this Spellbinders bow die a while back and haven’t really used it.  But it called to me to make Christmas paper bows and add to the front of some cards.  I was reminded of a series of cards I made several years ago with large organza ribbon bows on the front which were very popular with my work colleagues at the time.  I loved making these bows from all the different Christmas patterned papers.  They looked so lovely on square cards, I even made some look like parcels.  My Mum and Dad will be getting one of these and I hope they like it as much as I enjoyed making it.

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These cards take a little bit of time to make so I was in need of making something quick to put in packs and that wouldn’t cost as much to make or buy.  I’d been thinking about doing some cut outs with patterned papers behind for a while now, but never gotten around to it.  This was the ideal opportunity to do some with my snowflake die.  I love this silver holographic paper.  It it so sparkly behind the snowflake.  I think they will look great on my stall at the school fair too.

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As in the words of the great Monty Python, now for something completely different!  I bought this lovely papercraft kit from Create and Craft several years ago and not known what to do with it.  The papers are quite pastel in colour but very fun and wintry too, and the little elements are very cute.  I particularly like the children in their winter outfits.  I thought they were perfect to send to siblings and grown up children.

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For my final card design this year I went back to my love of DL cards.  There is somethigng so elegant about a tall slim card and I just couldn’t help myself in making at least one.  For these I again used a Kanban card kit with some lovely HunkyDory Mirri card.  Simple but elegant I hope you agree

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So that’s my collection for Christmas 2016.  There is a selection available in Hearts for Homes in Ramsbottom as well as in Holts Newsagents in Walmersley.  I will also be selling these directly at the Springside Primary School Christmas Fair and via facebook.

I hope you like them.

Happy Christmas Crafting
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More Crochet Snowmen

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Last Christmas, I had a rush on little crochet snowmen. They are very cute, and they were so popular with the dance mums, that I had orders for five more for this Christmas.

So for the last few weeks I’ve been crocheting parts of little snowmen. It has really started to get me in the mood for Christmas. I hope we get a spell of cold weather though. It does seem a bit odd making snowmen when it’s still well above 10 degrees outside!

My first set of snowmen are a for a lovely family with two little girls.  Their favourite colours are pink and purple.  I haven’t come up with any good names for these two yet, but I’m sure the girls will!p1250303

This trio are for two brothers and their younger sister.  One brother’s a Manchester United fan, the other is a Manchester City fan (I don’t fancy being there for football arguments in the future) and their sister is a dancer.

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I love how each one ends up different although the pattern is the same throughout.  It just goes to show how different yarns make things very individual.

I think the most fun I had though was with my jar of buttons while waiting for Alice in her dance class.  Looking for just the right shade of each colour is very important.  I was counting on any of the other Mums loving the buttons too, so we had buttons everywhere and I had to promise to bring them again!

Happy Crafting
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Unexpected crafting!

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I know I’m a crafter, so this title in itself is rather unexpected.  However, our Alice has been unwell really for a few weeks now, but she’s finally given in to being fully blown ill and is currently enjoying / enduring  some restful time off school.

This has meant I am now totally behind with my preparations for Halloween and Christmas, but that’s the life of a crafting Mum!  So today I decided to find something for both of us to do that would help lift Alice’s spirits and maybe go some way to starting my stash of Christmas decorations.

I’ve been thinking about making some simple, no knit hat decorations for a while and this seemed the ideal opportunity with a willing helper too!  What I wasn’t counting on was how much she loved making them.

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We had such a great crafty afternoon watching ‘Equestria Girls’ on dvd and making these hats, that she decided she wanted to make them and sell them too.  So it rather turned into me being her assistant and she’s planning on taking her little stash to her dance class at weekend and maybe even to the school Christmas Fair! I’m hoping that she will make her own gifts for her teachers this year too.

I think she may have caught the crafting bug – much better than the virus she is recovering from.

Happy crafting
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Boxing Day Floods

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Having spent Christmas in the South West with my inlaws, I missed being part of the floods at home. It was rather upsetting watching it from a distance, trying to keep up with exactly which parts of Bury were flooded or were going to flood. I spent most of Boxing Day glued to facebook and the bbc news. Several friends and family members lost power for a time, and I was dreading what we would return home too.

We arrived home last night and couldn’t see very much in the dark, I was expecting the worst though! So I’ve just been out to feed the birds, and this is my back garden!

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More like a lake, and this is almost 48 hours after the rain subsided! It much have been awful on Boxing Day itself. Fortunately, the house is several feet above the garden level, but I’m really glad I hadn’t followed through with my wish to have a shed / studio space at the bottom of the garden, I don’t think there would have been much left to salvage! I think I shall persevere with my little craft space in the spare room for the time being.

But we got off quite lightly compared to many in the local area. There is a road bridge out of action because of the pub collapsing in Summerseat, and a couple of footbridges are having to be demolished. And we’re set for more rain to come. I hope 2016 brings a drier Summer!

Christmas Cake

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This year I tried to be really organised and managed to make my Christmas cake in early October. And as I should I have been feeding it with some brandy every week since, that is until I ran out last week! So today was the day to take the plunge and decorate it.

I haven’t had much time between finishing Christmas orders and Alice’s dance classes and shows to really even think about a design this year, so it was a bit of let’s see what we’ve got and do something spontaneous! I cheated and used some ready-to-roll icing and I used some strawberry jam to stick the marzipan to the cake. I didn’t have a great deal of the icing, so I rolled it quite thinly – my husband isn’t a big fan of icing anyway so that’s a bonus. Having a root round by baking cupboard I found some little roses and silver balls, so I decided to have a red / white theme on the cake, with some little silver balls between each rose.

Alice then found my little snowman and Christmas tree so they were also added before we finished off the little scene with some sifted icing sugar ‘snow’ and a large handtied ribbon bow.

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I normally don’t get round to eating the cake until mid-January, but in the meantime it looks nice on the pre-Christmas table!

Happy crafting
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Early Christmas Baking

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Now that the Christmas holidays have started it’s time to get into the spirit of things and do a spot of festive baking. It’s very therapeutic to get out the mincemeat and make up some tasty treats. I decided to begin with a batch of my mincemeat parcels. They are so tasty and make a lovely alternative to a mince pie. I have a number of packs of frozen filo pastry in the freezer that need to be used, so this was an ideal quick bake.

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After the parcels were finished, I enlisted Alice to make some festive ginger biscuits that we could share with friends and family over the holidays. The recipe we have is in a little Hello Kitty Christmas book that we bought for Alice a few years ago. It’s a really simple recipe and makes absolutely loads of biscuit dough. We chose some different Christmassy cutters and set about making the biscuits.

It was a good job there was loads of dough because I had a minor moment with my oven and completely burned the first two batches! I forgot just how fast my oven is when I’m baking. Anyway, we still managed to make about 60 or so biscuits for sharing. Alice’s favourite part of the baking process is the decorating, and we used plenty of icing pens, hundreds and thousands, and other little Christmassy bits from my cupboard.

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Once finished we took some round to the neighbours, wishing everyone a Merry Christmas!

Happy crafting
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