Gifts for Myself and Others Report

Hello fabulous readers! (aka, Hi Mom!)

I thought I'd make a brief report about how the Gifts for Myself and Others show went, since I chattered about it so much in advance.  It was my first crafts show, so it was very exciting.  Prepare yourself for a long slog.

On the Thursday before the show, we were allowed to come in for a few hours and set up our booth/display, but not allowed to put out any of our product since there would be no security that night.  I should have taken more pictures, but here's the one I do have of our empty setup.  There's a big table out of view, across from the shelf.

Friday we were allowed to come in a few hours early and fill up our display with all of our lovely items.  As I said before, I was sharing a booth with Deb Thurlbeck, who makes all of the lovely fabric sculptures you'll see below.

We'll start with a shot of the overall display/booth.  We did rearrange things a bit as the weekend went on, partly as figures sold, partly just to keep things interesting, but here's how it started out:

 

Doesn't Erin the Heron look wonderfully festive in his little Santa hat and collar? And the peacock on the table is quite a show-stealer, isn't he?

My jewellery was mostly clustered on the left side of the table there, as you can see.  Here's a closeup from day one.  Sorry, it's a little blurry:

Here are a couple less blurry shots of sections of that main table spot:

As you can see, I had quite a few bracelets out.  Beaded bangles and the S curves with pearls in all sorts of colours.  I learned that I need to make a greater variety of bracelet lengths though, or at least have some extender chain and pliers on hand so that I can make them adjustable.  My preference with bracelets is not to have the chains though, personally.  What do you think?  Leave a comment and let me know if you like to have a length of adjustable chain on your bracelets.

I also had a few things on the stepped tables along the side.  You'll notice the earring tree under the lamp in the corner.  After a while I realized nobody was noticing it there, so we moved it up to the shelf, though I don't have a picture of its new home.

The giant glittery pine cones you've probably noticed are real, and enormous.  Deb collected them on a trip to California and then glitterified them.  I think they're just delightfully festive.

Here's a closeup of some of my donut wraps.  Deb and I finished setting up much faster than expected, so I had time to make a chain for the copper one.  I'm not 100% sure how I feel about the shape of it.  Leave me a comment and let me know what you think.  (Again, I apologize for the quality of the images.  I took these with the camera in my phone since I forgot to bring my actual camera along.):

Oh, and here's another shot of the copper one with its chain (comment please!) against a lighter background:

In between moments of talking to delightful people about my beading and Deb's fabric art (and a bit of browsing and shopping through all the other wonderful vendors) there were some lulls when I was able to work on some more beading projects.  Here's a pair of festive earrings I came up with.  I call them my jolly holly earrings:

I also made another variant of those with red pearls.  I'll post a picture later.

The last project I had time to work on was a fringe necklace I'd already spent a good 35-40 hours on in the past.  I kind of stopped counting.  I had done all the fringe, but I wanted to turn the ladder stitch over the fringe part into brick stitch in order to tidy up places where you could see knotted thread and also to make it less inclined to flop back and forth over the top of the chain rather than lie straight.  I was really pleased with how the brick stitch helped with both of those goals.  Ta da!

I don't know if black is the best background for it.  The colours are supposed to look like flowing water, which is why I put a pearl in the center, since it could be a natural jewel of the deep.  I may take a better picture later, but in the meantime, let me know what you think of the colours, what you see in it.

So that's about it.  I think our display ended up looking quite lovely once it was filled in and that our items complimented each other quite nicely.  Sea horse giraffes may have wound up wearing bracelets as necklaces for parts of the show, but sadly there is no photographic evidence to prove it either way.  It was lots of fun and I got to talk to lots of great people (shoppers and other vendors).  I look forward to doing more shows in the future.