To my new visitors who are stopping by after meeting me at the Creativ Festival: welcome! Don’t forget to take a look at my shop and my crochet tutorials!

Another Creativ Festival is over. This one went by like a whirlwind for me. I was only there for the Friday, but I left home at 6am to beat the traffic into Toronto, and arrived back home at about 10pm, so it was a pretty long day!

Here’s my table at the A Needle Pulling Thread booth:

It’s hard to see from the picture, but I brought 13 pieces with me this time (L-R: 2 pumpkins, fuzzy monkey, gecko, 2 tiny whales, fruit bat, african violets, stegosaurus, mini fuzzies hedgehog, arctic fox (behind), miniature pinscher, chihuahua). I had to split up my pattern catalogue into two books, as I had too many to fit into just one! I suppose that’s a good problem to have 🙂

One of the highlights of my day was when Silverlotus stopped by to show me the lovely African Violets she had made from my pattern! I had coincidentally brought my own violet along, so I had to grab a photo of them together (mine is on the left) – and didn’t she do a great job, especially considering she’s only been crocheting since February?!

In the weeks before the show, I spent forever winding yarn and putting together kits for my Whale class:

You can see my new gecko business card in this pic too!

The class went pretty well. I had 14 students and almost all were beginners. I wish the class had been 2 hours long; sadly, we spent most of the 1.5hrs learning how to crochet, and didn’t have time to complete the whale pattern. I’ve already heard back from two of my students who have since completed their whales, and I hope all my other students will too! (Remember, email me if you have any problems!) If you’d like to make a Tiny Whale of your own, it’ll be a new donationware pattern in the next couple of days 🙂

While I was at the booth, I demonstrated brushed crochet, by converting my Fuzzy Bear pattern into a brushed crochet pattern. I’ll be writing a tutorial on this method shortly, so if you’d like to try some of my fuzzy patterns but have problems using eyelash yarn, this is another method you can use to get a cute fluffy result. Here’s my finished bear, together with the original Fuzzy Bear:

As you can see, I didn’t brush him too much – I liked the sort of threadbare, antique look I got from just generating a bit of fluff. You could, of course, brush for longer and get a fluffier result where the stitches are more obscured.

The show itself was much smaller this year, with less vendors, but that may have worked in my favour. I gave out around 200 business cards and got 36 new names for my mailing list. (I’ll be emailing a new discount code to my entire mailing list later today, to welcome the new members, so sign up now if you’d like to take advantage of that!)

Overall, the show was a big success for me, although it took a lot of preparation, and the day itself was long and tiring. But it’s always worth it: I always enjoy meeting new people, and seeing some familiar faces from previous years! And it’s very cool when people recognise me (or my work, at least) from seeing it online – I’m such a celebrity these days 😉