I meant to post this yesterday, but I was just too tired to write coherently! The show was a great success – I met loads of lovely people, made some money, and managed to stay awake and reasonably alert through all three wonderful, exhausting days 🙂

My table. The orang utan got a lot of attention!

You can’t really see it in the photo, but I did wear the tiny blue rose hair clip. And if you look carefully just in front of my right arm, you may catch a black and white peek at my latest design-in-progress on the table. More on that next week, most likely…

I was tweeting from the show whenever I had a spare minute (so not very often). Being able to communicate any interesting personal news immediately is one of the most appealing things about Twitter, and I loved being able to read the replies on my phone in quiet moments!

My Who’s Who in the Crochet Zoo was a fun talk – I brought along 15 different animals in all shapes, sizes and yarn types, and tried to share some of my knowledge and tips. I had 15-20 attendees and I think they enjoyed it too.

My Crochet a Decorative Rose class on Saturday also had about 15-20 people (I was too busy teaching to count). On Sunday, though, the same class was insanely popular – people were lining up 1/2 hr early to get tickets, and it sold out within minutes! I felt like a crochet rock star! I’m still working on the pattern for the roses, but it’ll be up here in the next day or two, so if you wanted to come to my class but couldn’t get a ticket, check back here soon…

I’ll also be sending out a thank you discount code to everyone who has signed up for my mailing list, so if you’re not on my list yet, you might want to sign up now so you can take advantage of the discount!

Hmm, what else can I tell you about the show? Oh yes, the new business cards! I put out both new designs (Discworld and Guinea Pigs) and the old ‘classic’ style cards, and people took whichever they liked best. It looks like around 50 each of the Discworld and classic cards were taken, and close to 100 of the Guinea Pig cards, so I think going for the cute eye-catching card designs was worth it! I’d like to think that people might pin them to their noticeboard instead of throwing them away as soon as they got home…

The old card is top right – see how much more eye-catching the new ones are? (All the info is still there – it’s just printed on the back)

I didn’t really get much of a chance to look around the rest of the show, but my lovely booth neighbours from Upper Canada Quiltworks were demoing and selling a very intriguing looking craft: punchneedle. Ever heard of it? I’ll do a post on it when I’ve had a go – I couldn’t resist buying one to try! It makes a sort of looped embroidery. I can’t wait to try it out; I have loads of design ideas already.

It’s a punchneedle!

So, all in all, the show was amazing. As always, the best part of being there was getting to actually interact face to face with people. It was lovely to see some familiar faces from previous shows, and to make new friends! Of course, it’s not all good – you have to wonder at the insensitivity of those people who walked past my table with a look of absolute contempt on their faces because my art/craft is ‘only toys’… Hello?! I hope I’ve never been so cruel to anyone’s face, no matter my opinion of their work! But for each one of that type of person, there were 10, or 20, or 100 people who smiled when they saw my work. And that reaction is just better than anything you can experience online… ♥

Just a quick update – day 1 was a success! Pic of the day – can you tell which one is crocheted?

Awww!

I can hardly believe that the Creativ Festival is this weekend! It’s so exciting – crafters who live in or near Ontario, you HAVE to come to the show! It’s being held at the International Centre near Pearson Airport in Mississauga.

For some reason, people seem to have the idea that this is a typical craft show, i.e. people selling their handmade goods. That’s not what this show is about at all! The Creativ Festival is about trend spotting, inspiration, fabulous shopping, new products, industry experts, how-to’s, make ‘n takes, seminars, fashion shows, book signings, exquisite displays, & exciting door prizes! USA Today calls it one of the top “10 great places for a hands-on craft experience” in the whole of North America. Check out the festival brochure to see what’s on offer.

Here’s me at last spring’s show, working on the first arm of my orang utan!

The show begins this Friday, April 24th, and I’ll be there on all 3 days. Please come and introduce yourself; I’d love to meet some of you in person! Here’s my schedule:

Friday 1pm-8pm (except while I’m giving my talk): Come and meet me at booth #152

Friday 2.30pm: Who’s Who in the Crochet Zoo! When a ball of yarn and a crochet hook meet up with a lot of talent and imagination… cute little creatures come to life. Meet crochet designer June Gilbank of PlanetJune.com and her adorable crochet creations. Just the inspiration needed to crochet for the animal lovers in your life!

Saturday 9am-1pm, Sunday 9am-1pm: Come and meet me at booth #152

Saturday 3.30pm, Sunday 2.30pm: Crochet a Decorative Rose June teaches how to crochet a simple decorative rose with endless possibilities. Wear it as a buttonhole or brooch or use it to embellish a bag or wearables.

A bit more festival info: all workshops, demos and seminars are FREE, and the crafts covered include appliqué, beadwork, bear making, brass embossing, card making, crafting, crochet, cross stitch, cutwork, designing, digitizing, embroidery, fabric dyeing, felting, finishing, fitting, framing, goldwork, heirloom sewing, knitting, lace making, long arm stand-up machine quilting, loomwork, machine embroidery, needle tatting, needlepoint, paper crafts, patchwork, pattern alterations, pattern drafting, punch art, quilting (hand & machine), rug hooking, scrapbooking, serging, sewing, shadow work, silk ribbon embroidery, smocking, stamping, stencilling, surface embellishment and more!

See, didn’t I tell you it was a crafter’s paradise? So what are you waiting for, meet me (and my orang utan) and enjoy a craft-filled day at the Creativ Festival this weekend!

Thank you all so much for participating in my survey! I had over 100 responses, and every design was voted in both first and last place at least once, which makes it a little difficult to interpret the results… The clear winner, with over 40% first place votes, is the Discworld. After that, the results are a bit ambiguous. But what was even more useful than the numbers is the comments that over half of you included to tell me why you voted the way you did!

For instance, you (mostly) love the Discworld. But it also got a fair few last place votes, with reasons like:

• Not a PlanetJune original concept
• Most people won’t understand the Pratchett reference
• Background too dark
• Perceived complexity may put people off

And for the monkeys, the pros include:

• Natural setting
• Realistic
• Eye-catching vertical format

And the cons:

• Too busy for a small card
• Background too distracting
• Text doesn’t stand out

See how useful these comments are? I can see that the Guinea Pigs card is probably a better design than the Monkeys, as it shares most of the pros of the Monkeys comments, but avoids the cons. Your comments will also be really useful when I’m trying to take future product photos, to give me ideas of pitfalls to avoid falling into.

The reason I wanted to make 3 different cards is so that there’d be something for everyone. But, when I came to order the cards, I discovered that the prices were more than I was expecting – e.g. an extra $11.50 per design just to print the text on the back… Given that, and the survey responses, I’ve decided to just get the Discworld and Guinea Pigs cards printed. It’ll be interesting to see which is the most popular at the show! 58% of you chose one of these two designs as their first choice, and 88% chose one of them as either their first or second choice, so I’m hoping that almost everyone will like at least one of them!

Here’s the back of the cards

Now for the draw. 82% of the respondents opted into the draw, and the winner is: Johanna Jennings! Congratulations, Johanna! (I will contact you directly to ask for your mailing address, and I’ll throw in some bonus postcards as you’re only getting 2 cards in your prize instead of the promised 3).

Thanks again to all who entered. If you have any other comments, suggestions or feedback about any aspect of PlanetJune, please feel free to e-mail me at any time – all advice gratefully received!

I’ve been thinking about what kind of promotional items I can give away at next month’s Creativ Festival. I was debating buying some Moo cards, but they are so small I’m not sure that my photos would be clear enough. So, I thought I would get my own business card-sized Moo-type cards printed. I hope that they will be cute enough for people to want to keep them and not throw them away as soon as they get home!

I’ve made 5 designs and I’d like to get 3 of them printed. Could you help me choose between the 5 designs below? I’ll draw a random entrant from my survey who will win a set of the 3 winning choices! (One entry per person, please, and I’ll draw the winner on Sunday April 5th at 6pm EST)

Thank you! Click through to the one-question survey

You may have noticed that 2009 began with my announcement that I am taking the leap into self-employment, and then… well, not a lot else. Two patterns in two months is hardly impressive, especially when I should have all this extra time available. But I haven’t just been lazing about; now I can (finally) reveal what’s been going on…

Are you ready for my huge, exciting news?

Early prototypes

I have been writing a book! But wait – it’s probably not the book you’d guess I’d write… It’s a papercraft book about paper chains and garlands, and it all came about through my work on Folding Trees. I’ve been working really hard for the past couple of months designing the projects, creating the samples, writing the instructions and drawing the illustrations, and now it’s finally coming together!

Pretty papers

My book should be out in the US through Barnes & Noble in late summer 2009. The process has been a lot of fun, a phenomenal amount of work, and a big eye-opener into the world of print publishing. I’ll share more details as the publication date approaches…

Now I am returning to my crochet designs, and I should have two new patterns for you by the end of the week!

And one more thing: If you sell your crafts and you’re still undecided about signing up for an ArtFire membership, I strongly suggest you give it some more thought. Since I wrote my last ArtFire post, the $7 advance memberships have been going very quickly – half of the remaining memberships have been snapped up in the past 10 days! If you miss out on one, you’d have to pay $20 per month if you want to enjoy the full benefits of selling on ArtFire.

Looking at my March sales to date, my ArtFire sales are at 22% of my Etsy total, which tells me that the monthly fee has already been worth it! I would guess that the last $7 memberships will be gone in about a week, so please do consider grabbing one before it’s too late. And if you do, please list me (planetjune) as your referrer – thank you! Here’s my direct link: Register on ArtFire.com.

The start of a new year is always a good time to begin a new chapter in your life; to try something new and make changes for the better. This year is a big one for me: I’ve decided to quit my day job to concentrate on designing, creating and writing, and see where that takes me. Self-employment is a big scary step, but sometimes you just have to take a leap and see what happens! I already have a couple of projects lined up, and I can’t wait to get started!

Take a look at some of the things I made in 2008…

Also in 2008, I had some of my work published in a book and a magazine, I taught a crochet class, and I co-founded Folding Trees. Just think how much more productive I could be without having to fit in a full-time job as well!

I hope to be able to post here more often too, although I’m still sticking to my policy of quality over quantity – I only post when I have something worth talking about 🙂

Thank you so much to all my blog visitors and friends – your support, comments and e-mails are what give me the courage to dream big. My New Year’s resolution is to give myself the chance to succeed, but to not beat myself up about it if things don’t go as well as I hope.

Please wish me luck with my new venture!

Reporting back after day two of the show. Sunday was a lot quieter than Saturday, although I still had a lot of interest in my patterns. In the quiet periods, I managed to sneak away to wander around the show for a while, and pick up some new toys – some quilling paper, a bias tape maker, and a new light-up crochet hook, so now I have my three favourite sizes: E, G and H.

Best of all, the owner of Bears and Bedtime gave me a quick demo in needlefelting, which I’ve been wanting to try for months, and I found that, despite my wool sensitivity, my hands seemed okay with it – yay! So I bought some felting needles and a bag of mixed colours of wool roving (and aren’t these colours perfect for my animals?). Now I just have to find some time to try out all my new craft purchases…

To the eagle-eyed commenters on my last post, yes, you’ve spotted my hidden projects:

1) Looks like the cat is out of the bag with my ice cream bear! He is going to appear in the Summer issue of A Needle Pulling Thread magazine, together with an article about my crocheting. ANPT is a wonderful magazine featuring Canadian designers and artists and it covers the full spectrum of needle arts in every issue, with each artist contributing an article and a project. My ice cream bear is the reason I got to set up my display at their booth and work on my crochet throughout the show – thank you, Carla and John, for sharing your space with me!

2) I chose to finally make a start on my crocheted orang utan (I bought the yarn for it way back last August). As a break from pattern designing, I’m doing this one freeform. This gives me more freedom to experiment and figure out some new techniques, which may then find their way into future pattern designs!

So far, I’ve just made the arms. Each finger is individually wired, so the hands are completely poseable. A lot of people wanted to look at them, although one girl let out a little shriek when she saw the disembodied arm!

Now on to the subject you’ll be most interested in if you are a crafter thinking about doing a show: the festival itself…

This was my first real offline experience of putting myself out there as a crochet designer, and it was amazing! Watching people’s reactions to my designs, hearing them call their friends over to come and see, and being able to interact face to face with the public are things you really miss out on as an online seller. I think people appreciated being able to actually pick up my work and take a closer look – no matter how good your photography is, it’s never quite the same as letting people actually touch your work. And getting to see small things, like the little girl who picked up and cuddled every animal I’d brought, and then refused to move on until she had kissed every single one goodbye… there’s no way you can get that kind of feedback through e-mail.

Another thing that was interesting was seeing the kind of people who were interested in my work – I never usually get to find out that kind of demographic information. I met people ranging from 8 year olds who were just learning to crochet and teenagers who wanted to know how to get started, right through to 80 year olds with decades of experience, and women of just about every age in between. I met lots of amazing creative people, made some new friends (hi Rose!), and even met a few people who already knew me from the online world or were previous customers, which was surreal but very cool!

I can’t tell you about how the financial side of it worked out, since I didn’t have my own booth, and I wasn’t actually selling anything at the show… I displayed some finished pieces, worked on my orang utan, and answered people’s questions, but I also brought a portfolio with the cover pages of all my patterns for people to flip through, and I gave out over 200 PlanetJune business cards and postcards, so I hope a lot of the people I met will be visiting my site once they get back home.

Oh, and my PlanetJune t-shirt was a hit – several people even asked where I got it printed! Maybe I should start up a side business 😉

Overall, the show experience was fantastic. It’s a bit daunting to jump in without the protection and anonymity of the internet, and by the end of the weekend I was totally exhausted, but I’m so pleased to have had this experience. I would definitely encourage other online-only crafty businesspeople to consider getting out there and introducing people to your craft in person once in a while!