I contemplated taking the afghan out of the bag and then taking the photo to show you how nice it is. It's very close to the wedding afghan I made before but not quite as big. But getting it into the bag was a bear and I didn't want to take it out just to put it back. This is a gift for someone so I figured I could take a picture of the recipient and the gift and then they could try and get it back into the bag!
It's another blue afghan and it consists of twenty squares and it's 4x5 (or 5x4 depending on how you hold it) and the squares are 12" so it's about 48x60 a nice cozy size.
I was looking into what craft shows I can enter in and my goodness, the booth fees at some of these places! I haven't run into on that is less than $100. I thought I might try and drop in one or two of them - but I don't think I can. I have to plan this for next year! In the meantime, I really have to get my show established so artisans can have a more affordable place to exhibit and sell.
The problem I'm running into is finding the audience. I know when we do the Pleasant Home show we have a nice crowd the first day but the rest of the week, including the next weekend, is a little slow. With the small amount of shoppers, I can't get vendors. My thought was to go strictly charity fundraising and offer the show as a way for Not For Profits to raise money. I organize the show, they get their donors there, and the vendors give 10% percent of what they make. There would be food and give aways (no raffles in the Methodist church).
With the fees the way they are, vendors will need to find relief somewhere. why not feel good and raise money while doing it?
In any case, I am not ready to give up on the idea of a successful craft show so I have to figure out what I've been doing wrong. I will hang in there a little longer. For the last show, I got some of the people I went after getting but not enough - and it didn't help that the power was out in half the city - including the power going out in the church.
Maybe God's trying to tell me something...
I have the attention span of a baby gnat. I can get myself bored in record time. It's amazing that I am still knitting after all these years. Trust me, no one is more surprised by that than me. Every once in a while something gets a hold of me and I stay with it until the very end. I think it's because I can be so easily distracted that something catching and keeping my eye is a cool thing.
And so it is with the stash bust.
It's not just the granny square 
afghan that's making the skeins disappear - though I must admit skeins are beginning to drop - I am using my ninth skein. But I am also doing some other things that using them up. Take a look: I'm doing a ribbed afghan. I love ribbing. I have no idea why but I do. So making a strip afghan using ribbing is fun for me. I may not feel that way when trying to crochet the strips together but living in the moment with it is quite nice.
I am also making wagon wheel granny squares and knit squares using different stitches. Can you tell I reentered the afghan stage?
What I love about these projects is the controlled chaos. With the white granny square afghan, there's an order. it only has five colors, there are only four colors per square and then the white final border on all of them. There are only so many combinations that can be made and while I am not bored there are no surprises. But with the ribbed afghan any color can pop up and be used - and I have lots of colors. The rule is that there are no rules except twelve rows of one color followed by 36 rows of another.
And the squares can be of any color because they aren't necessarily being used in the same afghan. Nothing boring there!
I still have a ton of stuff to do before tomorrow's sale. The weather forecast is still good so I am really hoping for a great turn out. We have some really exciting talent coming and I am looking forward to seeing it all in one place. I know what a lucky girl I am to be able to pull them all together. I so much want them to succeed.
I hope you have a great weekend and since the rules of life apply to everyday, I plan to be back tomorrow - and Sunday I'll tell you how the sermon went!
Friday - Spring came a day early to Chicago. It was sunny, it was warm and Mr. Honey and I went up to church to set up the room for the Craft Cafe on Saturday.
The weather was wonderful and even though Mr. Honey and Char said the weather was changing I was looking only towards a good turnout on Saturday.
So, what was the weather like on Saturday? Snow. Not only snow but rain. Snow and rain. And not just snow and rain. Cold. Snow, rain, cold and not only that. Cloudy.
It was cold, rainy. snowy and cloudy. There were some wonderful vendors and we hardly had anyone come because the weather was so miserable. 
We did have someone who did well.
Alane makes the most gorgeous scented soaps. I just wanted to live in her corner - bought a bar, too. The entire show did about $200 in sales and the church's sandwich bar made over $400.
So the day was not a total wash out but I cannot explain how I feel. I didn't expect the weather to do what it did. I was especially bummed when I came out of church Sunday afternoon and the sun was out again. I looked up to the Heavens to the spot where I thought God might be sitting and went, "Dude?"
I'm not taking it personally and Heaven knows I've sat in craft shows and sold nothing but this feels a little different. I'm not even bothered by the woman who declared this the worse show she's ever been in because I had nothing to do with the weather. But to be fair, we also had an African drum class going on and she didn't appreciate the music. If we had a crowd going through the cafe no one would have noticed them...no, they woudn't have, Melissa!
I feel worse for the vendors that had no sales than I felt for myself when I was a craft show and had no sales. No sales and no traffic and it was an outdoor show in August. I could tell by the traffic we did get that if the weather had been nicer, we would have gotten them in.
But, we did sit afterward and made some new decisions that will hopefully make things better for the next one. (Move the drummers away from the hall for one - though, I liked them more than not..) but we could do nothing about the weather.
Cosmic bitch slap. Sigh.
Here's the sign Char put up at the church! I cannot thank her enough for doing it. I was going to ask permission to put up a banner and I was going to design it, get it printed then hang it when Char suggested the church had a reusable banner and she just needed to know what I wanted on it - and then she went to work! It's been hanging up for a little more than a week and I appreciate not having to go to the expense of having it made.
The support from the church has been amazing and I don't even want to go into the comparison because I could but it wouldn't be productive and it diminishes the good stuff coming from the new place. Suffice it to say I want things to go well because it would be good for the church, the community - and it wouldn't do me any harm either.
I sincerely thank Char for her support in making this happen!
On the knit/crochet front, things are continuing with the granny squares. I have started sewing them together in strips of nine squares and I have made enough to complete one strip and half way through the second and there's enough of them sitting in a bag to finish off the second strip and make a third - in other words, there's a ton of them. Brett Bara claims you can make a square in
about 5 minutes - well, I find I'm almost as fast crocheting as I am knitting and I can't get one of these squares off the hook in less than 30 so she must be a crochet whiz. I am having a lot of fun with these and I am already thinking of how to make a granny square afghan changing the design just a little bit and not doing a stash buster but having a controlled color palette.
I've discovered an interesting thing about trying to stash bust using granny squares...they don't take that much yarn. I have made about twenty-five squares and I haven't run out of one color yet - not even the main dark purple. I might be half way through that. So, this might turn out to be a minor stash buster because I am using so many different colors - if I decide to do another one with say, just five colors, I imagine that will use up the colors I choose. Then again, I am just on the second of at least six strips so it could become a snow ball effect. At some point, one of these balls will run out and then that will start them all running out and I will have to add another ball until it's all finished. Hmmm..the theory is set and now we have nothing to do but continue on with the project and see if skeins of yarn are used up.
It's always good to have a little bit of science in needlework.
