HOLIDAY CRAFT MARKETS

I participated in two holiday craft markets the last two weekends - the MOCA Holiday Craft Sale and the Selden Handmade Fair. After Thanksgiving and up until now, I did very few activities not involved in preparing for these shows.

Most of the stress was due to the slow, stressful death of my dear, old sewing machine. It involved a few trips back and forth to my trusted sewing machine repair man and ended with a quick, graceful decline right after she sewed a few (or twelve) last zippers on for me. As told to me by every single person I asked, sewing machines are not made like they used to be. But I have found a cute, sturdy little Baby Lock machine that is simple and does exactly what I need it to do. So I am more than happy with it for now.

And luckily both of these shows were so much fun and went really well. It's been about two months since we've been in Norfolk, and I still really have trouble sometimes feeling at home here. But doing stuff like this and getting back to doing things I love helps so much. Plus is always really nice to spend whole days talking to nice people who live here, too.

Getting ready for these shows was a lot of work in another way, too. Preparing for the summer markets in Saratoga, I became more and more discontent with some of the work I was doing. I kind of hated a lot of the fabric I ended up with and hated the fact that I had started to do less designing and more making things really fast to feel ready. So I attempted to avoid that and fix those problems for these two shows to give myself and Anykind a new start. I really love some of the fabrics I have started to use (mostly vintage!) and have fallen in love all over again with designing and sewing - and especially the whole process of what I am doing.

So my next endeavor is to re-do basically everything about my online shop - new pictures and all that. I really want my shop to represent what I am doing, and it definitely does not do that now. So hopefully soon I will have that to share as well!