But, very luckily for me, a local venue - Bridge Cottage Heritage Centre - which is in my hometown started back up their Craft & Artisan Markets at the end of 2021, as well as offering spaces for Late Night Shopping at Christmas. All were at a very reasonable price which wouldn't hurt the bank so much if there were any issues and I signed up straight away for the Christmas ones as I know that I do better at that time of year when people are looking for slightly unusual gifts for their loved ones.
The first one was at the end of November 2021 and I was actually quite nervous, slightly concerned I'd forgotten how it all worked and went together, and how to smile and interact with people. There were lots of questions about whether anyone would actually come, if it was dangerous, would people wear their masks (we did have masks on, just not for these photos), would anyone actually buy anything as there are so many people now fallen on harder times?? But, I needn't have worried as we had a lovely day meeting lots of people and re-discovering customers who we hadn't seen in a couple of years, hearing everyone's stories about lockdown and what they'd been up to.
My lovely man is absolutely amazing at these things. He has no interest in embroidery himself but he supports me and helps out and mans the stand whilst I nip to the toilet, brings drinks, fetches and carries and just sits and watches his Youtube videos on his photo to entertain himself, all whilst sitting next to me and smiling at people who walk past. For these events he did even more of the fetching and carrying as we are expecting Baby Dotty in April and my bump had just started to show so I wasn't allowed to carry anything too heavy.
A week or so later and we were back at Bridge Cottage for the second market of our year, the town's Late Night Shopping event. The Cottage was looking absolutely gorgeous - it's a Wealden Hall House built in 1436 and I can remember parts of it being a sweet shop, an art gallery, a card shop....it's been flooded several times and more recently restored and now used for events like weddings, talks, exhibitions and markets. How homey does it look though with the giant Christmas tree outside and lights on in all of the windows?
We were in the same space as before, right in front of the upstairs, right hand window (which gave us a great view of the courtyard in front which was also eventually filled with stands, and a brass band!)
I kept the display set up fairly similar to the previous week as it had worked well, although moved the card spinner off onto my little separate fold out table to make more room on the main table for baskets of kits. Kits are my absolute best selling items which is fair enough because I can't allow myself to sell my creations cheaply so, although my original hoop pieces get appreciated and talked about a lot, they are mostly out of everyone's budgets whereas the kits are more affordable if you are happy to create your own and have a go.
It's for the same reason that I have cards and prints of my original pieces as a way to try and make the creation of them worthwhile. For some reason, creating art with fabric is viewed differently to creating art with paint (although in my opinion it takes much longer and can be much harder to achieve!) and whilst you get collectors of artwork and paintings on the walls everywhere you go, how often do you see embroidered pictures, or textile art? Painters can often put together a new piece in an afternoon, scan it in and have prints made up of it for sale within the week - Stitchscapes can take a week just to finish for the small ones. I'm not undervaluing the work of painters, I'm a collector myself and went to college with many of them, but some comments you overhear whilst behind a stand of embroidery work can be quite galling sometimes.
We had decided that we would stay on for the craft market that was happening the following day so it was quite easy for us to leave at 9pm on the Friday, just leaving everything as it was and wandering home, hand in hand in the chilly mist, to return for 10am the following day. It was nice not to have to pack up in the evening for sure.
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