Christmas Craft Fair

As I am in my final year of completing my HND in Fibre Art and Textile design, like many years before me we have an end of the year show! This is very exciting for me and a lot of my friends/class mates as it will be our first time to have an end of the year show, a chance to show of all the hard work we have done over the last 2years and for our friends and family to come an surpport us. Our show will run for a week and to make this possible we have to raise money.

 In our Professional Practise class we decided to have a christmas craft fair so as a class we set about brain storming our ideas. We all came up with different and interesting ideas so it was clear we all wanted to make a verity of items instead of limiting ourself to just one.
We each set about making a sample of what we would like to make and a purposal to show cost materials etc. This way we all got a chance to put our ideas into action.
My idea was to make brooches I first started to make them using tights and wire but found the finishing was hard so I then moved on to making them with disovable fabric and wire. Although this technique took more time the finished piece was alot more resovled and well finished than my previous idea.The dissolvable fabric cost me 4.75 per half a metre and 1.75 each thread I used which was 4, but I was able to make all my brooches by using these meterails, the wire was 2.00 and I had the embroidery thread alread. Over all not including my time it cost me 13.75. I made some with fabric as pictured below attached to a handbag.

We all got divided into groups there were Team Felt in which the girls were making felt earrings and also another great idea as part of this group was to take orders to get jumpers with our college logo, class and name printed on them. Team Print were making handmade cards using interesting techniques and then my team which was Team Thread and I was making my brooches, Kayleigh making head pieces and other jewelry, Sarah making knitted and crochet shoulder pieces and iphone covers and Bobby making her bracelets. It was great to be on this team as we all brought our own individual style to our work and we meet up outside college hours to do our work together which was a great help and great fun!! 

It was the day of the Craft Fair and we were all buzzing with relief and excitement. Our target was to raise 400euro. We had from 9.00am til 4.00pm to sell our work. We all meet up in the Art block of our college and were split up, some of the girls went to the main building for the first part of the day and the rest and myself stayed in the Art block. We set up with two tables and we had 3 manikins, one I showed of my brooch and Sarah her shoulder and neck piece as pictured below.
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I displayed my brooches on a jewelry stand as pictured below. Also I hand sewed decoration display holders for each brooch.

The first half of the day went well I sold four brooches two were priced at 2.00euro and other two at 5.00euro so I made 14.00euro, however because I made 13 brooches altogether I was abit dissapointed as I put so much effort into there construction. The girls did really well selling their handmade cards and Sarah her beauiful neck pieces as pictured above.
The second half of the day we switched other and we went to the main building. The main building was very quite and although there were students in the canteen were we set up they did not seem to be that interested in our sale lucky for us the teachers were and Sarah and Emma sold some items!

After the weeks put in doing all this extra work I was delighted to hear we raise 435euro! Tara's great idea with the college jumpers, has loads of students interested in purchasing one so that means we will make an even bigger profit!! We all worked so well as a team and it was a good experience!! If I was to change anything it would be the loctation of the event that we would sell our crafts at a stand at a crafts fair as people go there especially to purchase handmade crafts.