market mayhem with made in the shade

The two markets I did seem like a long time ago now... probably because they were! I can only apologise for my terrible lackadaisical blogging style of the last couple of weeks. I have actually really enjoyed my unplanned break, but I promise to do better now that I'm back.

Part of my blogging problem is that I am no good at taking photos (or more accurately, no good at taking my camera out of my bag!) so I should confess that I stole the first and second-last photos in this post from the markets' organisers' flickr photostream. Thanks, Made In The Shade, for awesome market-putting-together-skills and for the photos!

These first three photos are from the Summertime Hop through in Edinburgh - the tatty-looking back of my stall (oops!) the out-of-focus front of my stall (oops!) and a close up of my newly packaged handkerchiefs and space-saving display methods.

Space-saving display methods turned out to be very necessary. Here is the scene (very late at night) on the night before the market, when I realised I had made enough stuff to fill my whole living room, let alone a six foot by two foot stall! Excuse the cat's scary eyes. Look very closely towards the right of my imaginary stall and you can see my miniature bunting hanging. Eep! The bunting was very well received. I didn't sell that many, but it had lots of people squealing and oohing and aahing. The really big sellers of the day were the pinwheel brooch kits.

My first ever market in the capital was brilliant and I set a new personal best in sales (smashing, obliterating, stamping upon and destroying my previous personal best) even though the day had a nice laid-back pace to it. I was there on my own, so didn't get the chance to look at all the stalls, but I did find the perfect Christmas present for my brother-in-law on the stall next to mine. My brother-in-law (notoriously difficult to buy presents for, hence why I'm saving this for Christmas!) works at the Hadron Collider at Cern and my neighbours, The Lindstrom Effect, had made this IKEA style flat-pack Hadron Collider instruction manual. Perfect!

Here I am at the second market of the week, Pin Up Nights, with my friend Bernie who (thank goodness!) came with me for moral support and even brought some stuff to sell with her. This market was... interesting - the sort of thing I'm glad I did once, but probably won't do again! It was fun (drinking cider funded by sales and chatting to Bernie and other stall holders like lovely Mhairi from Bonnie Bling) but I did spend most of the night defending my wares from drunk people and their sloshily full pint glasses. "Noooooo! Not the bunting!" etc. We didn't quite last until 3am, but did stay late enough to sell some Pat and Frank lavender bags to a man who was almost too drunk to get his purchase into his jacket pocket. Oh how we laughed at the thought of him finding his lavender-scented friends in his pocket the next morning! I gave him a discount - it does feel a bit weird to sell things to drunk people, not knowing if they would ever buy them sober, plus he was the first person all night who was nice enough to put his drink on the floor rather than on top of my stock!

This hand-drawn notebook was my purchase of the evening, for a friend who always laughs at the word "jobby". I don't know the name of the person who made it (I'll try to find out it's by Jolly Joyness) but she does really lovely line drawings and portraits, by which I mean that she is a very talented individual and hasn't merely built her artistic empire on the strength of the word "jobby"! This was, in fact, the only jobby-related item I could see on her whole stall. I wish I'd never started trying to explain that!

Phew! This post has taken me so long to write. I'll try to come back soon with something more snappy for you. I'll be off now, to forage the bare cupboards for food.