I’ve just come back from a busy weekend being a merchant at the Auckland Festival of Quilts. It’s the first time for me and I tried to treat the whole experience as a learning opportunity. I was selling my hand-dyed fabrics, threads, upcycled fabrics and a few other hand-dyed goodies, like socks and zip pouches.
Here’s some of the things I learnt:
1. People are lovely
2. There are dye-hard(!) fans of the colour yellow 
3. My hand-dyed threads are very popular, but people like perle 8 (finer) rather than perle 5 (thicker – great for big-stitch hand quilting)
4. Chocolate helps when there is an hour of show time left 
5. Lots of people want classes on ice-dyeing (yes! I’ll come and teach that to you!)
6. Upcycled fabrics went like hotcakes, time to dye some more
7. Aprons are quite comfy as all-day wear
8. Other vendors are happy to give tips 
9. Unpacking is daunting (haven’t tackled it yet)
10. My hand-dyed happy heels socks made people smile!
