3 Tips for Producing a Boat Load of Crocheted Goods
These tips are for when you need to produce a large number of a selected piece for craft shows or other big event. This is part of the Craft Show Preparation series inspired by Molly of mollyeleen.wordpress.com. Last year she did her first craft show and blogged about it.
- Make What You Hate First – if you don’t like making a certain piece as much as you do others, tackle this first. I don’t like repeated patterns on big projects like scarves and blankets. Let’s say I will be making 5 blankets for the show. I would get these out of the way first. I might even do work in 5 different colors just to break the ‘sameness’ it. I would do 25 rows of one and 25 rows of another working all five blankets at the same time. Knocking these off my ‘to do’ list first would inspire me to work on my other pieces.
- Choose One Thing and Get It Done – for those who make character hats you know that it is the little details that can take the most time. Maybe you have a 100 set of eyes to crochet? Set some time aside to make those eyes. Once they are done work on the ears or some other piece.
- Enlist Some Help – asking for help is not a “no, no” in a business. For something like a craft fair you need all the help you can get. Maybe you can have your husband or kids make little kits for your character hats. Place the hat and all its little pieces into a zip loc bag. This way when you are ready to do the final stitching you don’t have to do this step. Having your children help in the business will teach them a valuable lesson too.
You don’t have to turn into a factory worker but you can take some lessons from how they work. They have a crew that makes one piece and another crew that makes another. Each person is responsible for one thing and at the end of the line the entire item is made.
In your ‘crew’ you need to have a quality control expert. Yes, that would be YOU. Be sure you check and double check your helpers work as well as your own work. Sometimes in the rush to get something done you might make a mistake. “Oh, please don’t let there be a missed stitch or row on that blanket“.
Do you have a method for getting things done for large shows? Share your tips in the comments below.
Join me in the 31 Days of Craft Show Preparation by Blogger Molly of http://mollyeleen.wordpress.com. Molly was inspired to do the 31 days challenge when her friends took on the challenge that The Nester hosts each year. (based on the 31 Days to build a better blog by ProBlogger)
How You Can Participate
- Visit Molly’s Blog post which has all 31 posts in the series
- Blog about it. You can do one post for the entire week or one post per day. I’ll be doing one post a day. (31)
- Chat about it either on the Crochet Business fanpage or in either the CBB Google+ community.
