Cally Festival

After making the decision not to do any more fairs over the summer, I did my first one for three months at the weekend!  The Cally Festival is a street festival held in a section of the Caledonian Road in Islington, London and aims to bring together the whole community to enjoy street theatre, live music, food and lots and LOTS of stalls.

I had a stall with the very lovely We Make London collective and it was great to see Mary and Julie again, as I hadn't seen them since the Thames Festival in September last year.

I was woefully unprepared and spent most of the day before realising that I needed to do a LOT of sorting out - which took forever - and I forgot to do a lot of things that would have been good to do. Boo me.

The journey up was pretty annoying, as all the Brighton - London trains were very slow and infrequent, so I walked to Hove station instead with my massive pink suitcase of delights trundling along behind me.  As you can imagine, this is always fun to lug about on public transport, especially on trains with no luggage compartments and Underground stations with a lot of steps.

The weather was cold and cloudy with some very gusty wind, which scattered cards and flyers and occasionally blew down prints and framed pictures on neighbouring stalls - very alarming!

Holly from Holly Francesca had a few battles with the breeze!

However, the sun did manage to squeeze out and people turned out in droves to soak up the atmosphere - it felt very bustling and I had a lot of customers, which was great.

A piper leads a very Wicker Man-esque procession of people in handmade animal masks!

I launched a couple of new products too (I plan to do a separate post on these a bit later on) - a fox print and a cute printed otter range, which appeared on totes and handmade purses.  The fox print items sold out, so that's definitely worth pursuing!

Scampi Moo & foxy totes

Handmade foxy & Scampi Moo purses

I printed out a pic of the cute meeting between Otto and Nemo and popped it up next to the small otter range on display, where it caused much amusement.  I'm hoping it will also stop people mistaking the otters for: a. meerkats b. squirrels and c. beavers.

 

So all in all, it was a good day and I came home exhausted but quite happy.  I now have lots of work to do now preparing a proper launch for Scampi Moo and sorting out some foxy prints, plus stocking up for forthcoming fairs and (whisper it) Christmas.

Back soon! xxx