If you had told me from the start that buying my first ever stall at an expo would require so much time, effort, stress and money, I’m not sure I would’ve ever said yes in the first place. But back when the Great British Sewing Bee Live event was announced, I was tempted, talked it over with J, and decided to go for it and stretch myself as a small business owner.
It’s been a huge learning process, even just moving from a purely digital business into one that not only has to fill a space (which the organisers kept making bigger!) but also taking in-person card transactions, and ordering supplies to try and really show off what Fehr Trade Patterns really is to someone just walking past who may have never heard of us. If you’re coming along, we’re on stall H1 (turn left once you enter, and I’m in the corner with the workshop rooms).
The show is finally upon us, and hopefully now the panic attacks and stress and dwindling bank balance can give way to the enjoyment of meeting new people and putting faces to long-time customers’ names, too. But if I don’t manage to get a pattern released this calendar year, we can definitely point a blame finger in the show’s general direction as much as the book’s!
And speaking of the book, I’ll be taking pre-orders for signed copies during the show – they won’t ship til January, but you’ll have the opportunity to see the newly-approved cover (yay!), a few sample pages from inside, and also see a bunch of the book samples in person at our trunk show on the stall.
If you can’t make the show, have no fear – I’ll be putting up the pre-order up in the Shop in October so anyone worldwide can order a signed copy, too!
We’ve also got some Print Club Fabric Kits for sale, including three of our best-selling original Laurie King run, now printed on the superior Fashion Formula “Active Lycra” base fabric – Maps for the VNA Top (with the ombré upper front you can see in my About Me photo on every page!), purple Maps for the Duathlon Shorts, and purple Zigzag for the Steeplechase Leggings. And of course we’ve got our latest Harkiran Kalsi “Role Models” for the XYT Workout Top kits, too!
But it’s not just kits, we also have… badges! Yes, you can now proudly declare that you are on team “Sew / Sweat” even when you’re not wearing lycra! Honestly, I was so chuffed to bits when these arrived, and they’re made in the UK, too!
Another product of my own devising are these little iron-on reflective shapes, which I spent hours making over the past few weeks. You can now be safe and seen at night by ironing-on these little reflective wine glasses, cats, stars, feet, and leaves. Yes, I did indeed say wine glasses!!
I’ve also got some of these most gorgeous coloured and printed elastics to sell, and I’ll be demonstrating activewear techniques on my stall throughout the show, including how to sew an exposed elastic waistband so you can make the most of these. This is a technique I show on one of the designs in the book and it makes a really nice, clean finish.
You’ll also be able to buy A0 prints of my most popular patterns, rifle through a ton of samples from my patterns and the book in our Trunk Show, and get some great discounts, too…
It’s no fun when they’re a great event happening and you live too far away to attend, and so many of these items above will only be available to buy at the show itself, so I thought that I’d give everyone a present! So we’re having a storewide sale on all our digital patterns during the show – 21-24 September (this Thursday through Sunday) and no code is needed!
And finally I’d just like to give a massive thanks to Prym, Janome, and Alvanon in particular for helping me out and loaning me items to use during the show and in general just being incredibly supportive to small businesses like myself. Now if only I can shake this awful bug I picked up last week in time to actually enjoy the show…