Country Living Fair

Nothing much about Country Living Fair in this post, except for it is the reason I have not got much crafting to show you this week!
This is the Country Living Christmas Fair held in Glasgow every year (they have one in London too), and I had a stand with my shop. I have no photos of the fair or the stand, even though I got to meet Julie from Forest Poppy blog on the Saturday, who is much younger and prettier than I had imagined. Not that I imagined you old and ugly Julie (better shut up before this hole gets any bigger!), but of course I forgot to take a photo of our momentous meeting – duh! Julie has written a great post showing all the cool shopping she did there. Which will give you a much better idea of the show than you will find here.

Meanwhile I bought some wool! In fact, lots of wool. As you will see in the photo above I am planning to make the granny square jumper to go with the granny square gloves I have been making. I was a bit worried about the cost of the wool for this, as I needed 15 balls and most ‘proper’ wool (as opposed to acrylic stuff which I try to avoid) costs at least £4.50 a ball. But I found this lovely chunky Arran wool for £3 a ball! It is from a shop called Woolfish which is situated in a wee seaside town in Berwickshire called St Abbs but also had a stand at the fair.

I also bought some gorgeous variegated wool from the same place and managed to crochet this much of 2 pairs of gloves during quiet moments at the show. This caused quite a stir amongst the customers (live crafting!) and if I had a fiver for everyone that mentioned ‘Kirstie Allsopp’ to me (apparently she’s been crocheting on the telly) I would have done a lot better at the show!!
Actually, takings weren’t too bad at the show, though down a lot on 2 years ago when we last attended, but then so is everything. And I did meet lots of lovely people, including some readers of this blog!
These pairs of gloves are both going to be Christmas presents. I am dying to start that jumper but I feel I really must prioritise with only 4 weeks to go now, yikes!

To make up for the lack of Country Living Fair photos, here is a photo of a shop on Buchanan Street in Glasgow. Do you see those round things in the window? Look a bit closer… There are actually all old sewing machines! They have been suspended in lines in all the windows, and the shop is huge and goes around the corner, there is at least another 4 windows full of them. There must be hundreds and hundreds of them! I wonder where they got them all from and what they will do with them when they change their windows…

In the few days before I started the Fair I managed to catch up on my Bee Squares. Above is a square for Anna in Finland for my Tag Square Bee. Anna asked for aqua, brown and white. I have very few brown fabrics so this was a bit of a challenge. The block design is from a book of Japanese patchwork.

And here is the last month for the Quick Christmas Bee. It was Marg’s turn from Adventure’s in quilting and Sailing blog. She is going to make the same advent calender quilt that Maria made. Hopefully Marg is putting this together super quick as it’s December next week! No pressure Marg!