Life alternates for us these days between a static floating existence at point A and frenetic activity before returning to point A. It seems perhaps how we used to live in the years before we moved afloat. It feels like living for a while with more gentle sunsets than electrifying sunrises.
Family needs mean that since March we’ve been living this strange lifestyle, frenetic activity being the order of the day when brother-in-law rides into town! Last time he arrived, we hared off to Liverpool with the boat. This time his visit enabled us to trade at the famed Folk and Boat [FAB] Festival in Middlewich, move the boat for part of the week taking in part of another canal, and make a dash to the East Midlands to catch up with our delightful daughters and ever-growing grandson.
FAB for us lived up to its name thanks to the generosity of boating family the Donnelly’s at Middlewich Wharf. They not only run boat services from the wharf including a dry dock and its associated services, but also a holiday company, Floating Holidays, that gives holiday makers a luxurious chance to enjoy the glories of the inland waterways, those glories we are fortunate to enjoy almost daily when we can move.
We were able to trade without the boat, which we didn’t have time to move to Middlewich but with advantage of being a land based stall under the Donnelly’s historic wharf canopy which kept us and our stock dry when the rain came – which it did being UK festival tradition! I’m sure this weekend when we are aiming to trade from the boat at Pennington Flash on the Leeds & Liverpool Canal today (Saturday), we will be enviously thinking back to that spacious soaring canopy if an unexpected shower arrives.
Selling items you have made, have poured your love into, is a psychological challenge. It can be uplifting and terrifying in equal measure. It isn’t like delivering a professional service for which you’ve been qualified over time, although as an artisan crafter you are producing items due to skills which you’ve been honing for equally long very often.
It is the difference we all make at times between fast food and home cooking, an original artwork or a mass produced poster. There are occasions and budgets for both at times in many of our lives.
As a crafter, it is nerve wracking the first time you put your work on show with a price tag. There’s the price tag dilemma – charge what it has cost in materials and labour and maybe people won’t pay the price, they may think it too expensive, too costly compared to a mass produced equivalent, and there’s always the thought that you want to sell so should you reduce the price. The balance of having had fun during the making, and the therapy of making itself – should those reduce the price of the finished item? In our case there’s also the space equation- so many makes in such a small space reduce the space we have available for living! I’m aware that while the Skipper’s been away on caring duties, I’ve been making, and making and making! At times every surface has been adorned with projects in progress, sometimes with a dog buried beneath!
So sell we need to, but should that be at any cost? There is that fear of what people will think of your work. What you’ve laboured over at home in private suddenly seeing the light of day and the glare of public scrutiny. Will people like it? Will they like it enough to buy it?
I know from trading that people do like what I produce, that people will buy, but I also know that recently the conversations with people have been very different, very honest. People openly say they’d love to buy whatever it is they are looking at, but they can’t afford it although they recognise it is worth the price, or they say that they’d love it but they have to balance that expenditure against the bills, or the need for something else. It becomes an either or for many.
These conversations have given me ideas to create smaller, more inexpensive craft items, but also the idea which I launched at Middlewich to create kits enabling people to have the fun and therapeutic opportunity to make their own items. That proved hugely popular and every crochet kit I had put together complete with instructions, hooks, yarn etc., went away in new crafters’ hands. Some asked for a lesson to get them started which I was delighted to give, and we enjoyed chats and laughs together in the process.
Listening to customers talk about the joy they expect to get in mastering a new skill, or reinvigorating an old hobby has inspired me to give people more opportunities to make things for themselves. I’m now working on some prototypes of new kits with knitting and crochet, that we can stock and enable people to enjoy developing their own skills, testing out and writing instructions as I go.
It is lovely to be able to share not only the items I have made but also the joy of making. If you’ve any ideas of items you’d like to learn to make just let me know so I can sort instructions, equipment and make examples. Producing something in response to customers’s conversations and suggestions is very different from creating something you feel you want to make and then hoping you can find a buyer who would like to have it. It appears that to survive emotionally and economically a balance of both is the solution.
A mix of selling platforms – in person and online also seems to be a way of coping with the changeable British weather that has reduced our trading days this year so far.
Over the next few months I aim to build the Moving Crafts’ Instagram page to incorporate more items for sale which should also help when weather makes trading in person from the boat difficult. Customers can buy in comfort too which is always a bonus! Do join us there if you can’t get to us in person and let us know if there’s something you’d like made for you, or a kit for you or a friend to make something.
Pickingupducks 