My local farmer’s market put out a call for non-profits to come table at their weekend events, as they hope to make it even more of a community resource. Since I fundraise year-round for Extra Life to support Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, this was a great opportunity to help spread the word since we’ve been having trouble getting into conventions. I also figured this would be a great opportunity to offload some of my crochet projects, particularly my whale army that I’d made during radiation. I sold some whales previously during Tabletop Appreciation Day with 50% of the profits being donated to the hospital (and the balance going to pay back my yarn supply).
Since this farmer’s market was early October, I wanted to make some Halloween plushies as I thought they might be a hot seller this month. I only made a handful though because I wasn’t sure how this market would go, which I later regretted because they were a hot attention-getter.
Ghosts
I started with some no-sew ghosts using Bernat Blanket Velvet yarn for some extra soft plushie goodness and using a pattern by Rose & Lily Amigurumi. This pattern is really quick to work up; it took me about 45 minutes for my first one, and the biggest struggle was just working with the blanket yarn and having a hard time finding stitches. This one is also nice for intermediate crocheters as it requires you to know bobble stitches, hdc, flo, and blo. I definitely had to look up some of these stitches as I worked through this little guy because I just don’t do them often enough.
Pumpkins
I couldn’t decide on the color scheme that I wanted to use for these pumpkins so I made two different versions – one using basic worsted weight yarn and the other using Easy Peasy yarn by the Woobles. I didn’t have green in Easy Peasy so I used a brighter worsted weight green for this pumpkin.
I also learned that pale blue and red pumpkins are a thing, so I tried one of those! So cool!
Pocket Cats
I only made one of these, using a pattern by Sweet Softies. Hers is light and dark brown, but since it’s Halloween I opted to make mine in black (plus then it matches my black cat, Loki!). I didn’t love the way mine turned out, plus it picked up lint from all over as you can see, but I brought it to the market anyway. In a crazy small world coincidence, my real estate finance professor from grad school stopped by my table, and her daughter fell in love with this pocket cat!
Market Day
Overall, I sold 13 plushies, which I think was not too bad for my first market day, and it was over 90 degrees outside at that. Below are a few lessons I learned throughout the day.
- Moving the Extra Life banner in front of the table helped to draw attention. At first, I put it on the side of the table to help catch peoples’ eyes as they walked by, but then when I greeted them their eyes looked only at the table offerings and not the fact that I was raising money for my local children’s hospital.
- Changing my “good morning” greeting to include that I was raising money for the local children’s hospital really helped to shift peoples’ attention and made them more likely to interact with me.
- At first, I spread all the plushies out, but then my husband was fiddling with them and playing with stacking them, and it gave a much cleaner aesthetic, so we restacked all of them to look more organized. This made people more interested and less likely to gloss over. Ideally, I’d like to have some shelves and bins, but for now this is a good solution.
- Last time I sold my plushies for $10 each and this time I reduced the price to $8 each and I think that was a more reasonable price, especially given how small they were.
- Coming into this weekend I was worried I wouldn’t sell many of my Halloween creations so I didn’t make too many, however I sold out in full of these.
- A lesson I learned from last time was to create an inventory list coming in of what I was bringing so I could see which items and/or colors/shades were the best sellers. However, I made this as a notebook paper, so right after this market I redid this as a spreadsheet for easier tracking.
- I have some bigger plushies that I didn’t bring because I just wasn’t sure, but in retrospect I think this might be a good idea to price tag them separately and just add them to a different display.
- I need more signage and handouts on my table about the hospital specifically. I had big banners, but people looked at the table mostly not the banner. I have since requested this!
All in all, I’m quite happy with the result, and I am excited to try this again next month. If you have any suggestions for November or December crochet patterns (preferably no-sew but open to other quick projects), please let me know!
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