Instructables At The Maker Faire

Well, I'm a bit more rested today, but absolutely not recovered. There are still at least a dozen things that I need to do in the next week before I leave again for a whole week this time. I think that I might be getting a bit ahead of myself though...I shall endeavor to calm down a bit. I have so many stories that I could tell from the Maker Faire. The people that were met, the sites that were seen even from our tiny corner not to mention the things that were learned about physically selling my pieces, but I don't want to bore you with a week of anecdotes. I might still do so though, so be warned.

The first thing I wanted to share was a bit unexpected though in hindsight I should have known it would happen. I haven't vended at a lot of events, but I've been to my fair share. Thing I don't like a bout the craft fair environment are customers who treat it like a flea market, fairs that allow flea market type vendors to sell as well as the whole why pay that much when I could make it myself, when they most surely could not. This was not one of those fairs. This was the Maker Faire, almost everyone who walked through the gates makes something or has a real respect for those who do. There was no price haggling, and when someone wondered if they could do that themselves, it was out of genuine desire to learn something new, not to avoid paying our prices.

This turned out to be the perfect environment to advertise not my wares so much as my lessons on Instructables. I received visits from at least three members of the Instructables team throughout the day, first from Christy, the community and marketing manager that left cards for me to give folks directing them to my lessons. I even met the CEO Eric later in the day and he thanked me for sharing. There's nothing quite as surreal as meeting people who recognize you from the Internet especially when they are the geek elite. I spent much of the day directing people to the site, ensuring them that they can and should learn to tat as they often said they always meant to. I sent older ladies, young girls, the crafting hipsters and even a few man folk in the right direction. I demonstrated the technique and explained how easy it was to learn and my ridiculous goal of making tatting the next big crafting craze moved just one step closer to fruition. I should have expected that level of desire to learn from this crowd, but I was awed by it.

That was just one of the amazing things I took away from the fair and there of course are more pieces to the weekend. I hope to hear from many of those I talked to and I hope hey all give tatting a go. Sure that's more competition for my wares, but I still think it would be incredible to be even a little responsible for the emergence of this art into the mainstream, so yay for the Maker Faire.