The Handmade Fair

Yesterday Mum and I spent the day at the Handmade Fair, at Hampton Court Palace.

My view on arrival... it was a loooong walk round to the back to get to the fair!

It was such a brilliantly put together event, there was nothing I didn't enjoy! I was smiling all day, and by the looks of it so was everyone else.

We had booked ourselves into some workshops already, so we made sure to arrive in time for our 10am Edwina Ehrman (in conversation with Kirstie Allsopp) talk.

Kirstie and Edwina on stage, discussing wedding dresses.

Edwina is the curator of the current wedding dress exhibition at the Victoria and Albert museum. Her knowledge of wedding dresses and textiles was amazing, and I particularly loved that she gave the stories behind the dresses. At the end of the talk, she gave way some books to the ladies in the audience who had been married for the longest - 50 years!

After that, Mum and I had some time to explore before our 2pm calligraphy workshop. We wandered around one of the big shopping tents trying to resist the urge to buy EVERYTHING!! Our most favourite items on show were gorgeous wooden lazy susans and other wood crafted, hand painted goodies.

While on our wandering, we spotted the 'marzipan figures' workshop, which still had tickets available. We quickly purchased some and headed in. The ladies we were sat near quickly got chatting as we passed round the different marzipan colours and admired each others work. The lady running the session moved very quickly, but with teamwork we managed to keep up. Check out our ladybirds and teddy bears!

Mine are the ones on the left. Can you tell that Mum has experience of this sort of thing?!

Now comes the wonderful stuff. This was no ordinary craft fair. This was a classy do. The options for lunch were unbelievable. We went for French style meat and salad in the end, but there were several options - none of which were greasy burgers or boring sandwiches. In terms of drinks, there was a champagne bar, an iced tea bar and the Mollie Makes tent was serving cream teas for 2 for just £5!

So we had a chilled out, classy lunch. My only slight complaint (improvement for next year?) was that we were lucky it was dry. Mum and I couldn't find anywhere to sit that was undercover, so we sat on the grass by the pathway. It was fine, but if the weather had been worse we'd have been grumpy.

After lunch, we had time to wander around the second beautiful shopping tent. More lovely stuff, but this time we couldn't resist. We started spending...

At 2pm we arrived for our Calligraphy workshop. Such fun! I love this, I think it may be a new hobby for me (eek, I don't have time for another hobby!). We made a little gift box and label, but mainly just had time to play with the calligraphy pen. Check out my progress:

I'm quite proud of it!

After the calligraphy workshop, Mum and I were both feeling rather tired, so we popped over to the Mollie Makes tent for a cream tea while we planned our next move. We both seemed to think that the next move was nodding off on the grass, so we decided to do our final shopping and then head home (this did mean that we missed our final workshop - pom pom making, but we decided we'd already had a wonderful day).

It truly was such a fantastic event. Perfectly targetted at the correct audience. All the visitors were relaxed and enjoying themselves... now I've got heaps of ideas about new things I want to make!!

Hope there'll be another one next year.

Emily
(p.s. I also got ridiculously excited as during the day I saw Kirstie Allsopp, Tilly Walnes, Lisa Comfort and Stuart Hillard - *starstruck*!!)