The Craftbritannia sales fairy swap 2012!

Hallo people!

That clever old Rachel Elliot (aka FlyingCheeseToastie) came up with a rather good idea for a team challenge a while back. Us Craftbritannia bunch on Etsy are forever going on about the elusive Sales Fairy, and when one of us is lucky enough to be paid a visit by said Fairy (ie we sell something), we tend to shower our other teamies in Sales Fairy Dust in the hope that she’ll pay a visit to them too! Anyway, Rachel suggested we all make our own interpretation of a Sales Fairy, send them off to her, then she’ll randomly allocate a Fairy to each teamie and send them on. So todays wee bloglett is about the one I made…

It’s not a fairy.

The fact that it’s not a fairy can be blamed on Rachel for using the word ‘totem‘ in her brief, and Carrie for inventing the Lurker Stick (I think it was Carrie!). The Lurker Stick is a virtual stick that can be poked into corners to coax out buyers that may be hiding.

I’ll just pause here to say that us Craftbritannia lot are really quite sane and normal, despite how this sounds…

So, I wanted to make a sort of totemy-stick thing, but had no idea how or out of what. The idea came all of a sudden one Saturday afternoon, so I pootled down to the local hardware store, bought some dowl (which the nice man cut into bits for me), some double-sided sticky tape (all those childhood years of watching Blue Peter finally paid off!) then ran home as fast as I could and got started…

First I wrapped the stick in double-sided tape, and grabbed me a fibre thread pack from SpinningStreak…





The next step was to peel off the coating on the tape and start wrapping the fibres round the stick…





…until I ended up with wooly-coated stick with dangly bits of spare thread at one end…





Now I was stuck. I knew I wanted dangly jingly bits, but wasn’t sure what to do next. Then Sir Terry Pratchett came to the rescue… Pratchett fans amongst you will know that good old song “A wizard’s staff has a knob on the end” – so what else could I do but attach a knob! I needle-felted a ball of merino, then wrapped it in some beautiful vegetarian silk from Sassalynne…





Then I added some embellishments to the knob *snigger* (sorry!), threaded scrummy handmade paper beads from DesiredThings and little howlite skulls from BeadsYouNeed onto the remaining dangly threads and tied a little silver bell on to the end of each one…





And here’s the finished doodad!





All that remained was to write out the instructions… (thanks Rachel for this piccie! And I’ve just noticed I can’t spell ‘incredible‘!)





…then send it on its way!

After a few days, all the Craftbritannia Sales Fairies had arrived at Rachel’s place and were having a massive party…





…and now us CB teamies sit back and wait to receive our randomly picked Fairy, which all being well will bring us lots of luck on the sales front!

Massive thanks to Rachel for such a fab team challenge idea! I enjoyed myself hugely making mine – those of you that are familiar with the items in my shop will see my creation was… er… nothing like the sort of things I usually make, so thanks again Rachel for poking my old grey matter to come up with something different! And of course, massive thanks to everyone else who’s taken part in this challenge – hasn’t it been fun?! Hurrah for Team CB!

More pictures of all the Fairies can be seen on Rachel’s Facebook page.

So, there you have it!

I wonder which one I’ll get back?