Aka crocheting like my life depends on it ’cause it kinda does.

Hello everyone and welcome to another blog post!!!

I am ashamed that I haven’t posted in a long time and I apologize for that. I’ve been spending my time working, schooling, and as you can tell from this blog title, crocheting enough to sell at a pride festival.

This year, instead of just attending the pride festival, I will be selling crocheted beanies, bandanas, and keychains all pride flag themed, made by yours truly.

Initially, I wasn’t going to sell at the festival because all the spots were booked. And I was fine with that. I could just crochet samples for my Etsy and hope for the best. However, I got an email saying there was now space for me to sell and after a split second hesitation, I accepted.

I was excited for all of 2 seconds before the panic settled in.

I had roughly a couple of months to crochet enough goods to sell for a festival lasting 6 hours. This would not have been a problem if crocheting was the only thing I had to do. However, as previously mentioned, I work full-time and I’m a grad student.

In between doing assignments and working, there was barely anytime for me to truly sit down and crochet with the current system I had going on.

So I changed it.

I started doing my assignments at least a day in advance and stopped taking naps after work. Every spare minute I had, I crocheted like I was on fire and finishing the project was the only thing that would put it out.

There were three categories of things I was crocheting: beanies, bandanas, and keychains (spoiler alert: I didn’t have time for the keychains so I only crocheted a few).

Pride Beanies

The beanies took the most amount of time because they required more yarn and were the biggest projects I planned on selling. So, I focused most of my initial time and energy into crocheting those first to get them out the way. For each flag idea that popped into my head, I crocheted three different base-colored beanies for the flag.

Sound confusing? Let me give you an example. I crocheted three beanies with the standard rainbow pride flag that had base colors of black, brown, and beige (or a cream color for the pride flags that already have those colors in them).

Still confused? Let me just show a picture.

Now that you have a clear picture of the colors, allow me to tell you about the pride flags I chose to crochet. If I had more time, I would’ve crocheted way more flags than I did. But as previously mentioned, I was a little pressed for time, so I did the best that I could.

The flags I decided to crochet were the standard rainbow pride flag, the lesbian flag, the bisexual flag, the pansexual flag, the asexual flag, the nonbinary flag, the aroace flag, and the transgender flag.

Here’s a picture of a lot of the beanies below.

So, that’s it for the beanies. I crocheted just as many bandanas as beanies, in the same pride flags as mentioned above.

Pride Bandanas

As you can see in that picture, the bandanas weren’t completely finished. I got the main chunk of the bandanas out the way and decided to crochet the strings of the bandanas after the fact.

I unfortunately do not have a picture of all the completed bandanas, so this photo will have to do. Now is also the time to mention that I don’t have a picture of just the keychains either.

I do have pictures of the deals and combos though.

You can see a finished bandana and keychain in those images as well.

Now that I’m done talking about the prep and crochet items, let me talk about how the festival went as a whole (since we’re way past when the festival happen).

The festival

Despite my initial slight reluctance about the event (mainly about socializing and marketing for hours on end), the festival was an enjoyable experience that I hope to do again.

The set up itself was a bit…chaotic and this was entirely my fault. I bought the wrong kind of tent for the event and it took a bit to set it up. Thankfully, I had friends and nice strangers to help me with the set up. It took us about an hour to set up the tent by itself (I gave that tent to Goodwill immediately after the event but I digress).

The rest of the set up took less than 20 minutes. My friend took a few pictures of the whole set up and was kind enough to send them to me.

With my friends supporting me and helping me sell my things, I ended up selling over $600 worth of crochet items to others.

$600+ of crochet items.

Subtracting the booth fee, I still sold over $400 of crochet goods. I sold my goods at these prices:

• $20 for 1 beanie,
• $36 for 2,
• $55 for 3,
• $15 for 1 bandana,
• $26 for 2,
• $44 for 3,
• $8 for 1 Keychain,
• $12 for 2,
• $23 for 3,
• $40 for bundle (1 of each)

Plus, the event wasn’t as boring as I thought it would be and I didn’t overheat and pass out either (I have POTS). Granted, my friends play a huge part in why I enjoyed the event and I’m so thankful to have people in my circle that will support me in my endeavors.

By the end of the event, I only had a small amount of beanies, bandanas, and keychains left.

I don’t have a picture of the beanies I had left, but it was similar to the amount of bandanas you see above.

Selling at the pride festival was a lot of fun and if I have the chance to sell there again, I’m going to take it. Hopefully, I’ll have enough time to crochet everything this time around and I’m not fighting for my life to do so.

That’s it for this post!!! If you’ve read this far, thank you for reading my post and I’ll see you in the next one!!!

By the way, here’s my Etsy account (again) just in case you want something pride related: https://handmadecrochetbykay.etsy.com