Applefest - 10/6/2012

Applefest was another great day this year - our third year in a row! The fun began when Liz and Erica came over to Sam’s house the night before so we could price and prepare our products! And drink wine and be goofy.

Liz, crafting

Erica, reacting to something gross and funny that someone said



Harper, getting all up in Liz's business



Sam was trying on some scarves with no idea how prophetic this picture would be.

     

Yes, it was another cold, cold Applefest. It even rained for a few minutes this year. Luckily, that blew over quickly and the sun came back out.  Lots of friends came out to say hello and check out the autumnal fun.  Thanks for your support, friends!

This is what our pretty booth looked like

Liz was shocked and awed when her sister, Amy, appeared at their booth.  Amy drove 2 hours from Lapeer to visit the girls at Applefest!  She chatted at their booth for a while, bought a couple things to support Locust Street Crafts, then she and Liz walked around to check out the other vendors for a while. 

It has to be said that Liz finally sold her ugly orange hat made of fun fur yarn.  The woman who bought it actually totally rocked the look, which we didn’t know was possible until that very moment.  We regret to inform our readers that we do not have a picture to share.

After a particularly violent gust of wind (during which Liz yelled “NO!” when a pair of slippers blew off the table for about the fifteenth time, which was Sam’s favorite moment of the day), we decided to pack it in and went to The Bird to get the traditional post-Applefest Mediterranean pizza.

  

While we were packing up, this pretty rainbow showed up! We oo-ed and ahh-ed and then realized we were still freezing and got back to packing up. When Erica got home, Ms. Beezy sat on her lap to help her warm up:

B is for Beezy and Bednarski

It was a happy, fun, crafty day! Thanks to Zonta for everything they do to make Applefest a success, not limited to selling hot apple cider, warm donuts, and other baked goods!

Word on the Street: Applefest Edition

Hey everybody! We are so excited for this Saturday, which is Zonta’s Applefest! Here’s what we’ve been up to:

Sam’s been knitting her little fingers off on a few projects including flowers that will eventually be made into hair pins


as well as this chevron scarf:


Remember that hat from last week that was being modeled by a can of Lacroix? Well, a few cans of Lacroix later and look how much it’s grown!


Sam’s also working on getting her craft room in better shape so that when Liz and Erica come over Friday night for craft sale prep they will have room to work (and Sam won’t die of embarrassment).

Liz has been making a few new craft items, inventing single-stitch crochet patterns to make a couple cowls, not to be revealed here but at Applefest.  So, dear readers, come visit us.  And maybe buy Sam’s chevron scarf before Liz gets to it first!!!

This year, Liz wanted to appeal more to the holiday gift crowd at Applefest with some handmade ornaments, but she didn’t get around to making any.  Next year’s plan is to plan better (planning to plan?  Sounds good, right?).  She did, however, make this cool wreath:



Liz loves Halloween (probably not as much as Sam, but still lots), and got a little bummed one day about not really having any Halloween decorations or any money she could spend on getting some.  So, resourceful lady that Liz is, she decided to make a bunting/banner for herself based on a few things she saw on Pinterest:


The banner hangs above the tv and adds some decorative flair to the living room, though Liz thinks it could benefit from a dash of glitter glue.  Liz’s fiance, Eric, bought her flowers recently that Liz carefully dried out and put in a vase, also for some seasonal flair:


And yes, that is a Harry Potter quidditch Lego set.  Sometimes, Liz and Eric still play with Legos.  Play is good for you, not to mention that Harry Potter is awesome.  Liz hopes to listen to all of the audio books again this fall and winter during her work commute.

Erica has had three goals this week: Craft, Wedding Plan, and Advise!

1. Craft: Erica has been crafting her fingers to the bone to finish many cute items that will be on sale at Applefest this year, including these toasty warm items to keep noggins, fingers and necks warm...
 
… along with a bunch of cute bottle cap magnets that Erica lovingly picked all the glue off of.


2. Wedding planning: a work in progress. As always.

3. Advise: Erica is the Alumni Adviser for the Delta Phi Epsilon chapter at CMU. This week was Jump, the annual event where sororities on campus finally find out who their new members are after a week of recruitment events. This year, 18 women decided to join DPhiE’s expanding sisterhood--which brings the chapter total to 80 women! Erica is definitely a proud mama bird this week.
 

And that’s what we’ve been up to this week!

Don’t forget to come visit Locust Street Crafts Saturday at Papa’s Pumpkin Patch in Mt. Pleasant for Applefest! We can’t wait to see you there!

Applefest Excitement!

Hey everybody! Your favorite crafty girls got mentioned in the local news this morning! One more reason for you to come on out to Applefest!

We'd like to take a second to thank Zonta for mentioning us and for putting on such a great festival to begin with! Applefest is one of our favorite sales of the year and we'd go even if we weren't selling stuff.

Don't forget to come see us this weekend!

Word on the Street: Welcome Fall Edition!

This week, Liz actually has been sorting through crafts, repricing, and thinking about displays in preparation for Applefest.  

Yup.  That’s a crate with stuff in it, stacked on top of a small suitcase that’s stacked on a plastic bin.  What whaaaat.

And here is Liz’s coffee table, occupied by lots of stuff, but most importantly by some crocheting she’s trying to finish up (blue) and a sweet bag that Erica made for Liz a few years ago (pink and burgundy).  If you can spot Liz’s crochet hook (light blue), you win a prize!  Of being happy for Liz because, as previously mentioned, it’s the only crochet hook that Liz had.

Liz is getting to the point where she’s sick at the sight of a lot of the crafts she’s made in recent years and just wants them to sell already.  Come see all the LSC girls at Applefest and be sure to visit our special $2 discount bin that will be full of many crafty treasures.

Meanwhile, there are lots of crafts that Liz wants to make but hasn’t gotten around to creating yet.  She hopes to be better organized next year, creating a “craft plan” of different crafts that she’s interested in making and setting specific goals on how and when to make them.  It all sounds good in theory, but stay tuned to see if it actually pans out.  She hopes to have a few crafty holiday ornaments to sell by the time Applefest swings around.

Erica knit up a storm last week, finishing the baby sweater/hat combo with great swiftness--and then forgot to take a picture of it. It was insanely cute (you’ll just have to take her word for it).

Speaking of pictures, it’s difficult to take good ones when all you have is a phone, but Erica has a secret weapon: CATS! In preparation for Applefest, she’s been working on some smaller knit crafts this week, including tiny knit hearts. Here’s Beezy checking the hand-crafted high quality items.


In addition to tiny knit hearts, she’s also busted out the Gorrilla glue and stockpiled coupons to take to a certain craft store and buy them out of magnets (again) to finish 200 more B’s World Famous Bottle Cap Magnets (tm).

Sam has been a busy little bee, but not as much with the crafting as she would have liked. She started a new job which she loves but it is taking up a lot of her mental acuity.



She calls this the Forest of Sticky Notes and this is it at the end of a quiet day. It’s full of lists of things she needs to learn/do and when she gets home from a day of completing the sticky notes she usually just lays on the couch with a Lacroix handy and watches a few episodes of Downton Abbey (yes, again) to calm her nerves.

But never fear, she has started the project on her craft room (and is just way too embarrassed to show the “before” pictures until there are some really good “after” ones. And she did manage to get a good start on a pretty fall hat:


which is pictured here, modeled by a trusty can of Lacroix.

And that’s what we’re up to this week! What crafty endeavours are you up to now that fall has arrived?

Word on the Street, September 14

Liz hasn’t been crafting much this week.  She’d like to say that she’s started working on new crafts for Applefest, or that she’s even worked on some of the crafting she wants to do for her wedding - but that would just be lying.  She’s got high hopes, as the song goes, but really needs to take the time to find a good balance and create a timeline for getting projects done.

She has, however, finished the afghan that she started working on this summer.  It took many hours and a lot of simultaneous tv-watching, but it turned out great.  Hopefully, she’ll get around to taking some good photos of it one of these days.

A friend contacted Liz this week to commission a crocheted hat in Detroit Tigers colors.  Liz’s mom is going to wrangle up the appropriate colors of yarn for Liz to use to make this - thanks for being a yarn hoarder, Pam!

And because Liz doesn’t have any great pictures to share this week of her craftiness, here is a cool picture and link to powerful information of craft adhesives, put together by Lemon Jitters.  Oh, it’s way cooler than it sounds:

Erica has Been Everywhere Man, from Myrtle Beach to Metro Detroit over the last two weeks. There were vacations and bachelorette parties, planned and surprise wedding showers, but she still managed to find some time to craft. In between tirelessly writing thank you cards to her generous friends and family and wrangling addresses for invitations, she is also working on a baby set for a friend. But before the baby set could be started, the yarn had to be worked into submission. 

 Sam has likewise been semi-crafty. She's designed a slouchy hat and designed a super cool stripey chevron scarf for Applefest. She's working on cleaning out her craft room to maximize crafting and meant to take a before picture to share with you so as to shame her into actually cleaning and organizing, but her brain went on vacation and that hasn't happened yet. Maybe next week you'll get a before AND after picture! Maybe even a whole post about cleaning and organizing the world's messiest craft room! Dare to dream! In the meantime, here's an idea of what is going on in Sam's head:

Which is to say that she's really excited about fall. And pumpkin lattes.

That's what's keeping us busy this week!

We love Sam! Take two

We've all been busy with life and crafting our little fingers off, preparing for Applefest on October 6th in Mt. Pleasant.  Fun fact: This is the Zonta Club's 25th Annual Applefest - and this will be our third year there, woohoo!

We'll post more about our crafty goings-on later in the week, but Liz and Erica have been busy with a second super secret Sam post.  Here's goes!

Sam deserves the best birthday post ever. And even though this real post is a little late, Liz and Erica would like to share some of their favorite memories of Sam in honor of her 29th year.

There was an incident where Sam was cooking something at the Locust House, and Liz and Erica were in their respective bedrooms. All of a sudden, we heard Sam calmly say “Hey guys, the kitchen is on fire.” No alarm, no yelling, just the facts ma’am. Luckily, no one was hurt and the house was just fine.  

Not quite this dramatic, but you get the idea.

Sam also has impeccable fashion sense. From tie-dye shorts and well-loved t-shirts to heels and pj pants, she has given the contestants of “America’s Next Top Model” a run for their money.

What a rockstar!!!

In all honesty, when the three of us lived in the Locust Street house, Sam had the most professional job of all of us and put together these awesome coordinating outfits that often made Erica and Liz say things like, “Daaaaaaamn, girl!” She wore fabulous heels and would often walk to work. Yes, because she really IS a rock star and has super powers.

(Often, Liz wears heels for 5 minutes then starts to cry.)

Despite Sam’s kitchen-burning efforts, she made really excellent food often. We all consumed a lot of her famous caramel brownies (when Liz wasn’t eating all of the caramels), white bean chicken chili, and gingersnaps. And we ate a lot of popcorn too, which we called p-corn, so of course gingersnaps then evolved to be called g-snaps, etc. Abbreviation was our business.   

Wearing multiple layers and dancing/burning candles to keep warm. Heat is expensive, ya’ll.

In hindsight, we probably made and consumed so many warm foods because we were poor chicks in our early 20s, scraping to get by - meaning, we kept the heat in our apartment low in the winter and wore many layers, often wearing entire blankets, just to keep our extremities intact. Abbreviating food names was probably just a survival mechanism we used to not waste our precious warm breath.

One of the best things about Sam, we feel, is her loyalty and integrity to herself. She is so smart and strong that even when she encounters life’s challenges, she powers through and maintains a fearless confidence of self that is enviable and admirable. Sam reads lots of complicated and sophisticated books and can speak very educatedly about a variety of complex topics varying from evolution to forensics to philosophy and more. In short, Sam’s brain is giant and powerful.

One of the biggest lessons that Liz has learned from Sam is this: Nobody knows everything about life and you don’t have to always know what you are doing, because we’re all learning and we need to treat ourselves kindly in the process. Also: stop worrying so much, call your friends more often, and yoga. Just...yoga.

And also, love cats a lot but also love dogs just as much:

Fun fact: Sam LOVES Halloween, probably as much as Erica loves Batman. So, ya know, send her some cool Halloween sh*t, k? Crafts, decorations, fun things you see on Pinterest - leave some comments for her with Halloween stuff and she will love it! Cute pictures of cats and dogs are also welcome.

Ode to Sam

by Liz and Erica

Dear Samantha,

As your partners in craft, we would like to wish you a most awesome and wonderful:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!

We didn't really get our stuff together in time to create a real compilation post of how awesome you are and how much we love you, but we hope you'll appreciate these pictures instead, for now, until we get our act together.  We hope you understand.

(Sam loves Shark Week)

Who can resist a kitten in a hat?

"And you know what?  He LIKES the bonnet!"

One of Sam's favorite candies, yummmmm!

And of course, the patron saint of Locust House, Ms. Dolly Parton.

Sam, we love you more than we can say and crafting just wouldn't be the same without you.  You have great craft skills and are a patient and excellent teacher.  Your friendship means so much to us and you are truly a one-of-a-kind lady.  We hope you have a magnificent day and enjoy all of the great things that this next year has to offer you.