For the past several years, I have been a part-time vendor at our local Renaissance Festival. I love this for so many reasons, but one of the best is the people. The other vendors, the performers, and the patrons are some of the loveliest people I've ever had the pleasure to meet. They are so accepting of others, and are very happy to have a place that they can show their true selves without all the judgements and stigmas that come with other public places.
Last year, I noticed that many folks had added parasols to their costumes. I am sure this is not a new thing, just new in the sense that I happened to notice it. Unfortunately, many of the parasols I saw, although beautiful, were the same. They had color variations, but the style was the same.
I thought it must be hard to find unique ones in the market, so I set out to find patterns and supplies to start making them, and offering them as a new item this year. It is surprisingly hard to find umbrella frames, so I ended up purchasing regular umbrellas and cutting the fabric off of them myself. Not a huge time waster, just seems wasteful to me to discard of all that fabric. (I'll have to have a good think-session on whether I can re-use it somehow).
Yarn, of course is easy to come by, but I wanted 100% cotton, and I wanted unique colors. So I turned to the internet, and Hobbii came up as an option. If you haven't checked out their yarns, go take a look - fabulous colors, especially their special blends for Halloween and Black Friday. Their cotton cakes are also very large (800-1000 yards!), so I was able to complete a whole parasol with just one cake.
I was also able to find a few patterns that appealed to me. The first one I tried (and LOVED) is Skelly-go-Round from Ann Wannamaker (this is the design pictured above). It looks amazing with the Hobbii yarns! My next one will be this lovely Mila pattern from Agnes Dihen. My goal is to have several colors and designs available for folks to choose from this year.
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