I had the pleasure of visiting The Creative Craft Show at the NEC Birmingham yesterday, what a fun day I had! Here are my show highlights!

What a beautiful day! The sun was streaming in as I arrived at The NEC Hall 12.

This show is a hall packed with stands selling and demonstrating all manner of of crafts. I think pretty much everything is covered, there is fabric (loads of fabric) sewing machines, sewing accessories, quilting, paper crafts, yarn (lots of yarn), crochet, knitting, felting, beads, mosaic, craft books, tatting, basket weaving and lots more I’m sure!

I try to go in to a show like this with a budget to spend otherwise I can get carried away. I met a lady (we walked up from the train station together) who had brought an empty suitcase with her for the stash she was getting ready to buy! Very sensible!

I like to spend most of my money on the workshops, I absolutely love the idea of trying out new crafts and the many workshops running at the show give a fabulous chance to do exactly that. The first thing I do when I arrive at the show is do a quick sweep of the whole place zooming in on stands offering mini workshops and I get them booked up. Places go quickly and I learnt the hard way you need to get these booked up and then enjoy your gentle amble around the rest of the show in the gaps between! As well as mini sessions on some of the stands there are several Creative Dens where longer, more detailed workshops are advertised in advance on the organisers website which can be booked ahead too.

I started with a visit to Willowpool Designs where the lovely Simone taught me to make a willow fish. He came out a tiny bit skinnier than intended but he’s pretty perfect to me! Not bad for a first attempt.

I had a hanging basket hook out in the garden that wasn’t being used so he’s out there for now, looking lovely in the sunshine!

Next I enjoyed a session on the Artcuts stand. I sat with 5 other craft enthusiasts and together we made sweet little decorations.

Everything we needed was in a little pack. We got to cover the flowerpot with some really pretty chiyogami paper and then used inks to colour little wooden flowers.

Artcuts specialise in creating a great range of wood shapes for crafting, they also sell almost every craft product you might need to go with them to make something lovely too. They also have lots of kits to make all sorts of pretty things.

My next workshop was with Craven and White and was glass fusing. We didn’t actually do the glass fusing, that happens in their kiln later. We got to decorate a tile with paints and little pieces of coloured glass.

It got boxed up safely with my address and they will pop it in the post to me once it’s been fired. I can’t wait to see how it turns out.

My last workshop of the day was with Tatting and Design. The wonderful Barbara taught us how to needle tat. Apparently it’s much easier than shuttle tatting and therefore perfect for beginners.

I honest have to say this was the most fun! I have always thought tatting was just too difficult for me to do so I was thrilled to find I could actually do it using this method. Barbara provided us with a long tatting needle, a needle threader (essential!) and a pretty printed card which we could add our tatting flowers to once we’d made them.

The technique seemed complicated for 2 minutes and then after that it was easy peasy! Barbara was a great teacher and knew exactly what mistakes we were making each time we came to her with our hot mess! I’ve bought myself a set of needles as this is a craft I’d love to try more of.

I loved the giant knitting on display at the Rachel John Extreme Textiles stand. I’ve seen the knitting with giant wooden needles and multi strands of yarn before but Rachel also has jumbo balls made from textiles too. They knitted up so beautifully.

The wonderful Tilly Rose had the most beautiful area called Tilly’s Slow Stitch Cafe. People were able to sit and have a go at creating some pretty vintage hand stitched embroidery pieces. The stand was decorated by pieces made by members of Tilly’s facebook group and just looked so so pretty. It didn’t photograph very well but I’ve included it anyway as it was just so lovely in real life!

My show favourites the Grans on the Make were at the show again with their Make a Bee Line Project. You can stop and make a felted bee (I made one last time) and they also have a selection of bee themed goodies for sale plus this beautiful crocheted hexagon map.

The show is on at the NEC until Sunday, and will be back in Birmingham in November 2019. There are Creative Craft Shows and other ICHF events across the UK all year, you can find details of what’s on near you here.

Such a fun day out, utterly exhausting but totally worth it!

I’ll be sharing these highlights at these link ups