Lucia Festival in a nutshell

Well the big day was yesterday and it went great! My friend Beth and I had a booth at the Los Angeles Swedish Christmas Fair and we had a blast!  We named our booth, "The Swedest Thing".  We will be uploading items from the craft fair, as well as new items, into our Etsy shop soon.  

Since it was our first year at this fair, Beth and I were definitely nervous going into it. We learned a ton and now we know what we will do differently in the future. We also didn't get much sleep the night before as we were frantically putting things together and trying to get more crafting done...lesson #1 learned: start making this earlier.  

Me and Ryan in front of our booth (Ryan is very excited about the day!):

Here are Beth and Dave in front of our booth.

A full picture of our booth with Ryan the viking behind it.

The Lucia processional and program happened twice throughout the day.  Here was one of the only pictures I got to take of Lucia.  They sang a medley of songs after they processed, it was beautiful!

Here is a picture of more craft booths from the fair.  There were all sorts of booths there this year.

 Here are a few more shots of our booth up close and personal. We had double-wine tote bags, aprons, hand-stenciled tote bags,  hand-etched glass items with Swedish words/decals:

And we had various ornaments, headbands with Scandinavian ribbon, lingonberry headbands, hand-stenciled onesies, and more!

These hand-stitched felt Dala ornaments were a huge hit and sold like hotcakes! Beth made them in a variety of colors and did an awesome job:

I got to walk around a couple times and check out other booths and the token item I bought this year was this second-hand, hand-embroidered runner.  Isn't it beautiful?!

Overall, we had a great turnout for our booth and we are so glad we got the opportunity to do it this year! We are already looking forward to next year's fair when we can have more time to prepare and have a wider variety of items.  We had such a great experience and are so thankful for all the support from our friends, family, and husbands!

And I definitely couldn't have done it without the help of my sister, Caryn, and her wonderful daughter, Hannah, who came over all afternoon on Saturday to help me finish up last-minute projects.  Isn't she just precious?!  

So that about sums it all up! Thank you to all of you out there who helped me with ideas for the fair and all your support.  You guys are the best!

Also, get ready for this Thursday, December 13, as it is the kickoff to the
Scandinavian Christmas series 2012!
You won't want to miss all the awesome guest posts about the best Scandinavian Christmas traditions, crafts, and recipes!

Happy Monday!