Greetings from H&H Americas
I spent last week attending the h&h Americas conference in Chicago. If you’ve never heard of this one, I am not too surprised. It’s only 4 years old and it’s only open to craft business professionals (like shop owners). I’m not a shop owner but I do have a craft-based business and I am a member of the Craft Industry Alliance. I attended the conference with my Mastermind group, a small group of craft business owners (we have me, a quilt designer, a machine embroiderer, and a knitter/craft mom vlogger). We’ve been meeting for almost 4 years and decided that the conference was a great reason to get together in person for the first time. I’ll share more about all of them later this month.
I had an amazing time and got to meet and reconnect with lots of cool craft people! I took basically no photos at all because I was really interested in just being there and absorbing everything.
Since I mostly teach embroidery right now, I thought I would tell you about a few trends I noticed in looking at hand embroidery I saw at the more than 500 exhibitors that were there. Almost all of the hand embroidery kits I saw heavily featured the satin stitch, which is honestly one of my least favorite stitches. These are beautiful kits, but I think satin stitch is hard to master and can be discouraging for beginners. These are from Hawthorne Handmade (top left) and Stitches by Tiff (top right). There were also some great needlepoint and cross stitch kits. These are from Storyteller Stitchery (bottom left) and Junebug & Darlin (bottom right). The kits from Storyteller Stitching were honestly my favorites, even though I don’t do a lot of needlepoint, because of the beautiful handdyed threads in the kit. I am a sucker for really beautiful materials.
Two other trends you will see just looking at this tiny snapshot were landscapes and strawberries. I saw strawberries everywhere as bags, notions, on fabrics, and in needlework kits. I love strawberries, so that’s a trend that was fun to see!