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What does a typical day of a freelance craft designer look like? Find out on today’s episode of the Craft Industry Alliance podcast. My guests are two successful craft industry freelancers: Diane Gilleland and Haley Pierson Cox.

Diane Gilleland is a craft writer, designer, and teacher based in Portland, Oregon. She’s the author of Kanzashi In Bloom and co-author of Quilting Happiness, and her third book is coming in Spring 2015. She blogs about all things crafty at CraftyPod.com. I’ve learned so much from Diane over the last eight years about sewing and blogging and small business.

Haley Pierson-Cox is a Brooklyn-based designer and craft writer with a focus on crochet, sewing, needlework, and geek crafts. She is a professional craft blogger, a staff writer at CRAFT and a co-host of Craft Social, a monthly craft-focused Twitter chat. On her website, The Zen of Making she shares tutorials, printable patterns, and her passion for making items that are both beautiful and useful. I’ve admired Haley online for years and was really excited to have the chance to talk with her for the first time in today’s show.

We start off by talking about how a typical workday looks for a craft freelancer, including how much time we spend searching for new work, marketing and promoting existing projects, and completing the assignments we’ve already taken on. Then we talk about trade shows. Diane and Haley both have experience doing in-booth demonstrations for craft companies at different industry trade shows. They share what they’ve learned from interacting with the shop owners and other trade show attendees in this environment. Finally, because both Haley and Diane have expertise in multiple crafts, from crochet to sewing to plastic canvas to quilting, and pursue many crafts professionally, we talk about the benefits and pitfalls of not honing in on a specific niche craft.

And, of course, it wouldn’t be a Craft Industry Alliance podcast without recommendations of great stuff we’re loving right now.

Diane recommends:

Haley recommends:

And I recommend:

Listen to the Craft Industry Alliance podcast right here by clicking the arrow below, or subscribe in iTunes and listen later while you sew (or fold laundry or commute to work). If you enjoy the show, tell a friend about ti! Thank you for listening.

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