Flea Market Booths–Top 10 Items to Crochet

Crochet Ideas, Prep, and Branding for Your Flea Market Booth

Spring Break is long over, and I have been busy! Creating inventory for the Flea Market booth that I am renting has taken all of my time and energy.

This post may include affiliate links

I have some ideas to crochet up for a flea market booth, but before I go into that, I want to say this:

Flea Market Pricing is NOT the Same as Craft Fair Pricing

You read that correctly. They aren’t the same. You can actually charge just a little more in a flea market! My local Flea Market-The Owls Nest— is a very large flea market with two locations, and both of them have large buildings. This flea market is wonderful because they have a lot of antique items, unique items, and handmade items, as well as very unique craft items such as reclaimed wood.

This Flea Market sounds awesome, right?

It is. They handle the tax and the transactions–I don’t even have to be there! Though I plan to show up each week a few times to check on inventory.

On To The Top 10 Flea Market Ideas:

I worked on a lot of inventory and created some patterns along the way (available in my Ravelry store). Since we are in the warmer months, I focused mainly on smaller items that don’t have to be worn but can be used daily.

These Items are Listed Below:

1. Baby Burp Cloth. Make these with 100% cotton yarn, such as Lily Sugar ‘n Cream or Lion Brand’s 24/7 cotton yarn. I have a great pattern you can find by clicking on the Patterns tab above. These don’t take much to make, work up pretty fast, and you can sell them for a reasonable price ($7-$10 ea) and still turn a profit (more on this later)

2. Bandana Drool Bib. Make these with 100% cotton as well as they will be absorbing all that drool! My pattern features a beautiful and traditional bandana shape with just a touch of texture. These work up even faster, require even less yarn, and boy, do people just LOVE them! They can also be very reasonably priced, similar to burp cloth.

3. Scarfie. This pattern is also featured on my Ravelry page and is once again made with 100% cotton. These are for the younger toddler (24 months -3T) and will catch any little messes or just look adorable! They can be worn year-round and will make excellent, easy-to-take-care of scarves for fall and winter. Shaped just like a bandana, they are already pretty popular. These are also priced similarly to the bib and burp cloth.

4. Washcloths. Yep. Everyone knows that washcloths sell pretty well. But did you know about the new Lily Sugar ‘n Cream Scrub off yarn? Click that link, and you will see just how awesome it is. Here’s a picture to show the awesome textures:

And I’m so excited because…

Yarnspirations liked this picture so much that they reused it in an Instagram post and tagged me, giving credit to my work and photo!

There are so many different washcloth patterns to choose from, you won’t be bored with all the neat textures you could use.

5. Pot Scrubbies. We can’t have washcloths without pot scrubbies! These come in all shapes and designs. I prefer to use a specific scrubby yarn for these, such as Red Heart Scrubby Cotton or Yarn Bee Scrubology yarn. This makes for some serious scrubby action! The best part is, you can literally toss these in the dishwasher when you wash your dishes!! I’ve had mine for almost a year, and it has not come apart or shown any of the ends that I weaved in. I just love that I can reuse it! These will go for anywhere between $3-4, take very little yarn to make, and only maybe 30 minutes to complete.

6. Baby Headbands. Of course, we need a few more baby items, right? Baby headbands and toddler headbands are a fan favorite, and for the warmer months, we’re looking for those smaller or more open designs with a pretty flower or just pretty texture. A free pattern with a tutorial is available on my blog, but you can also search Pinterest to your hearts’ desire as there are tons! These will be priced pretty low ($4-5) but will sell like hotcakes and only take 30 minutes tops and just scrap yarn to make.

Let’s Talk Mother’s Day

7. Spa Set. For Mother’s Day, I made several spa sets each in different color combinations. These take 3 balls of cotton yarn–1 in a medium-dark color, 1 in a medium-light color, and 1 in white or a light color. Some color combos I used were bright yellow, medium gray, and white; blush pink, vanilla cream, and white; turquoise blue, cream, and white; medium blue, green, and white; you get the point–I liked using white because it helped to keep things light and simple.

This set includes 3 face scrubbies to use for exfoliation and to remove make-up, a textured washcloth, a pouf, a soap saver bag, and a basket to put it all in. My pattern provides the instructions on making each item in detail and will be available soon on Ravelry. I would mark these gift sets around the $20-25 mark.

8. Light Weight Baby Hats. Yep. Hats in warmer months. Babies are either born with only a little hair or no hair. Those that are born with full heads of hair…. are lucky. For the rest… A lightweight baby hat is just the thing to keep off the sun or protect against windy days. Use a baby cotton yarn like Bernat’s Softee Baby Cotton yarn, which isn’t like the cotton you would use for washcloths, but is much softer and much lighter weight. Being cotton, it washes up easily and is much more durable. With babies, everything needs to be so washable! So many cute baby hat patterns exist; just peruse Pinterest, and you will find more than you want to look through!

I would price these around the $5 and up mark.

9. Hanging Towels. Craft fairs and flea markets wouldn’t be complete without hanging towels! I got creative (mostly because I was bored) and made a different stitch pattern on each one. Moving quickly, I made up 20 towels in about 3 days. Once again, I recommend using cotton yarn, such as the ones we use for washcloths. This will make it so that the towel can be washed and dried without worry and with no pilling, and the entire towel can now be used to clean up a mess or dry very wet hands with zero worries!

Price these between $8-12.

10. A Few Baby Blankets. Not many. Just a few. The reason for this is you want to show what you can do, but you don’t want to put all your time and effort into larger projects because the idea is to crank out as many items as fast as you can to maximize profits. Blankets take a little time. C2C blankets take even more time, even though they are very cool. Granny square baby blankets can be done in an assembly line fashion, making them the most efficient to make, but if you are like me and get bored with granny-anything, try my Paige Blanket pattern out, it works up in about 6 hours and because of that, turns a better profit.

Set the price on these non-C2C blankets around $30-45. C2C blankets will be out of a lot of people’s price range. You typically would charge upwards of $120, but for the flea market, we’ll settle on about $85 at the lowest. Craft fair pricing for these blankets isn’t even worth the time, as people expect to pay garage sale prices at craft fairs and only show up with pocket change. They are looking for items they can buy with $5 and stuff in their bag or pockets.

Putting it Together

I crafted enough of each item that I felt wouldn’t be too much but also not too little. This is going to be different for everyone, but if you need a number, I’d do around 20 of each of the smaller items and less of the larger items, keeping the baby blankets down to a minimum, such as 4.

Put a price tag on EVERY item. There should be no question about what your items cost.

I also like to have several of these cards I made using cardstock and my trusty printer to inform people of each product and how to take care of it. This is information they can take with them. You can also slip these into packages of the orders you complete.

By the way, those aren’t as fancy as it seems. I just opened up Word on my computer, picked a flyer that had 4 little framed boxes on them, changed the wording, and voila! The cutting process was a tad tedious, though…

And then I stamped them on the back…

Final Thoughts:

All this prep had me stressing a little bit, but I pulled it off and feel pretty accomplished right now! Some people might think that all the extras I put into my work are too much, but I say this, branding is very important and makes your product look that much more professional and, therefore, more likely to be purchased.

What items would you add to this list? What would you charge for them?

Next Time…

Join me next time as I show you how I came up with my pricing. It might look intimidating to you, but I promise, in the end, it will make sense!

I am also going to go over how I set things up and all the neato things my husband built for our little booth. We are set up starting tomorrow! I can’t wait to see how things go for my little business!