In September 2012, we attended both MAICon (AICon's northern counterpart) and Software Freedom Day in Launceston.

MAICon

MAICon wound up being vairly hectic for us, with Mim and I having to drive back from Hobart the night before after attending a two day conference, making for a late night of preparation beforehand (Mim stayed up all night sewing zombie weirdies).

We arrived early enough in the morning to have a relaxed setup, and I gave another stallholder who was late a hand shifting their gear in.

When attendees started rolling through just before 10:00am, our fruit were catching eyes right away, and we handed them out to kids and adults at a steady rate throughout the day. MAICon had a very different feel to the AICon event we'd held a stall at earlier in the year, and people seemed to rush through the trading area (perhaps this is more to do with AICon's two day schedule allowing people to take a more relaxed approach to perusing traders' offerings).

Towards the end of the day (after Mim had had a nap), I ducked off to help judge the art competition. A little smaller than AICon's, the MAICon competition was divided into three categories: Best Overall Artwork, Best Made-on-the-day Artwork, and Best Pre-made Artwork. I found judging a bit easier than at AICon (perhaps thanks to having a little more experience). For anybody interested, there are photos of the winning entries on my Flickr account, and the Two Lof Bees Facebook page.

Our most popular designs at MAICon ended up being Choose Happy Fruit, Neko, and Hello Strawberry, with Dignified Bat and Pocket Ninjas also getting a bit of attention.

Business wise, MAICon was pretty slow for us, but so many people stopped to tell us how cute they thought our stuff was that it's hard to feel disappointed.

Software Freedom Day

September also saw us heading off to Software Freedom Day in Launceston, where Mim had a table showing off some of the stuff we do with Free/Open Source Software.

As the event coordinator, I had my attention fairly divided but almost every time I glanced over, Mim had somebody peering intently at something she was showing them, or scribbling away at the graphics tablet we had set up for people to play with.

Mim tells me that her favourite parts of Software Freedom Day are seeing all the little pictures that people leave behind, and being able to get some drawing done when things get slow. In addition to doing SFD Girl as an example Inkscape drawing, Mim worked on a few yet-to-be-shown pieces including some Big Bear and Little Bear concepts.