Crafting Again

For The Love Of Crafting

Wow, took me about 5 minutes to figure out what name to put on my new blog. I thought of these choices:

The Purpose of Crafting
Must Craft
Daily Crafter
Fairly Crafty
My Investment In Crafting
Crazy Crafting
Just Crafty

When I got to the letter “L” I could only think of “For the love of God” and then it hit me to use the title above.

Little background – I’ve been crafting and selling stuff I make (albeit not making a ton of money doing it) for about 25 years. My daughter Amanda was in a stroller the first craft show I did – at a friends house in Amherst – right down the street from a very popular school craft show at the time. I don’t remember selling many things I made but I do remember selling lots of frozen unfrosted cut-out cookies, as it was early December I guess people did not want to bake. I’ve been crafting ever since then. In 1994 my mother and I opened up a store to sell crafts on consignment in Amherst, we took over a business called Country Hearts and we did very well the first year, then Walmart opened right up the street about a mile, and our business fell off horribly. We closed doors after the lease was up. Too bad, we really did great the first holiday (Easter) and my mom and I thought Christmas would be fantastic, but I don’t even think we did the business we had done in Easter time for Christmas sales. Funny huh? Anyhow, we still do craft shows and have picked up my sister as another partner in the business. We spend lots of shows together talking, laughing, bitching, smoking (lets see if my quitting will withstand another craft show but that would be a whole other blog), and eating!!!!

Last craft show season I made aprons. They were adorable, I sold lots of them at work to the girls, I just couldn’t sell as many as I expected to at craft shows. I hoped each show we would sell 20 or more (my mother also made some) and it just didn’t happen. We even kept lowering the price but could not get the sales at the shows that we wanted. So, we gave a lot of them away as gifts this past Christmas, and now we are down to one tote of them left. Maybe we should put them on sale 50% off at the first show to see if we can get our investments back out of them. I’ll let you know how it goes after the May show.

This season I have searched all over for a new craft to make. It was a hard for me to pick something new. First I wanted to make ipad & ereader covers and started cutting out the patterns, but I just didn’t get motivated to make them. Then I saw a pillow case dress for little girls and fell in love with them. They are so cute, they remind me of the aprons. I made a pattern and cut one out to sew together. It took me about an hour from cutting it out and sewing it all together (a lot faster than an apron), and I even serged the raw edge of the seam together on my sewing machine so it has a finished look! I’ll be able to use up the ricrac I bought for the aprons to embellish the dresses, and somebody suggested to give people to option to order a little dress for their doll too (I think I’ll add a card they can fill out & mail back to me with a check for a doll dress matching their child’s dress for a few bucks). I am hoping to sell lots of them this year to make up for the money I lost last year with the aprons. I’ll probably still make the ereader covers too for something else on the table. My mom has been making these really cute beaded necklaces and I don’t know if my sister is making anything else new. At least I found something quick and easy to make that I think I can make a decent profit margin, besides, they are stinking cute!

Got 10 done already, and if I find out how to post photos to this blog I will put them on.

Until I blog again - Coleen