Slowly buy Surely

For the past few weeks I've really been trying to get things going with selling my hand-painted glasses. I've been doing them for the past few years, and have given a set of wine or champagne glasses at almost every wedding I've gone to in the past couple of years. At first I mostly painted grape designs on the glasses; a few different colored grape clusters connected by a vine that wraps around the glass. Then I started doing glasses that are what I call my black and white flourish design. They are my favorite. I believe I posted pictures of them before, but in case I didn't, this is what they look like.

Since then, I will sometimes look up a couple's gift registry to get an idea of their taste and other types of dishes, etc. that they like. For example, for my cousin Lyndsey's wedding, I did a very simple abstract design of black curves randomly postitioned around the glass. It wasn't anything elaborate, but it matched the dishes that she registered for.

For the past month, I have been trying to make this hobby into a small (very small) business. I have started a store on etsy.com, and currently have 11 designs listed. I have also ordered free business cards at vistaprint.com, and splurged a little bit to make them glossy and more professional looking. I also created a soft cover photo book at walmart.com which is going to function a lot like a catalog for me. I was able to include all of my current designs in it, minus the grape vines because I don't have any pictures of that. My mom has offered to bring in my catalog and business cards to work. She seems to think people will check it out. Right now my goal is to get people interested and show them what I am doing. I don't need to sell things right now, though that would be nice, I really just want people to know about it, so that they can call me when they need me. I feel like my prices are really good because I have such a low overhead, and I think my glasses make great gifts, particularly for weddings. I really hope other people think so too.

Actually, I've gotten some really good feedback from some of the people I've given these too. Cristen loves the grape vine set that I made her, and she gets compliments on them often. I also heard from another friend who saw a black and white flourish set at a friend's house and was impressed with it. I gave my mother-in-law a grape vine set a few years ago and didn't hear the end of it from Steve's aunt until I made her a set too.

This week I made some wine ID tags (the little beaded ones, like were attached to the wine glass favors at my wedding). I may add them to my etsy, or even offer to include a free set with a purchase of a set of wine glasses as a promotion.

Anyway, I guess this went from an update to a promotion of my items, haha. If you're interested, or know of somebody else who may be, let me know, or give them my website, or ask me for my card!