Working Hard

I am exhausted. And my house is a mess. But...I am almost ready for the craft fair I am participating in on Saturday. I've been working on a ton of new products including two new set of glasses (lilac and cherry blossoms) with iced tea pitchers, several new ipod/camera/cell phone cases, new children's hats, men's hats, name mugs, and some owl and bird mugs and glasses. I'm going to take some good pictures tomorrow, but here are some in the meantime.

Christmas!

The promised pictures are here. I'm actually giving some of the wine glasses as Christmas presents myself. As soon as I'm done making this post, I'm going to list them on my Etsy. If any of you are interested in purchasing anything in my Etsy shop and live locally, please talk to me directly rather than paying the shipping price on Etsy.

These didn't turn out quite as nicely as I had hoped. It's a little difficult to see, but they are cranberry colored flowers with gold stems and leaves.

I think these are fun. I've done them in both the small tumblers and the claret glasses. It's difficult to see the detail in the pictures, but there's a little outlet at the bottom.

Though you can't see it against the white backdrop (I need to come up with a better plan for taking pictures), There is a small snowflake on the bottom left and top right of each word.

I actually made these over a year ago buy never listed them. I guess they're kind of cute.

I'm hoping I'll actually get some sales with some of these because I don't want them sitting around my house until next Christmas. I guess we'll see. Thanks to all of you who have been commenting and offering your support. It means a lot.

Slippers Galore!

So I finally have made the time to make another blog post. I've been working hard with school stuff and Christmas present making and a little while ago, planning Traci's shower. I hope to post pictures of that soon. Not the shower itself, but the decorations because I'm so proud of how I coordinated everything. For that I must wait until Traci returns so I can commandeer them from her camera.

A few weeks ago I decided I wanted to make some slippers, but not the grandma-ish ones my grandmother makes (go figure), but rather something that's at least cute if not stylish (can slippers be stylish?). So I did a google search for free patterns. It took me awhile to find one that I liked AND understood. Because Oma taught me to crochet, I don't know alot of the terminology; I've had to teach myself most of it through books, etc. Anyway, I found a free pattern by The Little House by the Sea which I really liked, then I embelished it a little with details, different yarns, buttons, and fabric paint on the bottom to prevent slipping. The outcome was a Christmas gift explosion. Below are some of the pictures. I'm thinking about posting them for sale on my etsy shop, but I'm not sure if it's worth it. Opinions? Suggestions?


I hope to also soon be posting some new glasses I've painted, Christmas glasses, as well as pictures of the mugs I made as favors for Traci's shower. I plant to post all of them on my etsy this week and promote them as Christmas gifts. Anyway, stay tuned to see them!

Marathon Running

I feel like I just ran a marathon. Probably not actually. I hate running and avoid it at all costs. My body type does not lend itself well to running. I hated running even when I was skinny. What I mean is, I feel like I just did a ton of work in a very short period of time. I had a new set of glasses to post on my etsy today, and wanted to get it done by midnight so that it would be included in my items that are showcased in the wedding section today.

Other than that, I worked at summer care today from 9-6, and we did an awesome craft. I did it myself in fourth grade. It was luau week this week, and I had such a fun time planning it. The best part was that I actually had kids in my age group this week, so I got to use the materials I planned. I'm totally tooting my own horn here, but I think I've done an awesome job of coordinating my Bible verses with the theme. This week we talked about how luaus are celebrations and read verses and stories about celebrations. Everything from celebrating every day the Lord has made to David dancing until his clothes fell off to the parable of the lost coin and knowing how much God celebrates when one of His children comes to Him. It was really fun.

For our craft today we made sand art from scratch. Every kid got a big pile of salt on scratch paper. Then we gave them vibrant colored chalk (mostly sidewalk) and had them color the salt. It took awhile to get them to make bright colors, but once they did, we bagged it up. Twenty plus bags of salt later (and after lunch) we poured it into baby food jars and made some awesome sand art. We had a ton of fun. Plus it really impressed some of the parents, haha, and that's always a perk! I had one mom raving about how beautiful sons' jars were. I love it!

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!

Better Pictures

So I took some better pictures of the glasses that I painted this week. I posted the ocean glasses on my Etsy first, and by the time I finished posting the other set, four people had already viewed the ocean set. Unfortunately nobody will actually buy the glasses. It's nuts; three other Etsy users marked my store as a favorite. How can they mark it as a favorite if they haven't bought anything? Someone buy something! Or tell somebody who you think would be interested to check it out, haha.