Wooden Nativity Set

I thought I'd share the little nativity set I made for Cai for Christmas.

I wanted to have a set that was safe for Cai to play with and that we could set up in his room every Christmas.

 I won't be letting him play with it this year, at least not with complete freedom, but next year, I hope to be able to.

 When we have more little ones, Lord willing, I want each of them to have their own little set to keep in their rooms.

I bought two diy kits from  Hobby Lobby. The first was blank wooden dolls that I painted myself.

The second was a foam build your own stable with a star and square black manger. It came with the foam stable in six pieces, the star and its stick, and three already made peg figurines.

I gave Cai the figurines to pla with, well, Mary and Joseph; Jesus is a bit too small.

Merry Christmas!

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.

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!