Sunday - The Day After

Let me begin this evening by saying, once again, I LOVE MY CUSTOMERS! I posted earlier today about the poor candle that would not be a project this year because I did not like it. One of my customers stopped by this evening to pick up her order, and she thought if I just did all stars on the candle (read: lose the tree), it would be fine. So I might! I'll work on that this week and see if I can make it happen.

I actually got some of the stuff done today as planned. Does it count if you check things off your To Do list, but you also add more stuff to the bottom? I thought so ....

Yesterday was my last craft show of the year, so I took everything to my storage unit and unloaded it this morning. The door to my storage unit barely closed, I kid you not! This is one of those "added to the list" tasks for myself this Winter - give away some of that 'stuff' I have in there!

Once the car was emptied out, I went home and loaded it up again with all the flattened-for-recycling SU boxes and the rest of my massive collection of recycling stuff, including five empty kitty-litter containers. I had been using them as weights for my tent (which I no longer own), and finally, I will be rid of them! So off I went to the recycling center, only to find it was closed. CLOSED! Grrrrr .... I turned around and came back home. Bah! I'll try again next weekend. For now, my car is one big recycling bin. I hope the neighbors don't report me or anything ...

Working backwards, here, Saturday's show went pretty well. If the whole day had gone like the first 2 hours, I could have retired! Well, maybe not, but it would have been really, really nice. Here's the booth set-up du jour, which was pretty much like my last show.

I left the photo un-cropped so you can get the feel for the size of the gym we were in. Oh, and look - card racks with no cards ... I took care of that after I took the photo. The right grid wall holds all of my gift packs.

Here's the other side of the booth with all my City Cards and my pathetic Christmas tree. (You can see some of the GORgeous wooden items for sale next to me.) For the first time, I sold something I thought would not sell - those ribbon bookmarks! My first customer bought eight of them for her book club! Woo-hoo! I also sold some of the City Cards I made last week for the specific towns of this particular show.

I was also surprised by what did not sell. I sold more single Holiday cards than I thought I would, but I sold only one box of cards. No gift card boxes sold at all. Bummer. But all is not lost - they will be added to my online store here shortly.

[Sudden change of subject ... just work with me here ... we're now back to today ...] Then it was time to make the buckeyes. I only did one batch today, which was just about right, given everything else I had planned to accomplish. Here's an out-of-focus shot (sorry) of the assembly line process:

From left to right, we have: extra bags of milk chocolate chips; a BIG bowl of peanut butter + sugar + butter mix; a plate full of already-rolled-up balls of the stuff; a double-boiler with melted chocolate chips + some paraffin; and finally, a cookie sheet with wax paper and the beginnings of chocolate-covered balls of goodness.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, this is as wide as my kitchen is. You can see the side of the fridge to the right (it is black on the side), and you can also see where I stopped painting a few years back. The green paint is the newer color. To the left of those bags of chocolate chips is about 1 1/2 feet before you hit the left wall. See - teeny, tiny.

Remember when I said you'd need some empty table space to allow the dipped buckeyes to cool? Well here it is: a workshop table that straddles all the pantry overflow stacked up on my Kitchen floor. [Please pay no attention to those silly ant traps. They have done their duty and will be thrown away momentarily...]

No, those squash(es) to the right are not part of the process. They had to be moved off the counter to make room for the cookie sheet. And as I type this, the pumpkin is in the oven - cooked and cooling. It is destined to be pumpkin cake later this week.

And THEN, I uploaded about 20+ cards to my online store. Woo-hoo! Um, at this rate, I'll be done uploading them by next April, when I'll need to prepare for my May farmers markets. Baby steps ... baby steps.

Now I need to go finish some laundry so I can go to work tomorrow. I'll be back later this week with an update on that candle, plus now that the buckeyes are finished, I'll need to design a bag topper so I can give them to the lucky workshop attendees next weekend.

Thanks for stopping by!

I Love My Customers!!!

Today at my workshops we made this box-in-a-bag using Baja Breeze DS paper and Baja Breeze card stock. Each person got one of a variety of different sheets of the two-sided paper, and each person made their own decision about which was the outside of the box, and how to decorate it. I like to leave that up to them when I can, so there is an element of creativity on their part. A few of my customers do not like to think too hard on weekends (I am so in agreement sometimes!), but most people embrace the freedom to step out of the suggested design of a project and go off on their own.

My customers amaze me with some of the ideas they come up with to change things around. You can almost see the wheels spinning. One of my workshop rules is: "if you do it differently, you must show everyone else what you did." I have yet to have anyone be too embarrassed to do that, plus some people decide to do it her way instead of my suggested way. I am okay with that! In fact, sometimes I slap myself in the forehead wondering why I was not that smart. See, we all learn from each other.

So this afternoon, while building the box-in-a-bag, one of my customers pondered aloud, "Wow, I'll bet this would look cool made out of vellum with a candle inside." Everyone immediately stopped dead in their tracks, stamps suspended mid-air, agape at the marvelous thought of home-made luminaries. I gave her full credit for the idea, and she would like to retire off the residuals. Yeah, right.

So after they all left, I made one. Yep, in about 5 minutes. Check it out:

Please excuse the poor quality of the photo. The bag is made out of SU card stock vellum (much heavier than paper vellum). The base and scallop border are made from SU Shimmer White card stock. Before I stuck the vellum to the base, I used a snowflake stamp inked with glue from a glue pad, then I dumped SU Dazzling Diamonds glitter on it. I left the top unadorned to allow more air for the flame, and to reduce the chance I'd burn my condo to the ground.

I have not lurked lately on any blogs or SCS, so I have not seen this done before, but I will say this was my cutomer's idea today, and not my own. I think it is pure genius!

Okay, gotto go clean up so I can go to the Day Job tomorrow and be ready for my Monday evening session. Thanks for stopping by!