I don't have the wherewithall to double-post things, so I'm giving you a link to my new Pinterest board for Crafty and DIY things I'm loving:
http://pinterest.com/peacelovemath/craft-love/
If you haven't heard of Pinterest, you should check it out! It's a great way to collect things you're digging as you surf the web; you can sort it into categories but still see everything in one place if you want to, which is awesome for discovering common themes among visuals you love, or just the general awesomeness of seeing all your recent interests at once! I don't normally jump on the bandwagon like this, but Pinterest feels a need I have thought about and wished for often in the past - a place to easily collect links to stuff that sparks my interest, keep them all in one place where they're easy to see and find later, and the icing on the cake is, it's visually attractive too! I really love it.
You still have to ask for an invite and wait a couple of weeks for it, or if you know me I can invite you. I invited my mom yesterday, and now she's all signed up and busy collecting images that inspire her for a planned bathroom makeover!
Enjoy, and let me know what you think!
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Greencraft
I have a few more pairs of crochet baby shoes in the works, including a finished pair for my coworker's twin girls arriving in May:
The shoes all have a main body color and a secondary color for the trim/inside, so it made me super happy to have the perfect opportunity to make two inverse pairs for the twins - one is purple with pink trim, and the other is pink with purple trim!
My scarf/shrug has been put on hold as I work on another few pairs of shoes plus a soft rattle toy that is going to be super cool for grabby baby hands. More on that in a couple of weeks.
My other biggest craft-related triumph of late is the pot hangers I made last night! I kept seeing them for sale in garden shops and thinking, I could make that! So I took a close look at how they were knotted, then used some clothesline we already have, and made my own! They were quite easy, and I felt so elated when I finished, because I saw something I liked in a store, and made a just-as-good-if-not-better version for myself using nothing but materials I already owned, so it cost me $0.00! [pics of those coming soon, it was too dark out when I finished last night.]
All my other creative energy of late has been going into garden planning, which will turn into a whole lot of garden DOing as soon as it's not pouring down rain any time I'm at home when it's light outside!
My other biggest craft-related triumph of late is the pot hangers I made last night! I kept seeing them for sale in garden shops and thinking, I could make that! So I took a close look at how they were knotted, then used some clothesline we already have, and made my own! They were quite easy, and I felt so elated when I finished, because I saw something I liked in a store, and made a just-as-good-if-not-better version for myself using nothing but materials I already owned, so it cost me $0.00! [pics of those coming soon, it was too dark out when I finished last night.]
All my other creative energy of late has been going into garden planning, which will turn into a whole lot of garden DOing as soon as it's not pouring down rain any time I'm at home when it's light outside!
Thursday, March 24, 2011
New start!
Beginning with the previous post, I am going to start posting both my personal craft projects and links to projects I want to tackle on this blog! I still haven't managed to make anything to post for sale on my Etsy store, so hopefully this will be a stepping stone to that!
Below I posted a great list of crochet flower patterns that I can't wait to try!
I'm also currently working on my own variation of this scarf pattern from Lion Brand, which I'm making with a dusty purple mercerized worsted weight cotton. I'm using that pattern but making a large rectangular scarf (instead of the crescent-shaped shawl the pattern makes), and I plan to finish it off with a knitted-on I-cord and tiny buttons all around the edge, which will be decorative, but also let me button it into a shrug or a poncho! Should be pretty cool.
This is the first project I've started for myself in quite a long time, and it's going to take a while to finish, so I'm trying really hard to do at least a little bit every day, because it would be nice to finish while it's still spring. But I made it cotton so it will be fair game to wear on a cool Summer evening as well. And won't it look nice with one of those crochet flowers pinned to it?
I also made 2 red potholders for Hannah last week, to match her other kitchen items she got to furnish her new apartment!
Here's all my knit and crochet pictures on facebook!
Below I posted a great list of crochet flower patterns that I can't wait to try!
I'm also currently working on my own variation of this scarf pattern from Lion Brand, which I'm making with a dusty purple mercerized worsted weight cotton. I'm using that pattern but making a large rectangular scarf (instead of the crescent-shaped shawl the pattern makes), and I plan to finish it off with a knitted-on I-cord and tiny buttons all around the edge, which will be decorative, but also let me button it into a shrug or a poncho! Should be pretty cool.
This is the first project I've started for myself in quite a long time, and it's going to take a while to finish, so I'm trying really hard to do at least a little bit every day, because it would be nice to finish while it's still spring. But I made it cotton so it will be fair game to wear on a cool Summer evening as well. And won't it look nice with one of those crochet flowers pinned to it?
I also made 2 red potholders for Hannah last week, to match her other kitchen items she got to furnish her new apartment!
Here's all my knit and crochet pictures on facebook!
Crochet Flowers!
Here's a list of great crochet flower patterns! I'll be making some cute embellishments for upcoming gifts, hopefully for Easter baskets!
http://www.skiptomylou.org/2011/02/15/10-beautiful-ways-to-crochet-a-flower/
http://www.skiptomylou.org/2011/02/15/10-beautiful-ways-to-crochet-a-flower/
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Shop Craft Day!
I created an Etsy shop for someday selling kits for crafts to do at home, and I'll also sell my own crafts if I ever feel like it. Someday.
Here:
http://craftdayshop.etsy.com/
In the mean time, check out Kelly P's Etsy shop and buy yourself a pair of earrings or something!
Here:
http://craftdayshop.etsy.com/
In the mean time, check out Kelly P's Etsy shop and buy yourself a pair of earrings or something!
Friday, May 22, 2009
www.craft-day.com
You can now find this blog at www.craft-day.com! I didn't think to try the address with a hyphen until yesterday, and it was available! If the woman who owns www.craftday.com does ever get back to me, I'll just buy that too, but I don't mind the hyphen.
Next big projects are...duh...closing on our house, and then spending about two solid weeks de-wallpapering, painting, moving carpet around, and moving. After that I really want to work on Paul about getting a dog later in the summer. But the rest of my crafty energy is going to go towards knitting baby things at least through the first half of July, and then maybe I'll start taking the next steps with this little inkling of a business venture.
Next big projects are...duh...closing on our house, and then spending about two solid weeks de-wallpapering, painting, moving carpet around, and moving. After that I really want to work on Paul about getting a dog later in the summer. But the rest of my crafty energy is going to go towards knitting baby things at least through the first half of July, and then maybe I'll start taking the next steps with this little inkling of a business venture.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Slow but steady?
After my initial burst of enthusiasm that spawned this blog and my first post, I really neglected this whole idea. But recently it's started popping up in my mind again, persistently, so hopefully I will find the energy to make it go somewhere soon.
I never did get together with Aunt Jute to put together a party for Greer and her friends. I would really like to do that, but probably not until at least July once we're (hopefully) all moved into our new house.
Beyond that, I've been thinking a lot about the order of things. How do I even get this ball rolling? It's one thing to talk about it on here, or even to actually throw a party for my cousin, but one event and a couple of blog posts does not a business make. What do I need to do to make this OFFICIAL? To make it actually HAPPEN?
To that end, I've had some additional ideas to expand the scope of the business, and I think having more to offer makes it more viable. For instance, if I am going to actually start an official business, I want it to be socially responsible, so I've had a couple of ideas that I think would both grow the business and give back to the community. More on this later.
I think the first thing I need to do is write a business plan. The ideas I've been having lately make me feel like I might actually be ready to do this, and writing one would itself help me to flesh it out in my mind. I think that's thing # 1 to do.
The next thing I think I need to do is to compile a binder of craft options. A brief write-up of individual actual crafts that I could teach people. Once I've made a preliminary pass of everything I can think of, I would go back through and add detail to each one: what supplies are needed, how much they approximately cost, basic instructions for the craft, age group it's appropriate for, approximate time it takes to do. Plus I'm sure once I write down ten or twenty discrete crafts, I'll keep thinking of (and inventing) more and more to add to the porfolio. An eventual augmentation of this binder will be pictures of actual finished crafts, and also a box of physical examples where that's feasable.
I think once I've done the business plan and gotten started on the porfolio, at that point I would like to see about making it official. I think a sole proprietorship would make the most sense to begin with, so I'd like to get one (however I do that), and open a small bank account to keep that separate, since at this point if I actually did anything I would have to pay taxes on it.
This is where I get stuck. At first glance it seems simple enough to start finding a few people who will hire me to throw a party, but what about legal considerations? It's no big deal to go to my Aunt's house - she's not going to sue me, and I visit her house all the time anyway - but what about someone else's house? Their kids? What if I'm doing a craft involving scissors, and some kid cuts himself on the scissors I've provided while under my supervision? On a different note, how does it work that I'm buying craft supplies and then effectively selling them to someone else? And what about instructions and patterns for certain types of crafts, like knitting: do I need to make sure everything is my own, or is it OK to use a pattern from the internet? If I want to use and teach from a pre-existing pattern, can I get the rights to it? How do I do that? How do I protect myself, my business, and my clients from legal issues resulting from copyright infringement or actual physical harm? What else is there that I haven't even thought about yet? It's more than a little overwhelming.
There are plenty of people out there who run, say, a hair salon out of their houses and never officially have a business. I don't want to do that. I want to be official. I heard a story on NPR a while back, late last summer maybe, about incorporating social and environmental responsibility right into your business plan, and I think there was actually some official part to it. Like not a non-profit organization; a regular for-profit business, but with something extra that made it officially responsible for fulfilling its goals to also give back to the community and to be environmentally friendly. I think I want to do that, if in fact it does exist.
Which brings me back to some of my additional ideas that I mentioned before.
Before we get to the social responsibility part, I thought of how I could actually sell a product, instead of only offering my services. At a Craft Day Party, you would of course be paying for my services as a leader and teacher, but you'd also be paying for all the supplies you need to do the craft. One big benefit, I think, is that you then aren't paying for extra material that you don't need: I'll supply all the re-usable stuff that you would otherwise have to buy, and when you're done you won't be left with the other nine-tenths of a bottle of fabric paint, say, that you don't need but had to buy to get the eighth of an ounce you needed.
Expanding on that, what if you don't have the supplies for the entire craft, but you don't actually need me to teach, or to supply simple things like scissors? Well then you can pick a craft out of my catalog (the one I made for myself in step two), and if you're having ten kids over for your son's birthday party, then you just order ten kits from me! I wouldn't want to get into the business of renting things like nice scissors and glue, so the kits would assume that you had your own scissors, but for the rest you would specify what materials you needed, and that's what I'd put in the kit, in the exact amounts you need! So you still get the benefit of having very little waste, and it's a cheaper option than hiring me to come lead the party for you.
The kits would also be a great thing to get for your kids for, say, a long car trip, or to save up in case of a rainy summer afternoon. In addition to specific craft kits, I could create a more generic Car Kit, and you could just order a couple a few weeks before you leave for your trip to the beach. I could have Car Kits one through five, with different combinations of crafts, so when you get a second one for the return trip it's not a repeat. Or if you need another one for a future vacation, the kids won't be bored because it's just the same thing again. Full disclosure: I totally got the Car Kit idea from a family friend of ours, Betsy S. Or was it Barb E?
So anyway, on to the community aspect: I could do a fund raiser where you'd buy a craft kit, but instead of for yourself, it would go to, say, the children's cancer ward at Hershey Hospital. It could also be a fund raiser for another organization, where you'd sell the craft kits, and a percentage of the price would go to that organization, such as Relay for Life.
One other community idea I had was to do an open house. It would be really neat if I could get a community center to donate an afternoon's use of their space, and then advertise and invite families to bring their kids to do a few specific crafts, and take a free will offering to cover expenses. Or maybe sign people up for approximately twice the cost to cover expenses, and then if I got 20 people to sign up, there would then be room for 20 other people to come at no charge, kind of like the One Laptop per Child thing. Hopefully I could find another organization to hook up with, like Big Brothers/Big Sisters or something. Wouldn't that be neat?
As far as environmental responsibility goes, I haven't quite figured that out yet. I'll definitely make sure that I'm creating as little waste as possible, and I actually thing my business model already does that: since you're using my supplies, and I'm keeping everything you don't use or need, I'll actually use the rest of that bottle of paint or bag of beads at the next party or in the next craft kit, instead of it sitting in your closet for five years until you get ambitious with your cleaning and end up throwing it out. I also hope to think of some crafts that I can do with household materials that would otherwise be thrown away. And of course I will recycle any scrap materials from a party, either by re-using them in the future or by taking them to the proper facility.
I think if I can get this ball rolling, I can probably do it without spending much of my own money, which is another thing that makes this idea seem possible. Hopefully I would be able to grow into everything I want to do, and for the forseeable future I could do it out of my house and in addition to my tantalizingly lucrative full-time job. If, and I can barely imagine it at this point, the whole thing were to grow to the point that it could support having a storefront (with a big room for crafting events!), it would also have to be making enough money to let me quit my job and work at it full-time. Maybe, just maybe, if Paul has a successful career as an engineer, then I could do this full-time and thus also be able to be at home with our kids. That would certainly be an almost unimaginably perfect scenario.
Right now I have so much to plan and do to move into our new house, and in addition to that I have a lot that I want to knit and crochet for all of my child-bearing friends. So hopefully I can gather more information over the next few months, and maybe in July or August I'll have started on steps one and two, and just maybe, I'll be ready to make myself an official sole proprietorship.
Oh, one last thing: I came up with a logo. Which leads to another legal question: how do I claim the name Craft Day, and how do I register my logo? Are those things expensive to do? Anyway, I'm hoping to make a good draft and scan it in sometime in the not-too-distant future, and then I'll make it the heading for this blog, instead of just the text "Craft Day." I'm really excited about the logo, both because I like it so much, and because it really lends itself to some google-esque variations, like for different holidays and seasons. Just wait.
Ideas, tips, thoughts, encouragement, and answers to any questions posed in this post are most welcome in the comments section or by e-mail to craft.day@gmail.com!
Here's hoping.
I never did get together with Aunt Jute to put together a party for Greer and her friends. I would really like to do that, but probably not until at least July once we're (hopefully) all moved into our new house.
Beyond that, I've been thinking a lot about the order of things. How do I even get this ball rolling? It's one thing to talk about it on here, or even to actually throw a party for my cousin, but one event and a couple of blog posts does not a business make. What do I need to do to make this OFFICIAL? To make it actually HAPPEN?
To that end, I've had some additional ideas to expand the scope of the business, and I think having more to offer makes it more viable. For instance, if I am going to actually start an official business, I want it to be socially responsible, so I've had a couple of ideas that I think would both grow the business and give back to the community. More on this later.
I think the first thing I need to do is write a business plan. The ideas I've been having lately make me feel like I might actually be ready to do this, and writing one would itself help me to flesh it out in my mind. I think that's thing # 1 to do.
The next thing I think I need to do is to compile a binder of craft options. A brief write-up of individual actual crafts that I could teach people. Once I've made a preliminary pass of everything I can think of, I would go back through and add detail to each one: what supplies are needed, how much they approximately cost, basic instructions for the craft, age group it's appropriate for, approximate time it takes to do. Plus I'm sure once I write down ten or twenty discrete crafts, I'll keep thinking of (and inventing) more and more to add to the porfolio. An eventual augmentation of this binder will be pictures of actual finished crafts, and also a box of physical examples where that's feasable.
I think once I've done the business plan and gotten started on the porfolio, at that point I would like to see about making it official. I think a sole proprietorship would make the most sense to begin with, so I'd like to get one (however I do that), and open a small bank account to keep that separate, since at this point if I actually did anything I would have to pay taxes on it.
This is where I get stuck. At first glance it seems simple enough to start finding a few people who will hire me to throw a party, but what about legal considerations? It's no big deal to go to my Aunt's house - she's not going to sue me, and I visit her house all the time anyway - but what about someone else's house? Their kids? What if I'm doing a craft involving scissors, and some kid cuts himself on the scissors I've provided while under my supervision? On a different note, how does it work that I'm buying craft supplies and then effectively selling them to someone else? And what about instructions and patterns for certain types of crafts, like knitting: do I need to make sure everything is my own, or is it OK to use a pattern from the internet? If I want to use and teach from a pre-existing pattern, can I get the rights to it? How do I do that? How do I protect myself, my business, and my clients from legal issues resulting from copyright infringement or actual physical harm? What else is there that I haven't even thought about yet? It's more than a little overwhelming.
There are plenty of people out there who run, say, a hair salon out of their houses and never officially have a business. I don't want to do that. I want to be official. I heard a story on NPR a while back, late last summer maybe, about incorporating social and environmental responsibility right into your business plan, and I think there was actually some official part to it. Like not a non-profit organization; a regular for-profit business, but with something extra that made it officially responsible for fulfilling its goals to also give back to the community and to be environmentally friendly. I think I want to do that, if in fact it does exist.
Which brings me back to some of my additional ideas that I mentioned before.
Before we get to the social responsibility part, I thought of how I could actually sell a product, instead of only offering my services. At a Craft Day Party, you would of course be paying for my services as a leader and teacher, but you'd also be paying for all the supplies you need to do the craft. One big benefit, I think, is that you then aren't paying for extra material that you don't need: I'll supply all the re-usable stuff that you would otherwise have to buy, and when you're done you won't be left with the other nine-tenths of a bottle of fabric paint, say, that you don't need but had to buy to get the eighth of an ounce you needed.
Expanding on that, what if you don't have the supplies for the entire craft, but you don't actually need me to teach, or to supply simple things like scissors? Well then you can pick a craft out of my catalog (the one I made for myself in step two), and if you're having ten kids over for your son's birthday party, then you just order ten kits from me! I wouldn't want to get into the business of renting things like nice scissors and glue, so the kits would assume that you had your own scissors, but for the rest you would specify what materials you needed, and that's what I'd put in the kit, in the exact amounts you need! So you still get the benefit of having very little waste, and it's a cheaper option than hiring me to come lead the party for you.
The kits would also be a great thing to get for your kids for, say, a long car trip, or to save up in case of a rainy summer afternoon. In addition to specific craft kits, I could create a more generic Car Kit, and you could just order a couple a few weeks before you leave for your trip to the beach. I could have Car Kits one through five, with different combinations of crafts, so when you get a second one for the return trip it's not a repeat. Or if you need another one for a future vacation, the kids won't be bored because it's just the same thing again. Full disclosure: I totally got the Car Kit idea from a family friend of ours, Betsy S. Or was it Barb E?
So anyway, on to the community aspect: I could do a fund raiser where you'd buy a craft kit, but instead of for yourself, it would go to, say, the children's cancer ward at Hershey Hospital. It could also be a fund raiser for another organization, where you'd sell the craft kits, and a percentage of the price would go to that organization, such as Relay for Life.
One other community idea I had was to do an open house. It would be really neat if I could get a community center to donate an afternoon's use of their space, and then advertise and invite families to bring their kids to do a few specific crafts, and take a free will offering to cover expenses. Or maybe sign people up for approximately twice the cost to cover expenses, and then if I got 20 people to sign up, there would then be room for 20 other people to come at no charge, kind of like the One Laptop per Child thing. Hopefully I could find another organization to hook up with, like Big Brothers/Big Sisters or something. Wouldn't that be neat?
As far as environmental responsibility goes, I haven't quite figured that out yet. I'll definitely make sure that I'm creating as little waste as possible, and I actually thing my business model already does that: since you're using my supplies, and I'm keeping everything you don't use or need, I'll actually use the rest of that bottle of paint or bag of beads at the next party or in the next craft kit, instead of it sitting in your closet for five years until you get ambitious with your cleaning and end up throwing it out. I also hope to think of some crafts that I can do with household materials that would otherwise be thrown away. And of course I will recycle any scrap materials from a party, either by re-using them in the future or by taking them to the proper facility.
I think if I can get this ball rolling, I can probably do it without spending much of my own money, which is another thing that makes this idea seem possible. Hopefully I would be able to grow into everything I want to do, and for the forseeable future I could do it out of my house and in addition to my tantalizingly lucrative full-time job. If, and I can barely imagine it at this point, the whole thing were to grow to the point that it could support having a storefront (with a big room for crafting events!), it would also have to be making enough money to let me quit my job and work at it full-time. Maybe, just maybe, if Paul has a successful career as an engineer, then I could do this full-time and thus also be able to be at home with our kids. That would certainly be an almost unimaginably perfect scenario.
Right now I have so much to plan and do to move into our new house, and in addition to that I have a lot that I want to knit and crochet for all of my child-bearing friends. So hopefully I can gather more information over the next few months, and maybe in July or August I'll have started on steps one and two, and just maybe, I'll be ready to make myself an official sole proprietorship.
Oh, one last thing: I came up with a logo. Which leads to another legal question: how do I claim the name Craft Day, and how do I register my logo? Are those things expensive to do? Anyway, I'm hoping to make a good draft and scan it in sometime in the not-too-distant future, and then I'll make it the heading for this blog, instead of just the text "Craft Day." I'm really excited about the logo, both because I like it so much, and because it really lends itself to some google-esque variations, like for different holidays and seasons. Just wait.
Ideas, tips, thoughts, encouragement, and answers to any questions posed in this post are most welcome in the comments section or by e-mail to craft.day@gmail.com!
Here's hoping.
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Welcome to Craft Day
Hello all,
Welcome to my little business venture, Craft Day.
The idea is to take everything I loved about being the Crafts Director at Camp Nawakwa, expand it to all my favorite arts and crafts, and make it into a business.
I'm not selling stuff I make, although if there is ever a point in my life that I have time to finish enough projects that I have EXTRAS to sell, that would be cool. No, what I'm planning is to hire myself out for parties, where I will teach everyone how to do a craft or three that they have selected for their party.
I envision age groups from kindergarten all the way through adults: maybe you and your girlfriends have been eyeing up all those cool hand-made scarves and wishing that you had learned how to knit when you were a kid - well, hire me for the afternoon, tell all your friends to bring a snack to share, and have a Craft Day party! I will bring all the supplies needed to teach you and your friends to knit. Or more traditionally, instead of hiring a clown or a magician for your second-grader's next birthday party, hire me! I will bring a big table, tarp for the floor, and ALL the supplies to make whatever you want: seed bead jewelry, hemp jewelry, friendship bracelets, sculpey clay figures, tie-dye t-shirts, iron-transfer t-shirts, puff-paint hats, origami, buttons/pins, hair accessories, and other things that I'm still thinking up.
In addition to offering all materials, supplies, and clean-up, I also plan to take pictures once the kids are working, and upload those pictures both to this site as promotional material, and to Craft Day's Picasa so that parents can order prints. I might even lug my computer around with me and just burn the pictures right to a CD for them.
I don't yet own a big folding table, chairs, tarps, or nice craft supplies like a button machine, craft pliers, a big bead organizer, etc. but I am hoping to start with some small business first where I can just buy supplies for those first few parties so that I can get a feel for my profit margin and what it actually takes for me to do a party.
So tell your friends! I am up for anything, and since I'm just starting out my prices are totally negotiable. For my first few clients, I'd like to discuss what they're looking for, go out and estimate a price, and then discuss with them what they are willing to pay. This will help me figure out how to advertise my pricing in the future, and I will remain open to feedback via e-mail and comments on this blog!
Thanks for reading, and I hope to hear from you soon!
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