An exciting experiment is in the works!

What a find!  I can hardly believe it.

My son likes to take lots and lots of baths.  He loves to play with colors too, and he likes to use different colors of soaps and shampoos when he takes a bath.  We limit him to two color choices per bath.

Sorry this is so blurry. I guess I just got excited!

One of his favorite outings is the grocery store.  Our pharmacy is located in the grocery store and it works like this:  My son goes to the pharmacy window and asks for his medicine.  Even though everyone there knows him, they ask for his name and birthdate, and he answers their questions and signs the forms, and then he sometimes chats and makes small talk.  (!!!)

When he does a great job, he gets the built-in reward of picking out his own salad and drink, and browsing through the soap.  They have a huge selection of shampoos and soaps and body washes in every imaginable color and for every special condition.  This cracks me up because our usual condition is “dirty” and so we are looking for soap to make us “clean,” and all of them do that.  Of course, there are different price points.  We stick to the cheap ones.

I don’t know why I never noticed this before, but with all these options, there is one kind of shampoo that (presumably) would be for almost everyone.

“Normal” shampoo.

Normal?  Sure, why not?  It’s 79 cents, and it’s orange.  I’ve never been normal before.  I’ll try it out and let you know how it goes.

Yummy!

Really, it tasted way better than it looked.

My daughter has been vegetarian for years (since she was six) and has recently decided to upgrade to vegan.  She doesn’t like vegetables, so this may be a bit of a challenge for her.  She’s pretty amazing though.  She says it will be good for the animals and good for her too.  We’ve been frequenting the grocery store salad bar so that she can try bits of new veggies without committing to a whole serving.  Of course, her main concern was not veggies, but pizza and chocolate.  She is thirteen, after all!

We found a recipe for vegan chocolate at CCK.  We tried it, and it was awesome.  So we made up some cookies.  Yes, that blob up there is a dozen cookies.  We should have stayed with Katie for the whole deal, but following directions doesn’t exactly fit our lifestyle.

The cookie recipe was my idea, and not a very smart one.  Lots of times, we’ve made cookies and just skipped the eggs (or subbed a dribble of coffee or water or whatever) but we had a little extra garbanzo bean juice and decided to dump that in.  The dough was incredible, but it baked up a little funny-looking.  🙂  Next time, we’ll just eat the dough!

What to do about cut sewing patterns

This is just one box!

Did you ever pick up a used pattern and get ready to sew and find out that there is one lousy piece missing?  Sometimes it’s just a patch pocket and you can improvise, but sometimes it’s something more important.  Nobody likes that, so most shoppers like to buy uncut patterns. Cut patterns are hard to sell because a seller needs to count all the pieces first to make sure they are all there.  Counting means unfolding and re-folding and maybe getting out the iron…   And selling patterns on most marketplaces can have high overhead costs (listing fees, final value fees, shipping expenses), which is why many pattern sellers don’t even list them at all unless they can get a minimum price.

People don’t mind buying cut patterns if they are cheap enough to offset the risk of the pattern missing a piece.  But they want to be able to search for the pattern they want, not to buy a whole box of patterns (and pay to ship all that) to get the one pattern they are looking for.

I don’t know how I managed to acquire so many cut patterns, but they are taking over!  Sometimes I buy them by accident. I think they are uncut but when I get them home to take a better look, I find that they are not.  Sometimes I buy a big box of patterns and some of them are cut and some of them are not. Sometimes people just give them to me because they don’t know what to do with them.  I can’t just throw them away, but I can’t hoard them either!

I’ve opened another store (I know, I know…) on eCRATER because the only fees are the ones charged by my payment processor.  (I use Stripe, in case you want to know.)  I can list all I want, and I can send listings to Google and Pinterest.  If you follow my “Pattern Pieces” board on Pinterest, you will see patterns as I add them.

I am charging 50 cents a pattern to cover my payment processing costs.  $3.00 covers shipping in the USA with tracking and an envelope.  I’ve got it set up to combine shipping costs.  🙂  I hope to break even on the cut patterns, and to make sewists happy.  Plus, this finally gave me the kick in the rear that I needed to open my own web store.

I’ll be moving some other merchandise over there too at discounted prices.  I expect most of my customers to be people who already know me from my other stores, bargain shoppers, and other pattern sellers looking for missing pieces.

Here’s a screenshot:

I’ll keep adding patterns and other stuff as I go along.

On a housekeeping note, I have changed my password so that Lucky can’t hijack my blog again.  And again.  And again.  Jeepers, that duck!