Month: July 2015
Yummy!

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

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!