Yep, I'm spamming you. I promise I won't do it often though ;) I've finally listed my hats on Etsy though! If you know anyone who might be interested in buying a hat, I have a coupon code that's valid through April 15 for 10% off. Use GRANDREOPEN at the checkout. Of course if you know someone who's local they can email me at beansproutcreations@gmail.com for custom pricing and to arrange a pickup.
As I am sure most of you are aware, today was my birthday. Today marks the beginning of the last year of my twenties. Yikes! I'm not bothered by it (yet), but it will be weird to officially move out of the "young mom" category that I've been in since I was 17.
Anyway, we started out the day by sleeping in. Yay! Then I ditched dropped the small ones off with Grandma and headed to lunch at Scratch with my sis-in-law. We had reservations, and it's a good thing too. We were the only ones in the restaurant for quite a while! I decided to be adventurous and get the Fettuccine with duck sausage.
It was super tasty! It was also a ton of food. Like two full meals worth. I think that has helped convince my husband to go there. Almost. I also got a gigantic bowl of huckleberry ice cream =)
After that we head to the salon to get my hair cut. I was in desperate need of a hair cut. I think that it's been somewhere between 18 months to 2 years since I'd last cut my hair. I didn't do anything super drastic, just a trim. Daniel didn't even notice. In his defense though, I don't often wear my hair down ;) I also got a pedicure. The second one of my life lol. Wow, that's sad...I haven't cut my hair in almost 2 years and I've only had 2 pedicures in my life. Oh, well.
The family and I went to a local frozen yogurt place. It was quite the experience. You walk in and there's a wall full of frozen yogurt dispensers. Although that's probably not what they're called, they probably have some fancy name. Anyway, there were probably 10 or so different flavors. The idea is, you grab a container, fill it up with as much frozen yogurt as you want...in as many flavors as you want...then you go to the counter and throw on a ton of toppings. Needless to say the kids had a blast!
While we were driving there, Matthias started shaking his cup that had a bunch of ice in it, Lydia started cracking up! As you may recall, she's not much for laughing. She's been laughing a bit more recently, probably to compete with this cutie who recently came to visit:
Sadly, by the time we got parked, she had slowed down a bit in her laughing, but I was able to get some on video. Of course I was trying to record it while sitting in the front seat, so it's a bit shaky and not centered. But you can hear her laugh at least. Well, when Lydia and Kelsi aren't giggling that is!
I have decided to go ahead and attempt to sell some fun little hats. I am going to do animal themed hats, I'll start with owls and eventually add things like cats, dogs, bears, monkeys and such. Now I just have some decisions to make, and as I am feeling rather indecisive today I am not sure what colors to do. Lydia is not being very helpful, so I'll just ask all you =) The yarns I have in my photo are (I'm almost embarrassed to say) just a small selection of what colors I have on hand. I was at least able to narrow it down to these colors though! Anyway, I'm thinking of offering 4-6 color options, which ones do you think would be best? Of course I took the photo with my phone, so the colors are a bit different in real life ;)
I also have to decide if I like the big nose or little nose. I know it looks as though the eyes on the two hats are different, but they're not. On the pink hat I just glued them on (I'm lazy like that) so they curl up a bit, but I can't do that on the ones I sell so the blue one has it's eyes stitched on making them lay flatter. So it's not the nose that makes them look different =)
I'm also thinking of making matching bibs similar to this one:
Yay or nay?
Ok, I don't think I have any other major decisions to make at the moment.
Ok, people, I need your feedback. As I'm sure most of you are aware, I do a lot of crocheting. I used to sell patterns that I designed, but I stopped because it got to be too much of a hassle. People expected me to be their personal tech support and crochet teacher. So I ended up spending more time in the "customer service" end then I did actually creating and selling. Not fun. A while ago I thought I would make and sell baby hats, but then I started reading up on all the laws regarding items made for children and decided that it was too much to keep track of and too much extra money I'd have to spend. But, I've been reading into them some more. Basically they say that any item intended for children under the age of 13 has to be tested for lead. Way expensive. As well, each item has to have a "tracking label" which is basically a tag telling where the item is made and what it's made of along with some kind of tracking info like a website. However, there appears to be items that are exempt from the lead testing, natural materials like cotton don't require testing unless it contains something metallic (like sparkles). So, that leaves just tracking labels that I'd have to worry about. Much more doable. But, here's the real problem: would anyone actually buy the stuff at the cost I'd have to charge? Take for example this hat:
Isn't she cute? Well, the cost in yarn (cotton, which is what I'd have to use to be exempt from lead testing. Well, I could use wool but cotton is washable) would only be about $3-5 depending on the size of hat. But I'd have to take into account the cost of labels, Etsy fees (which are crazy) and Paypal fees (which are rather high if you have a business account) and packaging material. Not to mention some profit to make it worth my while. So, basically I'd have to charge $20-25 plus shipping per hat. Of course I also have to consider the competition. There are tons of baby hats available on Etsy (over 3,ooo listings of owl hats for example), and I'd have to compete with people who don't care (or don't know) about the laws and make their items out of acrylic yarn and therefore can sell them much cheaper. So, what do you think? Worth it or no?
Kelsi has a new blog! She just started it today, and has been working hard choosing all the colors and putting beards on Lydia. They didn't stay. Go check it out and say "hi"! You'll have to request access to read it though =)
This was Kelsi's attempt to get Lydia to crawl. She's been inching her way around so Kelsi thought she'd help things out a bit! In case you can't see the video too well, Kelsi is hiding around the corner, pulling a cord that has a book at the end of it. It's amazing how quickly Lydia's learning new things though, so I'm sure she'll be cruising around faster than I'd like!
