Tuesday, November 3, 2015

Exhibition and Sale

On Thursday kids school sent a circular saying they need to bring handmade items for exhibition on Saturday. So I asked my girl what she wants to take and she told me she wants to make a house! Told her we'd have to make something which people would be interested in buying and so we took a piece of paper and started writing down the things we wish to make. The list went something like this:
1) Hair clips / bands
2) Pouches
3) Fabric dolls (small size)
4) Cookies
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We just had a day to make whatever we wanted to, so I told her we'd start off with the clips since they are the easiest to make plus even if we don't manage to finish off the rest we'd have something to sell. So we made a few felt flowers and attached the leaves on and put that on hair clips. Pretty soon we ran out of hair clips and hot glue and it was night time already - too late to go out and buy. I thought I'd get the a label printed from Printo to put on the outer cover. It would be like selling our own brand of products :-).

The next day, i.e. Friday I cut different fabrics out to make the pouches, put the matching zips together and got sewing. Made 3 pouches by 3 PM. Then I went out to get hot glue, hair clips etc. The traffic was horrendous. Horrendous traffic is synonymous with Bangalore, even so, some days are far worse than others. I went to HSR to source zip as well. Got home by 6 PM and go back to making more flowers. In total we made 18 pairs of flowers in Red, Rose, Purple, Yellow and White. Then I went back to completing the two more pouches. Sewing happened only after kids were put to bed, at around 8:30 PM. I had not yet made the cookie batter.

Once dinner was done and kids went to bed I got the cookie batter ready and started baking 6 cookies per batch. The baking tray I have now can accommodate only 6 cookies per batch ;-) and my oven is not a huge one either. While the cookies were baking I started sewing the remaining pouches. All prep work was done, fabric outer and lining was cut and interfacing was ironed on, zip ready for installation etc). With the batter I made I could make 23 large cookies. I then waited for them to cool down. In the meantime, I decided to pack away the slides. I put them in pairs based on colour.

Next step: Packing the cookies. I made little pouch for each cookie with the butter paper and covered it with the Pink Paper I had got from Itsy Bitsy and tied the bakers twine around each cookie. Felt good seeing the end result. And the while I kept thinking I should take pictures... and guess what, I forgot or rather ran out of time. Once the cookies were packed, I got back to sewing the very last pouch. Then I had an idea - yes I get these at the very last moment usually! - I decided to make little handmade bags to give away the pouches. I used the baby pink sheets I had got and instead of gluing the sheet, used the masking tape on the inside to keep the sides of the bag together. Terrible idea, but since I was running out of time, thought I'll just do it this way this time...

Was up till 3:00 AM finishing up all the last minute work. The next day we all went to school and set up the stalls and pouches got sold pretty soon. And the slides as well. Cookies took time to sell because it was packed in butter paper and the outer cover, no one could see the cookies. But we did sell a fair amount. Of the 23 I had baked, all got sold except 5 or 6. We gave those away to the kiddos around the hall. And of the 18, 4 slides were not sold. Those I gave away to my girl's classmates...
All in all I felt great making and selling these.

This is the only picture I could find of my wares. This was after I sold the first two pouches and first 5 pairs of clips / hairbands were sold.


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