Learning About Craft Businesses

A local homeschool group puts together a craft fair every fall. Anyone can sell at it, but it's particularly a chance for kids to experience a bit of entrepreneurship -- developing a product, organizing, pricing, advertising.

Annabeth and I decided to purchase a space to sell doll clothes, having discovered people would actually pay money for things we make.

 We made sure we had a lot of items at a lot of price points.  It was sort of crazy here in the weeks leading up to the craft fair, as a matter of fact, as we made clothes and shoes, figured out pricing, rehearsed efficiently setup of our display.  We also signed up with Pixie Faire to sell  items made with their patterns -- an easy process, but someone actually did ask if we had permission to sell items using these patterns, so hooray for being official.

Oddly enough, someone also asked if the clothing would actually fit the dolls.  We had, of course, tried each item on a doll at home as soon as we finished making it.  More to the point, though, we had 6 dolls standing or sitting at our booth wearing various outfits; and during the course of the day Annabeth had small girls help her decide on new outfits and participate in re-dressing the dolls.  

The oven mitts were popular.  We should've made a bunch to sell as Christmas ornaments.  Pattern from Lee & Pearl.

Annabeth wants to continue selling the overstock plus some new items.  The biggest barrier is letting people know what we have.  Attend more craft fairs?  Use social media?  She's been working on photographing various outfits. 

She has strong opinions on what what constitutes good doll photography.

I think she's starting to get the hang of it.

Our Silent Auction contribution -- American Girl doll clothes

Choir goes on a week-long trip every year to various locations in the U.S.  Thalia participated for all 4 years of high school, and visited places like Florida and Colorado.  Last year was Annabeth's first year to be eligible to go.  At first she was not impressed with the idea of going -- for one thing, they were going to the Dakotas, which sounded boring.  But Thalia insisted that she really should go, so off she went -- she loved the event, and she loved the Black Hills and Mount Rushmore.  

One of the fundraisers to pay for the bus is a Silent Auction.  It's held about the time of baseball's Opening Day, so it has a baseball theme, although all sorts of items are auctioned.  Over the years I've thought about what we could contribute to the auction, and finally decided that what it really needed was something that kids would be interested in.  We decided to go all-in and make it baseball themed.  Thus, American Girl baseball-themed outfits.

Annabeth and I worked on these together.  Most of the clothing patterns came from Pixie Faire, which has a wide selections of patterns for dolls.  Many of them were collected during the Freebie Fridays, which is when they offer one of the patterns for free.

The hat was made from a Lee & Pearl pattern.  Honestly, we think Lee & Pearl have the absolute best AG patterns available.  The logo was a bottle cap print out I found on Easy -- I printed it out (enlarged) on Avery iron-on transfer paper and put it on the fabric before I sewed up the hat.

Josephine modeled something a bit more swanky.  Again, these patterns are all from Pixie Faire.

Instead of a hat she had a clip:

And, of course, a handbag.

And shoes. 

Annabeth made all the shoes.  There's something enthralling about seeing a row of little doll shoes.  Well, maybe not for most people, but I just love tiny accessories.

Annabeth insisted that the packaging presentation for the actual auction had to be Just So. She carefully placed the items in cardboard boxes she had decorated, and included a photo of the doll modeling the clothing.  Each outfit was given a name.

The bidding turned out to be fairly level; we really were filling a gap with our contribution.  It helped that people knew that they were also contributing to a mission project with their bids.

This is how we found out people would actually hand over money for doll clothes we made.  And that gave us our boost into a new adventure of going to craft fairs selling handmade clothing.  More to come on that later.