Friday, January 29, 2010

Really Awesome Site for the Wool Obsessed

In my poking around, I came across this site that just made me drool. I realized that there was someone out there just as obsessed with wool like I am. Kris has a super abundance of recycled wool that she crafts with and offers wool for sale too!


I found this really awesome sweater that I HAD to have with little roosters all over it. The colors are even more vibrant in person and I imagine making a soaker and several pairs of slippers from this one. Kris is constantly posting great tutorials. You can find tutorials for making regular socks, blankets, dryer balls, and tons of other cool things. If it can be made from wool, she has probably made it. I hope you enjoy poking around this site as much as I do. So many great projects for a rainy (or icy day like we are having today).

Thursday, January 7, 2010

Happy New Year!!!

I am excited to start a brand new year AND a brand new decade. I am working on my annual business plan and hope to be a little more organized this year. I am planning on cutting out a few things, and growing in other areas. My main struggle has always been to come up with oodles of great ideas and then would not have the time to cultivate those ideas. Those of you that have been with me since the beginning in 2004 have seen me make just about everything under the sun out of wool at one time or another. I realized this and really did well on working on my crafting obsession this past year. I plan to continue that trend this year. I had started up a second website (what was I thinking?!?!) that grew beyond what I could handle very quickly. I sold Artisan Baby so I could completly focus on Woollybottoms. I made another decision for 2010 that I will not be doing all interlock pieces any longer. I LOVE the fabric as do many of you, but the unpredictable milling and cost of the fabric just kind of caused me to loose all my joy in it. I have realized that I can not do everything and be scattered across the board. I will only be using the interlock in our hybrid soakers and longies. We have also kind of moved away from stocking on hyena cart last year. I will probably continue that trend into this year as well. We will still have our fun "uglies" sales and will stock through hyena cart for those but that will probably be it. We will be sticking with stocking (wow... say sticking with stocking 5 times fast lol) the main website several times a week and I am working on stocking on Etsy (one of many unfinished projects from last year LOL). I don't want to be spread all over the place.

The main theme I guess I should say for 2010 is balance. It is becoming increasingly hard. I am not a big business. It is just little old me and I do have one person helping me full time doing sewing and inspecting each and every piece we make. I still handle all of the computer work and answering phones and emails. I also package and ship each and every package along with sewing. I am so incredibly thankful for the increasing business but in order to keep up and still be able to keep this a local mom owned business (and most importantly my sanity) some changes will be made throughout the month of January.

My accomplishment for today (well besides the typical sewing and shipping) was working on the Etsy store (as you can see over on the side of the page now). One thing to cross off the list woohoo!