Stingrays Are Now In The Mix

Success!  New Cat Toy! 

I was fooling around with some blue mottled polar fleece & white fleece and came up with a Stingray pattern that works great.  Minimal sewing,  you stuff it with one layer of crackly plastic from a pretzel bag, sew two more lines in a torpedo shape down to the tail, stuff that center section with fiberfill and machine sew the opening closed.   Add two eyes - the only part that's hand sewn, and you have a crunchy Stingray.   Frankly I could turn out a dozen of these in something like 20 minutes.  Nice!

And Now -- A 'Zine

Ok, today I visited the wemakezines.com site and spent a little time there again, clicking through posts and checking posted links for ideas.  One got me over to Pinterest which had a nice variety of home made zines showing.  It got me motivated to start a little project of my own. 

I figure if I could come up with something Steampunk oriented, and got the creative juices flowing, AND it was put together nice enough to sell possibly on Etsy or at a Zinefest, that'd be great.  Since I like Trilobites, I sort of got off on this quirky idea of blending those with a fake family history, putting things into a sort of alternative dimension remembrance. 

It was a LOT of fun!  Finding the old photos of bakeries, horse drawn delivery trucks, 'fake' ancestors and storefronts took about two hours. I had more than I anticipated, making for a larger booklet, but they were all too good to pick only a few so I expanded with more text and got deeper into the family history.  Picking the font style to look 1920's to 1930's was easy, and I played around with the placement on the page, shifting to Landscape to get it to lay out right. 

Heck I even put an advertisement on the back about the Trilobite Harvest Festival June 8th, LOL!  Free parking and everything.

It's 5 pages, double sided, in black and white. I've got the mock up all done and it I'll stop off at Kinkos tomorrow to get a bunch printed up.  They charge 10 cents a page, so double sided makes it $1 per booklet..... sort of steep when you think of it since doing 20 of them will cost me $20 bucks.  But it's probably cheaper than me using up all my home printer ink getting it copied off. 

Title is Making Trilobite Pies, A Family Remembrance.  Selling price -- likely $2 or $3 for each.  I'll make a few for family and friends, then the rest is for selling. 

Ahhh...ZOMBIES!

The Zombie mice seem to be getting great reviews.  The people I've showed them to all liked the item and weren't afraid to pick them up and check them out.  I may have a really nice niche market item here!!!!

I went with a white felt belly, brown fake fur napped fabric for the top of the body, but it's a very short nap more like upholstery fabric, and brown felt ears. They get a rattail cord tail on them and the eyes are white pearls. I wasn't sure if two the same size are better or one small one and one large one.  The preferences have been 50/50 on the eyes so I'll probably make some of both. 

The zombie part comes in with the red felt on one side of the face between the seams (cut jaggedly with a scissors tip) and the mass of 'stuff' sticking out the other side of the body on that seam line.  I did a piece of folded white felt for the ribs that I sliced into lengths after the mouse was stuffed, and a piece of red felt under that also sliced up after sewing in AND about 10" of wildly textured hairy red yarn wound 4 times around my fingers and then tied in the middle with a knot and sliced open so the strands look like guts. The knot is sewn in the seam as well so nothing pulls out.  It splays out really nice.

The mouse is life sized, only partially stuffed so it's sort of flat, and the brown is a realistic color so they do look like real mangled mice.  I cut a piece out of one ear on each one also, trying a notch and a half circle. Either one looks good but the notch leaves a more solid structure on the ear so I'll likely go with that in the future.

Next........possibly Zombie Hamsters!  Fear The Fur! 

New Items - Testing Ideas

Well, I've been working on a bunch of new stuff over the past months. Some took off like crazy, others were 'meh'.

Best idea - catnip toy witch hats. Super easy to make out of felt, nice size (the cone is about 3" tall) and they go together quickly. AND the felt is stiff enough to have them stand up nice and straight. If I made them in brown and scruffed them over in a bend and tacked that in place I'd have a Hogwarts Sorting Hat.

Another good one is Squiddies - little squids made out of different colors of polar fleece, with cotton bottoms (I found a print that has dots on to represent suckers, it added interest) and a folded piece of polar fleece at the front that I sliced up to make the tentacles.  The eyes went on above that, just plain black beads, but I pinched and sewed the area right above those to make a sort of eyebrow. They look grouchy.  HUGE hit with the Steampunk crowd!!!!

I've seen interest wane in the normal things - carrots, chili peppers and such.  Mice are still the best sellers though.

Purrtosa Is Still Hanging In There

You know, given the fact that a tiny specialty store usually doesn't 'make it' even when the economy is good, Purrtosa is still going strong a year after it's been opened.  Kudos to them! 

She has a small store the size of a living room, which has the merchandise rearranged regularly to keep 'fresh', and most of the time there's a live cat there that's up for adoption as well.  She works with the local rescues and has placed several cats in new homes that way. 

I dropped off a box of items to her a week ago and have been making Valentine's Day cat toys over the past few weeks to deliver as well.  She wants seasonal which is great. Anything that doesn't sell by the end of that particular season I trade out for new stuff, so it's not a hardship for her to move them at half price or anything.  I'm surprised there were still two Santa Hat toys left out of what I got to her last month, but hey, I'll take them back again.

Next holiday is St. Patrick's Day.  I've never done anything specific for that one before so I'll have to think on that.  I'd make shamrock mice but she already has two mouse toy suppliers and didn't want more mice.   The Easter selection will be a lot easier -- bunnies, eggs, carrots.

After that is 4th of July.  Then Thanksgiving.