Silent Sunday

A Year in Silver Birch Crafts - 2011 - Part 2

Apologies for not posting this yesterday, having a bad week! But thank you for everyone who read my last post. Hope I didn't bore you :)

I entered March with lots of enthusiasm the Yellow Spotty Bags were still selling well. A friend of mine asked if I would be able to create a recorder bag for his Daughters Recorder and wanted it personalised. A week or so later I created just a small Recorder Bag so that she was able to take her Recorder to school and not loose it!!

March continued with a great pace with new additions to the Yellow Spotty Range including these great little Party Bags which not only are great for party's but for just putting little tiny special things in! I speak to a lot of people on twitter who are huge fans of my Spotty Range, and I knew one lovely lady was looking for party bags for her little ones birthday party. So what better way to help a great friend, who owns/designs and runs with her husband Piddley Pix, but also to help little me out with a review of my Spotty Party Bags! So off they went and I was so happy to receive a fantastic Review from Kev and Kelly. So with March ending and my Daughters 11th Birthday approaching very quickly, I created the lovely and tactile Cushion Covers. On the eve of my daughters birthday up went her Personalised Birthday Bunting and she had a great day!

Now April is always a funny month for me but 2011 saw me reach the grand old age of 35 (eeeeeek) I never thought for one minute that at 35 I would be running my own business let alone loving every single minute of it and feeling such a warmth from all the fantastic Reviews that I receive, makes every sleepless night (dreaming up new ideas) so worthwhile! So sales were going really well on the Yellow Spotty Bag side, and I was developing more and more of my Unique Bags, was asked on twitter by a friend for a custom Messenger Bag! well I couldn't say no!! The lady choose the fantastic Robert Kaufman Playday Spring fabric and when I sent her pictures of this Unique Messenger Bag she was thrilled with it! I also added more Facecloth's to the personalised range, including a very lovely Yellow Spotty Facecloth. Since the original Yellow Spotty facecloth I have added a pink and blue version. I also added another item to the Yellow Spotty Range Spotty Bunting!

May arrived with a steady flow of sales through out the month, The Yellow Spotty Bags were still going well and with the phone sleeves they were flying out the door, not just on my website but at the Fair I attended regularly over in Tring, Hertfordshire. I also sold one of my first Embroidered Mini Cushions which was amazing! The lady also came back for a 2nd a few weeks later! May was a quiet month for creating new items because I was really busy with the Yellow Spotty Bags and adding to my current ranges.

Hope you are enjoying reading my year of Silver Birch Crafts 2011, will be back in a couple of days with part 3, June - August, which shows you that because of the success of the first 6 months of the year, I was able to push and further my ranges as well as adding new ones!

Sarah

A Year in Silver Birch Crafts Life - 2011

One of my New Years Goals this year is to blog more! So I thought a great way to start is to tell you what has happened with Silver Birch Crafts over the past year.

January to March

Hopefully over the next few days I will be covering the year but Part 1 is January to March

So January arrived, very quickly, in itself it is not usually a very busy month business wise, but for Silver Birch Crafts started off the year with such a boost it was a shock! With 24 Sales in total, mostly because of the Yellow Spotty Bags which I had launched at the end of October. The very First Yellow Spotty Bag was done as a custom order for a very good friend of mine called Dannie who has a fantastic range of crocheted goodies over at Booties By Dannie who if it was not for Dannie I would never have made the bag let alone listed it on my website. Also in January I emailed a lovely lady called Louise who owns and runs Baby Signing Mummy to ask if she would review my Yellow Spotty Bag! She agreed and on the 13th January did this fantastic review of my Yellow Spotty Bag. So January ended up being a really fantastic month!

February arrived and with it the snow! The Yellow Spotty Bag sales continued and the thought was to widen the range. So after being emailed by a gentleman about a personalised spotty bag. I thought fantastic this will be a great addition and created a bag especially for "Zaki". I also designed and created the Yellow Spotty Gym Bag which is great for small things, I already had the range of Gym Bags and added this to it. By now I was making Spotty Bags by the batch, now when I say batch it doesn't mean that I was making huge batch's but small ones and taking care to make sure each and every Spotty Bag are unique. When making the bags the flap and under the flap are the same colour sequences, but the back and both sides are as different as I can make them. When putting the spots on I tend to "chuck" them on and see where they land!

When March arrived I wanted to develop the some of my other ranges further, so I added the Make Up Bags and Brush Rolls to my Website, these are a lovely little addition which I am hoping to develop further in 2012. The sales of Yellow Spotty Bag continued even though I thought they would slow down. During March I added the Toy Bag to the Yellow Spotty Range.

I hope you have enjoyed reading the first part of A Year In Silver Birch Crafts Life 2011 I will be covering April - June tomorrow!

Sarah