Bears looking for homes

I went and picked up the items I had at the Art Fair this morning and now I have bears to sell. These poor little guys need new homes and would make great Christmas gifts for the young and old alike. They all have soft faux fur, are 14 inches tall, 5 way jointed and have child safe locking plastic black eyes and noses. I have put them all at a great low price.

This will be the last of the bears that I design and make. I will not be making any others than for special order. I am having too much fun now, learning about old dolls, finding them, cleaning them up and redressing them.

Now it is time to get some Christmas decorations up. The tree is started and a few things out. Will not go overboard this year like I have done in the past. Just can't get into it this year.

It's Craft Show season!

Yes, this is the time of the year when I do most of my craft shows. Holidays are coming and people are more willing to buy that child safe bear or doll. I am now in full gear mode to get my shows going.

I have a show this weekend, then another in two weeks and then another two weeks after that. I use to be able to do a show every weekend but age has caught up with me and it takes a week to recover from a show. My mind thinks I can still do all the shows but my body just says stop you can't. Boy old age stinks sometimes!

So today is getting all my displays ready and all the table covers washed and ready and see what else has to be done with products I am taking to this show. Tomorrow will be packing everything into containers and packing the van.

Even with all this, I still am sewing today. I got a couple cute dolls at the Goodwill store yesterday and so I did one doll up yesterday and today will try to finish up the other one. Then the lady at one of the other thrift stores says she will have some other dolls ready for me to look at today so will probably make a quick trip down there is see what she has. I have to remember to take a couple of the dolls with me that I got from her when I go down there and show her what I have done with them. She wanted to see them.

So the next two days are busy and then the weekend will be lots of sitting and standing and talking to people. Hope for lots of good sales so I don't have to bring so much stuff home.

Happy Crafting everyone and for you who do shows, I hope you have great sales.

Sunday has been a different type of day for us.

Yep, Sunday has been different. It rained off and on all morning with lots of thunder and lightening and some beautiful double rainbows. This afternoon we had some thunder but the storms all past us and just went over the mountains. Living in the desert, we love a rainy day as we only get about 6 inches of rain a year so this was wonderful. It also made the temperatures lower. We were in the low 80's and it was nice until the sun came out in the afternoon and the humidity got to us and we had to turn on the a/c. The weather people are saying we could have the same type of weather the next three days. I think our fall has finally arrived!

Today was a bear making day. I know all you have been reading about from me is dolls, dolls and more dolls. I love doing the dolls and I have a couple more that I still need to dress but I also have a online show in November and the bears have to get done first. Wish I could show you what they look like but you will all have to wait until they go online on November 21 and 22. At this moment I have two completely ready and three more partly done.

Now I know that I will make my rounds at the thrift stores on Wednesday so you will probably see more dolls. The funny thing is that for years, I have been making and selling bears and they have always been my passion. Over the years I added rabbits, cows, pigs, mice and dogs to the mix that I made of craft shows. Most of these have now gone away from my stock. I also added soft dolls which I designed and they have always sold well. People like to buy handmade dolls. It has only been a couple of months with the recycled dolls and this is now my new passion.

My winning entries

Finally I am able to post the winning entries I had in our Mohave County Fair. This has been a month long adventure. First was trying to decide if I was going to enter anything in the fair and this being the first time that I had ever done anything like this, I didn't know what I should enter. I changed several times before I got the final decision made. From there it was deciphering the entry form on the internet. So many divisions and so many categories and sub categories to choose from. The easy part was being able to enter on the internet and not having to print everything out and mailing it in. The forms had to be in almost a month before the actual fair.

So now were the 3 trips to Kingman. The fair grounds are over the mountains and a 100 mile round trip. The first trip was to get the things there a week before the fair so that they could be judged, the second trip was to see if I won anything once the fair was open and then finally yesterday was to go pick everything back up after the fair closed.

I am happy that everything I entered won a First Place ribbon and am really happy that the Fairy Princess won a Best of Class ribbon. I do get a little money from all this but that is not why I entered this competition. I just wanted to see if anything I design and make would be judged by others as good. There were 100's of entries in my division and so I am very pleased that mine all won top honors.

From here these items will all be available on my website and I hope that you will take a look and with Christmas coming up soon, you will decide if anything I have will fit into your budget.

I have several craft shows that I am doing this fall and everything that is on my website will also be shown at shows. Shop early if you see something you want and with 50% down, I will hold an item for you in layaway.

Thank you for taking the time to read my blog and tell you friends about it as I really do need more followers.

Onto another project.

Well here we are again and onto another new project. I started to think about doing plant pokes and then had some people say that they would get wet and buggy. Living in Arizona, we don't have that problem but I guess you would in other parts of the country.

So it was suggested that I try the bear heads on pencils or pens. I have done a couple on pens but I think the pens are kind of short so I have done several on pencils. I think if people want they can still poke them in a plant but that will be up to them.

This is the only one I have photographed at the moment but I have a dozen made in different colors. I have them in grey, brown, tan and this rust color. I have some with flowers glued on the ear and some without. Each will have a ribbon around the neck. I still haven't decided what I need to charge for these. It will have to be somewhere from a dollar to two dollars. I will never get my time costs but this has been a fun project and keeps me busy. Let me know your comments.

If you would, become a follower and you will know when I have a new project in the works. I have a few more ideas that I am working on so hopefully over the next few weeks when it is too hot here to be anywhere but in the sewing room, I will post some more new things.

Everyone take care and don't forget to check out all the things on my website that I have put on clearance. I really need the room for some new things LOL.

Merry Christmas

Here we are only a few days left until Christmas. Where has this year gone? I find that the older I get the faster the years go. We have already received all our Christmas gifts this year. We bought ourselves a new sofa and chair for the living room. The old one was 10 years old and had seen its better days. Then with some of the profits from my sales we bought a Wii. We haven't really got into playing it yet as we are having trouble getting the handheld to stay on the screen. And we do want to buy more than one game. Then our kids went together and bought us a new 32" HDTV for the bedroom with a built in DVD player. This is wonderful because working with all the surround sound system in the living room with the big screen is a pain. Plus we can lay in bed and watch whatever we want.

As for my season with craft shows and website sales, I have done pretty good. I only do a couple of shows and the website is only a year old so for me, what I did was great. The money helped us but new roofing on the house and added more cement to our patio area in the front of the house. This next year we need to get more landscraping so that will be our goal with sales profits.

This picture is of the mink bear that I made and I used it on our Christmas cards this year. Enjoy and have a wonderful Christmas season.

If you would like I have reduced some of the pricing on my website. I did this so that more people could afford my work in this hard economy times. I hope you will take a look.

Eva, www.ejcrafts.com

Today is the first day of my blog.

This is my first time at doing a blog and so that everyone can get to know me and my creations I am just introduction myself today.

I have been sewing since I was a child and so I sew. Over the years I have made just about everything that you can think of making. About 30 years ago, I decided that I wanted to make some teddy bears. First I only made them and gave them to friends and co-workers and then people said they would buy them so I started to do art and craft shows. This turned into quite a business for me. Every weekend we would travel the western states and sell at craft shows. I would work my regular job and come home and sew, travel on the weekends and it went on and on like that for years. When my hubby lost his job, downsizing they called it, we decided to sell our house and buy a travel trailer and do shows full time. We did this for only 2 years when we got so burnt out that we went back to regular jobs. We didn't do shows for several years or did I make bears. Then, of course, the bug got me and I started to want to do shows again so we did a few a year. We had to stop doing the shows for a while as our jobs were too demanding to be able to be gone.

We retired almost 5 years ago and decided to do a few local shows and I was up and running again with a business. Last year after my hubby got quite ill, I started a website as our house was being overrun by stuffed animals. I still do a couple of shows a year but am hoping that the website will give me a good income.

I do hope that you will check out my website and bookmark it for future reference. I not only design and make teddy bears but soft dolls, rabbits, mice, dogs, hand puppets and a few more odds of ends of things. Whatever I dream up and make, I put on the website.

Eva
www.ejcrafts.com