Christmas in July

Today I am thinking about a little Christmas in July.  This is about the time of year that I start thinking about Christmas gifts and Christmas cards, and I make all kinds of plans to create all kinds of handmade things.  I wind up getting less than half of them done, but it’s nice to think and plan, right?

When I make Christmas cards, I usually pick out one design and make a whole stack of the exact (or near enough) same card – 100 of them to be exact (although some years my design turns out to be a little more time consuming than I originally planned, so I’ll scale it back to 75 or 80 and finish the rest after Christmas.  Why so many and why finish more after Christmas?  I have a mailing list of 60+ people.  The count fluctuates from year to year, but it generally stays in the 60-75 range.  I make extras because I never know who will send me a card that’s not on my regular list, and I always like to send them one in return.  Then after Christmas, whatever cards are left get sold online or donated to “Cards for Soldiers”, “Operation Write Home” or some other charitable card-giving organization.

Since I only do one kind of card each year, I have a lot of Christmas card ideas that I never get to use.  Last year, I took a card workshop from Valerie Jackson of Creative Sanctuary in which we created these handsome Christmas cards.  These cards demonstrate some really fun ways to use Close to My Heart stamps, inks, and papers.  I really enjoyed making them, but since my cards are pretty much already planned out for the next several years, I didn’t know what to do with them.  I finally decided I should just package them up and sell them on Etsy.com.  And since I’m thinking Christmas in July, I’m thinking this is a good time to get them posted, so I did.  You can see these cards and some of my other Etsy projects here:  https://www.etsy.com/shop/craftyneighbor

I think I’m going to pull out some of my older cards that are lying around and put them on Etsy, too.  I have so many cards and projects lying around here, and since I’ve started this whole “clean out and reorganize the craft room thing” (that’s taking forever, btw), I really think I should purge myself of these craft projects that are just hanging around and serving no purpose.  I’m also getting ready to start sorting through some of my excess supplies and selling them off on Ebay and Etsy, too.  A while back, I read a tip from another crafter who said she was stuffing supplies in a USPS flat-rate box and shipping it to the highest bidder.  What a great way to get rid of a lot of miscellaneous, mixed up scrapbooking supplies!

Speaking of an excess of miscellaneous, mixed-up craft supplies…this past weekend, we had our semi-annual scrapbook garage sale, which amounts to having our own little Christmas, or at least it felt so to a lot of crafters.  This year’s sale featured 15 different vendors with almost 40 tables of merchandise for sale, and we had shoppers lined up outside the building waiting for the sale to start.  I tried not to do too much shopping myself, but I know there must have been some really good bargains out there because I saw a lot of crafters making multiple trips to get their purchases back to their cars!  Cross your fingers that we will be able to get the venue again in the spring, otherwise we might have to move this event to an annual occurrence, rather than twice per year. 

Well, that’s it for today.  I am on a mission to get some of my leftover sale items sorted and posted on Ebay and/or Etsy.  I need to get these stacks of boxes out of my house ASAP!  I have company coming in two weeks and I can’t even get to the bed in the spare bedroom.  Oops!  Thanks for subscribing to my blog, and I hope you’ll read it again tomorrow!