Taking care of business

It is amazing sometimes the way things work out. It's a bit hard to believe, but between the time that I completed those Converse booties, informed my friend, and posted them here, but before she completed the sale on my Etsy store, someone beat her to being my first official sale!

I woke up Sunday morning to a request from a potential buyer to waive shipping fees since she also lives in Regina, so I set up a local delivery code that I can provide to local buyers to receive free shipping (why didn't I think of this before?), and before I knew it I had my first sale!

She had requested a smartphone sock, like these ones that I made for my husband's phone (black, for the iPhone 5), and for my phone (purple & blue, for the iPhone 4/4S).

I had made these back in the fall when we first got these new phones, using sock yarn to keep them quite slim, but still providing protection from scratches and small impacts. In fact, I decided to make the one for my phone after I took it into a cave with me at work (I used to lead Outdoor Ed field trips) so that I could check the time, and I dropped it in the cave, slightly damaging the casing. Luckily I had other, unrelated problems with the phone and they replaced it (apparently without noticing the small dent in the phone) – at which point I decided a case was required to prevent a repeat of the same mishap!


Back to the current item:
On my store I had posted images of all the socks yarns that are easily available to me, and customers are asked to select from this image. She selected colour 2 from the variegated yarn options you can see below.

With these variegated sock yarns it's always a bit of a mystery what the pattern will look like in the end. I kept my fingers crossed that my buyer had noticed that there was a significant amount of yellow in the yarn, and wouldn't be surprised or disappointed about it!

I worked on this case in the drive back to Regina from my parents' place in Calgary, on Tuesday (yes we travelled on New Year's day), and put the finishing touches on it yesterday.

Here it is, the finished custom-made phone sock.

Then I had to figure out how I would package my finished items so that they looked nice when they arrived. I decided to wrap them in tissue paper, to keep them neat and tidy and somewhat protected inside the shipping envelope (in most cases, though obviously this one isn't being shipped so it was delivered just in the tissue paper). Here it is all ready for delivery:

As you can see, I also made myself some basic business cards to include with each order - including a little word cloud (www.wordle.net) I created about my store. I will probably order some professionally made cards eventually, but I think these will do nicely for now! Here's a close up:

Since this was a local delivery item, I dropped it off at her house (she was at work at the time) and she got it last night. She sent me this comment, which made me quite happy about my first sale:

"Got it! Thank you very much! It looks great, and fits my phone snugly. Very impressed! I could see myself bugging you for another in the future"


I guess with this sale I'm officially in business!

Keep crafting!


PS: You can find this item on my Etsy store here