We went to Germany in the Army shortly after my eldest daughter was born. I recall getting a care package from Grandma Plaintiffs Mother-In-Law that contained a Strawberry Shortcake blanket to grace the crib of her first born grandchild. Ever since, she has been kind enough to grace us occasionally with some hand made items that were always made with love as a key ingredient.
A few years back, in an attempt to butter up Grandma Plaintiff, I purchased her a new embroidery machine for her birthday. That summer, her Mother-in-Law came to visit and told us how inferior our machine was, and how hers did this and that so much better. It wasn’t long after she left, that we received a new top of the line Brother Dream Machine courtesy of her (did I say “Thank you Mom” enough)? When she came to visit the Crown Princess this year, we had a good time getting to know the inner workings of the machine at the hands of a more experienced seamstress.
After her departure, we took a few moments to count the blessings in our lives and realized how much we have in our “craft room”. Now, those of you who have known us in past know that we have dived very heavily into crafts before… we ran Candle Junkies for many years selling hand crafted candles. We ran Craft Junkies selling excess supplies that we had or made along with Ceramic goodies that we made ourselves, and we ran miSu Designs for some loose end stuff (mi for the first two letters of my name, and Su for the first two letters of Grandma Plaintiffs name). For one reason or another we gave up the business side of crafting and moved the crafting to a back burner. As we looked at the new craft room that Grandma Plaintiff had suckered me into building her in the space that was our former master bedroom, we realized that we probably have more in the room than we ever did with the candles or ceramics… it seemed only fitting that we should begin a new phase of crafting lives with something embroidery / sewing related.
Thus begins the new online adventure of Grandma Plaintiff and myself. We scoured the net looking for a domain. We fell in love with Artistic Needle, and registered TheArtisticNeedle.com hoping that the owner of ArtisticNeedle.com would be willing to sell it at a reasonable rate. Nope. They want roughly 11K for the domain name. Moving on…. we finally found that NeedleDoodles.com was available so we registered it and began the adventure … this time around, the big old world wide web had evolved since we last set up a site. We opted to start off selling products on Etsy holding onto the domain for the future. We did point the new domain directly to the Etsy store so that we’d be easier to find.
We thought we were doing pretty good. We made the first few items and talked to our Quality Inspector (aka Grandma Plaintiffs Mother-In-Law) and received only a C. Inquiring why only a C, it was pointed out that our bookmarks and flour sack towels would look better if we took the time to cut all of the jump stitches. Point taken. Remade. Next inspection – B. The quality would go up if the thread on the back of the item matched the thread on the front. Point taken. And thus the expression “Quality that would please my Mother-In-Law” was added to our ingredient list on Etsy. 🙂 (I love you very much Grandma Plaintiffs Mother-In-Law – and thank God for allowing me to have you as my Mom.)
With that, and the manual steps of creating a product or two, www.NeedleDoodles.com is open and selling embroidered flour sack towels, handcrafted embroidered bookmarks and our inventory of one of a kind handbags will be added as Grandma Plaintiff makes them.
So …. as we begin yet another experiment in online crafting, this one seems to have deeper roots than anything we’ve done before…. But I’ll save some of that for a future entry….
Grandpa Boltz
aka – Still the one that the Crown Princess won’t say his name….