As I sat here this morning rebuilding the blog entries from long past days, I found myself chuckling at the things we used to do. Here’s an update on the side hustles we used to chase…

Needle Doodles – died very soon after being started. Takes way to long in our opinion to embroidery items and not enough return on the time/labor/materials. Grandma Plaintiff still has her super fancy machine and probably needs to quit spending so much time worrying about me and more time in the basement dungeon with her precious machine.

Mug Doodles – did very well for us. I think we did just over 14,200 sales on Etsy before we figured it was just too time consuming and shut that shop down.

The side hustles suffered greatly during my battle with pancreatic cancer – they lost 50% of their Year-over-Year (YoY) sales for 4 years in a row. But now that have regained some of my strength back and have some of my energy back, we’re rebuilding the side hustles – we’re aiming to get them back up to their former glory days as we move into retirement together.

Twisted Crafters – it’s still with us – sorta. We stopped selling filthy mugs on it when we shut down the Mug Doodles store – but continued to offer engraved pens and pencils on Etsy … today, it’s been renamed SimplyPencils and we’re in the process of opening our first actual website for it instead of relying only on Etsy.

http://www.simplypencils.com is where you can find the new shop (should be open within the next week or so)

shopsimplypencils.com will take you the Etsy shop.

DIY Craft Blanks is still churning along… we’ll begin focusing our efforts on the redesign/restructuring as soon as we’re done opening the new website properly for Simply Pencils.