a handmade holiday

This is a picture of Oleo the cat attacking her handmade crochet catnip eyeball she received in her Christmas stocking. She loved it, for a whole 5 minutes. I got a lot of funny pictures of her freaking out, licking it and attacking it, she got a claw stuck in it and I held onto the optical nerve for her fun times. It was good stuff. I found this little handmade eyeball at Urban Craft Uprising this year.

Christmas here at the Pellegrini household was really nice as usual. The lovely people in my life spoil me, and here I am sending out gifts late! Eek. Such is life in the retail season. My own gifts get sent late after I make sure and mail all my sold mobiles to their recipients on time!

Oh and I cooked up a storm on Christmas. Italian style - this big gravy dinner with all sorts of meats from the local butcher. And I made pasta by hand - Tony got a pasta maker for Christmas so I put it to good use, and the noodles turned out way tastey!

Check out this great picture I found of the Portland Saturday Market during the "Festival Days". It got really cold and foggy here in Portland for holiday. No snow, for that I am happy. Although I did go down and vend for 1 day of the festival downtown and it was cold! Too cold for me and I really didn't sell much and it just seemed so silly. But the fog at night was beautiful. I was too cold and moody to take any pictures of the beauty. Ah well. This one is great, and it shows my friend Yasu's wooden sign for his booth "Toys4U"
Anyhow - this holiday season was really good to me. Lots of handmade gifts were given and received! I wasn't crazy with buzyness, but I was very busy.

I came out with this new "Mobile Making Kit" just in time for the holidays and I sold every single one that I made (50). They cost me about 70cents a piece to make(between the cute little plastic tube, stickers, ink for the instructions and labels, the swivels and steel bits, the firing of the glass pieces, etc.) so in the end after cost I made just a little over $700 on getting rid of a pile of scrap pieces of glass! Whoohoo. That was successful in my opinion. I ordered more little golf ball tubes, I would like to sell these thru art museum gift shops. I already have a few tweeks in mind for the packaging and such. Any feedback is welcome!

Many mobiles made by me found new homes this Christmas season, at least a couple hundred pieces of art were constructed, packaged and sold over the last month or so by my little hands. I don't know the precise number off the top of my head... but I thought rough estimates at least might be interesting to read for my blog readers out there. I am a voyeur myself, I like reading specifics in other people's lives and businesses. Although I would like to keep things relatively private, and I am frequently embarrassed that my business is not much bigger after being around for over 8 years now... but I keep at it and I still enjoy myself and I make a lot of mobiles. I am glad people like them. In fact, I am overwhelmingly grateful people like them. It really is my pleasure.

If you ever would like to get a mobile made by me - let me know :)