Personalized Gifts

What fun it is to make personalized Scrabble bracelets!  And…we’ve had quite a few to complete lately.  It’s kept me hopping because we're also trying to build our inventory for the upcoming holiday season.  The personalized bracelets take a bit longer than our regular bracelets and require extra communication, but the end result is so gratifying!

There is something that touches my heart when someone orders one of our personalized bracelets.  It must be because you get to know a little part of that person and what is special to them.  I have had some wonderful connections through our custom orders.

I really started thinking about it as I was making a bracelet for a mom who ordered one for her teenage daughter.  It has images of a childhood book they shared together. She took a lot of time to think through her order.  It's important to remember how much things like this mean to the people who order them.  They put their creative and emotional energy into them.  It can be easy in the busy, day to day business to forget that there is a thoughtful person on the other end of the order.  They share their families, their pets, their trips, and their hearts…how special is that??

I love to read the responses we get when they receive their bracelets…

 “Bracelet arrive today and I just LOVE IT!!!! It is just beautiful!!!!!”

“I LOVE IT!! It's the sweetest thing! Thank you so so much.”

“Ahh! So darn cute!! She'll LOVE it!! Thanks so much”

Here are a few of my favorite custom orders:

A woman ordered two bracelets for her first wedding anniversary.  One was of her wedding and the other of the honeymoon they took in Hawaii.  

Another ordered one of our dog frames with two different breeds on it for a friend who had the two breeds.  What a thoughtful gift!

 

A young lady ordered a bracelet for her mom with pictures of all her family on it.  It was such a memorable bracelet!

 We have another customer that orders one custom bracelet a month, so that by Christmas she will have bracelets for many of her friends.  Talk about thinking ahead and budgeting!

 When times get busy or I feel stressed, I think about all the people I’ve come in contact with through our personalized bracelets and all our other items for that matter - people all around the world, and it makes me pause and take a deep breath to know that in a small way in the big scheme of the world dynamics that our bracelets are important to these people and appreciated.  Makes me smile…and that’s important, too.

We just jumped into this blog without giving any background about how we got started on our handcrafted journey.  Where did our journey begin?  Well, it really started when I was a little girl and a “crafty” kind of kid.  I remember having a friend when I was five whose family had made an “art” room at their house.  It had everything imaginable to create fabulous crafts and priceless artwork.  And…as a five-year-old, I thought it was the most exciting place to be.  Interestingly, I now have an “art” room of my own.  I guess it’s true how we come full circle to what we knew and loved first.

BASSET HOUND DOG FRAME

But…now…fast-forward about 40 decades and here we are working to build our  handcrafted   business.  The dog frame idea came to me in the mid-90s while living in Ohio.  I have always loved dogs – showing them, training them, having them as a part of our family, but the dog frame idea just percolated until finally after many years and several moves, including moving home to Washington State, I finally pulled it all together.  In 2005, I made my first very rough frames and went to my first show.

However, as fate had it, the very day I returned home from that show there was a message that I had a job. (You know one of those “day jobs” that pays the bills until you’re able to leave your day job to do something like the dog frames.)  I was in agony.  I weighed the pros and cons.  The show went well.  I knew people were interested in my product, but money was running out and a good-paying job would certainly be helpful.  Money, frames, money, frames? In the end, money won.  I have been dirt poor before, and I didn’t want to be there again.  I reasoned with myself that the job would help to finance my handcrafted business…and it did.

 I have been slowly building the business since that time.  A couple more moves, a different job, finding the love of my life (who is my partner in this business), and now we’re up and running full-time with our shop on Etsy.  At times we still struggle with finances, time management, and working so many hours that I have to make myself take a day off now and then, but in the end, we’re getting ahead, figuring things out and I know this is where I’m supposed to be.  Every time I create a dog frame and our upcycled jewelry, or a customer sends a heartfelt note and feedback, it makes me stay the course and continue on our handcrafted journey, and what a journey it is.

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