The Mushroom Tree

Well, it's not really a surprise, since I've been telling her I was going to make it for her for, what, six months now? Seven months? So I suppose the surprise is that I finally MADE IT!!!



It's my first-ever MINKEE diaper! And it wasn't as scary to sew as I thought it would be. I sewed a gift bag for my mom for Christmas using the same minkee, and it was surprisingly non-aggravating. I guess it varies from minkee to minkee, just like difficulty varies from different PULs and different velours. Some give you shit, some don't.



The fabric was cut with my old pattern, which has a little less butt coverage than my new one, but it's not too drastically different. And yes, there are nine rows of snaps, not eight. *puts bag over head* I am completely incapable of lining up snaps evenly, and there was two inches of extra room on one wing, so I added another row of snaps. No biggie.

I made it for this gorgeous little girl, Mandy's daughter Bella:



Is she not the most beautiful baby EVER?! Isn't she?? I hope it fits, Mandy!

I've been having sewing machine troubles and haven't been able to get any work done for quite some time. Unfortunately my mechanic had no clue what the problem was, so I am still having occasional issues, which is frustrating for me but translates into bargains for YOU, because I have a whole lot of seconds for sale! :)

It's a new year and I have a brand new design for my cloth pads! After listening carefully to customer feedback, I've revamped the soaker to be contoured in the middle to give less bunching. It is also smaller all around so it fits entirely within the two outer layers. I've changed my 13-in. pads to 12-in. pads, and instead of two layers of terry, which some customers found too bulky, I've made my heavy flow pads with one layer of terry and two layers of jersey.

This new design is slightly more labor-intensive than the old, so I have raised my prices just $1 for each pad, bringing them to $5. Seconds are $4, the same price as my first-rate pads were in the past with the old design.

Check out some of the awesome new stuff I've got available! Stripey sets, gorgeous jewel tones, mini-wetbags too!



I also have my very first business cards! They're just free ones from Vistaprint, but hey, it beats having to draw and color them by hand! I also got a working printer for Christmas, so no more writing out addresses...I can use Paypal shipping! WOOHOO!

I'm clearing out the last of my old stock at The Mushroom Tree! Many of these items will not be relisted, so come get them before they're gone! I've got newborn and small fitted diapers, doublers, mama pads, wipes, and pouch slings, all with stress-free pricetags! Come check 'em out at my Etsy store!

Now through December 1st, take 20% off your whole order! When you go to checkout, add your Paypal address in the comment box, but do not complete payment when it takes you to your account. I will send you a revised invoice with 20% marked off your total!

It's been drizzling this nasty, cold, goopy rain for the past 48 hours straight. I wanted to take J to the park sometime this week before it started to get too cold, but nooooo. Mother Nature had to get all PMS-y and cry all over me. I think whoever coined the phrase "bouncing off the walls" must have been stuck indoors with a toddler. Ditto for "climbing the walls."

I need to get to my mom's house so I can use her sewing machine to make the cloak I'm wearing for Halloween. Uma is still in the shop; I should call and see how long it will take for them to order that part she needs. I have stock that needs to get sewn soon!

Speaking of stock, I'm revamping my mama pads. The old design had some flaws: A) the soaker always wound up too wide at the wings after trimming once the initial tack-down sewing had been done, plus it felt kinda uncomfortable with the heavy pads, and B) the bulk of the soaker was too difficult for my serger to chew through. So I made a second pattern for the soaker itself, which is now smaller around the edges so the outer layers are the only ones getting serged, and nipped in at the middle to get rid of that bulk at the wings. Here's an example with my 7-in. pads:



I've got so much awesome fabric to sew up, I am really eager to get Uma back. I plan on introducing pad sets just in time for Christmas! They'll be in the 10-in. size since that's my most popular seller, with 2 liners, 3 regular, 2 heavy, and a mini-wetbag with a cute matching pouch to put it all in inside your purse. Fun stuff!

It's finally looking like fall around here, so I'm celebrating by having a Buy Any 4, Get 5th Free sale! Help me move this old stock out of my store to make way for all the yummy new items I have waiting!

I've been taking a bit of a hiatus from "work" and just catching up on lots of personal sewing. I always have a stack of clothing that needs some kind of alteration: holes that need patching/closing, things that need new elastic, skirts that need to be hemmed...oh, it goes on and on. I finally made it to the bottom of my stack today, and I've been working on a few other things in the meantime as well:

Here's a pouch sling I made for J to carry his "baby" in. Good thing I decided to make it adjustable, cuz I didn't realize that fake babies aren't quite as pliable as real ones. 



I also made him a new pair of longies. I'm working on a matching hat for them right now. I've finally mastered the crotch, although the concept of short rows still escapes me. Oh well, practice makes perfect!



Wearing them at Spaghettifest last weekend.



And today, I finished something that I actually started working on several years ago and forgot about till now. I bought a plain navy jumper for $1 at a secondhand store, and although it was cute, it needed some jazzing up. I didn't have a sewing machine at the time, but I'd bought a Handistitch at Goodwill, and cut up a skirt I had that didn't flatter me so I could make the jumper a little more interesting. The Handistitch turned out to be a horrid piece of crap like most "seen on TV" stuff, and the jumper looked awful once I was done. I shoved it in a bag with a bunch of other miscellaneous craft items, put it in my mom's basement, and forgot about it.

I recently went down to her basement looking for some of my yarn, and rediscovered the jumper. I took it home, took off the crappy embellishments, and put them back on properly. Although it's still far from perfect - hey, I make diapers, not clothes, okay? - I'm pretty pleased with how it came out. I got to use one of my decorative stitches (the patchwork stitch) for the first time. Whee!

Front:


Back:


Closeup of top:


On me:

Made from an unravelled Goodwill sweater and some leftover purewool (doubled up since purewool wicks like a mofo). The dye from the purewool bled when I washed them, but I don't think it's too noticeable.



Most labor-intensive thing I've EVER made. Note to self: don't ever make another pair of longies using single crochet stitches!



I tried doing short rows on the bum and royally screwed it up somehow. It got really weird, so I tucked in the corners and sewed them down inside. It looks goofy as hell when they lay flat, but you don't notice with a diaper underneath.



They're a little baggy, but I made them to grow into anyway. And yes, the pockets are crooked. They were too much of a pain to attach for me to bother going back and taking them off so I can align them better.

Been waiting for a chance to try cloth pads without breaking the bank? Wait no longer! I just stocked a TON of pads in all sizes and absorbancies at my Etsy store! Only $4 each, and seconds for only $3.50!

This will be the last time I will stock pads for a while, and the last two stockings sold out in no time flat, so be sure to get 'em while they're hot off the machine!

I also have available a totally new Mushroom Tree item: pouch slings! I have one available each in M, L, and XL. Only $15!

Don't forget to sign up for our mailing list to keep on top of all our new products, stocking dates, sales and more!

I tidied up my "fabric wall" and my sewing desk today, and it looked so nice that I decided to take some pics. I love looking at pictures of people's sewing rooms online; I like seeing how other sewers organize things and utilize/decorate their space. Like this one, for example: I just wanna scamper around that beautiful room and quiver with glee! (And I don't even quilt!) I, however, have a slightly more Dumpster Chic look going on....

This may look incredibly messy, but it's actually very organized. I could sit here and label everything in the picture with a number and write out a list of what each section is, but nobody would read it and the people that did would be bored to tears. The trunks underneath it all hold some of J's outgrown/yet-to-be-grown-into clothing, and the gray totes hold my current store stock. With the exception of the totes, I got all this stuff for free, hence the mismatched look. Those apple boxes are KICKASS for storing things.

It's rare you'll see my desk looking this tidy. The milk crates on the left not only store things I am working on or about to work on, but they also keep that end of the desk up, since it is old and the leaf droops pretty severely. It is a classic sewing cabinet with a hole in the middle part, so I put a board that I think came from Adrian's computer desk over the hole. It works out pretty well, because I can move the machine back and forth this way if I need some space right in front of me for trimming or pinning. The orange shoebox sitting on the shelf in front of the chair holds my rolls of Velcro, unopened thread cones, and my eight thousand plastic craft organizers that I keep my twenty billion snaps in. That's my computer desk to the right....no, you don't get to see it, it's still a shambles since Adrian hasn't done any more work on my computer after we found out the power supply I just bought was broken.

There you have it. I'd like someday to have all my craft stuff in one room, organized in matching cabinets without a cardboard box in sight, but for now, I'm happy that I have enough room in my bedroom to store all this stuff. Yay for spacious apartments! And really, it's more practical to have my sewing desk out in the common area: I can't be holed up in a back room with a curious toddler running all over the house, plus, I can watch TV while I sew.

Tomorrow, I'm stocking TONS of new mama pads, plus some pouch slings! WOO-HOO!!!

Don't forget to sign up for our mailing list to keep on top of all our new products, stocking dates, sales and more!

Okay, after what I went through to make the first sling for my store, I've decided I'm definitely NOT doing custom orders!

I took what was left of the turtle batik fabric from the sling I made for myself and paired it with a sturdy grey knit to make a M/L sling. All went well, right up to the final tacking down of the french seam, until I turned it right side out again and discovered the lines I'd just sewn so nicely on the inside were all over the place on the outside. 

So I got out my seam ripper and started taking it apart. I have three - yes, THREE - seam rippers, and the two better ones have gone missing, so the only one I could use was the one that came with my machine, which doesn't have a nice ballpoint on the end to prevent accidental fabric tears. Well, you guessed it: even though I was as careful as could be, I still ripped the fabric in three places. I wound up taking the entire seam apart, and figured I could fold it over in a different way to hide the ripped parts. 

I pinned the new seam into place very carefully from the outside, figuring that it'd be better to tack it down where the lines would actually be showing. I managed to miss about three inches worth on the final seam, even though I swerved the line all over the place trying to catch it. And somehow, the end of the seam did NOT turn out as nice and flat as the beginning did (which was the only part I didn't undo, since it was fine). It stuck out and looked horrible, so I made a few quick stitches to nail it down, and that looked even more horrible. 

I'd been debating whether or not to add a padded rail to the bottom, and I decided that I should, since it would hide that ugly end of the seam. I cut the fleece, topstitched it so neatly, and spent a good amount of time pinning it onto the sling in such a way that the stitches would fall directly on top of the previous ones on both the top AND bottom of the rail. Very tricky! Too tricky, in fact - despite my meticulous efforts, I stitched too low towards the middle of the rail, and too high on the corners. The outside of the rail looks perfectly fine, but the inside - bleecchhh.

I don't even know what to do with this thing now. It looks fine on the outside, and the flaws are really only cosmetic, since they don't affect the performance or durability, but it's just too screwed up even to sell as a second. And that's pretty impressive, considering how lax my standards are for my own work. ;) Come on, I'm not a machine, I'm a human being, and my work WILL have that distinctly human touch. But this looks like I let my 3-year-old son sew it. 

I am debating whether to offer it to No Mother Left Behind, or put it up FFS (free for shipping) on Diaperswappers. In both cases, a needy mother would benefit and recieve a really cute sling that just happens to have too many snafus to make the retail cut. I suppose once I get some more made, I'll make up my mind.

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I am uploading a heeyooooooge video (109 MB) onto Google Videos right now, so I guess I'll ramble for awhile to kill time.

I lowered my combined shipping costs today. I've been in the online buying/selling game for 7 years, but I've never had to figure out till now how to reasonably price shipping for individual items when they are sold together. Turns out that $2 per item (especially really light items like nursing pads) is WAYYY too much. A friend of mine bought $60 worth of pads from me and got charged almost $20 shipping! I felt really bad, so I threw in two free pads to make up for it, and just now I went into my store and changed each combined shipping cost to only $1 per item.

I hate to think that I might have come across as one of those people who jips customers on shipping just to sneak in a few extra bucks. That's totally not my groove. Like I said, I've been in this game for 7 years now, and I know darn well how much certain items cost to ship, and when I see someone asking more than that amount, I pass them by. I think it's shady and underhanded to blatantly inflate shipping costs, and I'd NEVER do that. My entire store is geared towards moms who can't afford to throw down a big wad of cash for diapers or pads, and ripping them off on shipping is not what I'm about at all.

I also hate when people sneak those few extra dollars in and justify it as "handling/packaging" charges. No sirree, I'm not going to pay you $3 to tape a piece of paper onto a manila envelope and then drive half a mile to drop it off at the post office. Sorry. Heck, look at what I have to go through to mail packages:

-I can't use USPS's pickup service since there is no outgoing mailbox at my house. That means that every. single. stinkin'. little. thing I want to mail, be it a huge box or a regular ol' letter, has to be taken to the post office.

-My printer is out of ink, so I can't use Paypal's pre-made shipping labels. I don't get to just drop my packages off at the counter, nope, I have to wait in line like everyone else.

-I live on the other side of town from the post office, but I don't have a car. So what does that mean? Every time I want to mail something, I load up the stroller and WALK 20 minutes to drop it off, and then another 20 minutes back home. Try doing that twice a week in 90+ degree heat! 

Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining. I'm just trying to show that even though getting my stuff in the mail is a bit of a pain, I'd never charge people extra for it. I did consider keeping the shipping rate at $2 to make this effort seem more worthwhile (and also to cover the fees Paypal charges me every time someone pays me), but then I realized that if I don't want people to do this to me, why should I do it to them? Especially when someone buys a ton of items and gets charged $2 for each one. That's not fair! So I lowered it. It's the right thing to do.

Sheesh, my video is only half uploaded. I guess I'll hit the Stumble button a few times until it's done.

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I don't give this thing much attention, do I? I mainly write over at OpenDiary, and since I am still very overwhelmed of LJ I don't feel like really opening up here....besides, this is mainly a biz/craft blog. ;)

So let's see, what have I been up to? Well, the store is doing well....mama pads still selling like hot cakes, and nobody's touching the diapers, but I think once I get the Larges and XLs up, people will be more interested. You can practically stumble over a medium fitted in the street, after all. Hopefully I'll get them up soon - I'm on a bit of a sewing sabbatical since I'm about to take Uma (that's what Hannah decided my sewing machine should be named) into the shop. I wish it were a stitch that I didn't use so much that was messing up...but I REALLY can't get by without the zigzag stitch. I use it on just about everything! 

I've got plenty to keep myself busy with while Uma's in rehab, though. I've been brainstorming lots of fun ideas, and I'm gathering up fabrics to cut. I need to crank out a bunch more mama pads, of course, but I also want to introduce pad/wipe pouches and maybe mini wetbags for them as well. I made this for my pads back in January, and although I'll be changing the design a little for the ones I plan to sell, the concept is basically the same:

 

It holds about four or five of my 7-inch pads plus the mini-wetbag I made. I'll need to make them bigger for people who like the 10- and 13-inch pads, of course. They really come in handy when you're out of the house and don't want a bunch of pads floating around randomly inside your purse. When I'm at work, I can grab the pouch out of my purse and take it to the bathroom instead of dragging my whole purse in there.  

I'll also be making similar pouches for wipes, but I'm trying to find some cute old-fashioned diapers to make them out of, like this one I made for myself. Sorry about the blurriness, but you get the idea:



Isn't that just so stinkin' cute? I bought that diaper at Goodwill for a buck just cuz it was too adorable to pass up, and hadn't been able to think of what to do with it till it dawned on me to make it into a wipes pouch back in May. Go figure, I haven't been able to find any more diapers like this since then. ;)

I'm contemplating making some "gift sets" too. I had thought about this prior to even opening my store, but people have actually asked for something like this, so I figure I should go for it. I'm thinking of making a postpartum set with a handful of different-sized heavy pads, nursing pads, wipes, and maybe a newborn diaper; a mama pad "introductory" set with several of each length/thickness pad, a mini-wetbag, and a pad pouch; and a newborn set with a wool wrap, a diaper, a shirt, and maybe a hat and socks. I think it'd be fun to make sets that match, especially since I bought some jersey sheet sets for a song at a yard sale and I could go crazy with some tie-dye sets. I'm planning on doing some tie-dye in the spring, too, since I have a bazillion white onesies just aching to be prettied up.

I also plan on introducing pouch slings to my store lineup. They are easy to make and fun to use, and I figure they'd be a good affordable item to add to the stock for people who can't shell out $50 for a Hotsling. Here's one I made just last week for myself. Please excuse the blurriness once again, that's what you get when you shoot in a bathroom with no flash! There's my 3-year-old 35-lb. son riding comfortably. I've added a fleece rail to the bottom since this picture was taken because it tends to dig in his legs when I do the back carry.



The only problem I haven't figured out yet, though, is whether to custom-make each one to the customer's measurements, or pre-make them in different sizes, since pouch slings are not adjustable. I'm leery of doing customs of any kind, since I'm a firm believer in "what you see is what you get" and I've heard so many horror stories of WAHMs overselling themselves and then frantically playing catch-up. Most of the sling-able fabric I have right now is not enough to make larger sizes with, so I can always make pre-made ones with those, and then sell custom-made ones later on when I get more fabric. I really need to get more fabric. :)

I did draw up about ten business cards on scraps of posterboard, but I only handed out one this past weekend, and that was to a friend who didn't have my current email. There wasn't really anyone to hand them out to: only one other mom showed up, and I think she was a little freaked out by how hard I drooled over her 2-week-old baby, so I left her alone. Oh well!

Here's a pic of one of the cards. Not the most professional-looking thing in the world, but they'll do till I can afford some real ones!

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Since I sold out of mama pads in just a matter of hours after advertising my store here on LJ, I decided to bite the bullet and make a whole lot more! My serge stitch has been chewing up some of my things, so some of them got tossed in the Miracle Diapers box, but most of them are good enough to sell as seconds. I can't wait till I get enough funds together to get this stupid sewing machine fixed!

I also made some BKT doublers and regular terry doublers, and some new batches of wipes. I'm aching to get those L and XL dipes up, but with my zigzag stitch all out of wack it's just not gonna happen. Soon, though!

I had to raise my shipping costs. My printer is out of ink, so I can't use Paypal's free delivery confirmation, and I have to buy it at the PO, which costs a whopping 75 cents per package! I've added that cost to each item, but I will take it back down once I can print out Paypal's shipping labels.

So much rides on the money I'm making from selling. Not only do I need things to pull my business together completely, but I have several big packages of my personal stuff still in my friend Russell's closet in Texas that I need to have shipped to me. I'm also hoping to save up for a car. This whole idea is mostly just a fun hobby for me, but at the same time, it would be really great if I did make some money from it.

I'm thinking about hand-drawing some business cards on pieces of posterboard I have left over from making my diaper patterns. That's another thing I need money for....but I'd like to have some cards to hand out at a music festival I'm going to next weekend. I'll probably just draw a mushroom, write a quick note about what I sell, and put my website address at the bottom. 

I took pictures of all my new stock today and just got done editing them for my store. I'll be listing them later tonight after Jameson goes to bed and I can fully concentrate. But here's a sneak peek at some of the new things I have to offer:

 

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The Mushroom Tree is celebrating its SEMI-GRAND OPENING all this week! Stop by for a visit and look at my affordable cloth  diapers, mama pads, and more!

Check out some of these cute items I have listed:

(If the link above isn't working, please C&P themushroomtree.etsy.com into your browser!)

Don't forget to sign up for our mailing list to keep on top of all our new products, stocking dates, sales and more!

When I first decided to start my own business selling cloth diapers and accessories, I had a pretty idealistic image of how it would all happen. I envisioned myself spending perhaps a few hours a day sewing, and working on a cute little website in the meantime. I thought it would be so easy and fun to pull together. Little did I realize how much WORK it would be, and how much time it would actually take!

Chasing after a toddler, plus having housewife duties to keep up with, sometimes meant that I didn't get to sit down to work for days or even weeks at a time. Sewing machine malfunctions or breakdowns meant that I couldn't create some of the items I'd planned on selling. Computer problems kept me from making my website look how I wanted it to. And all the other ins and outs of life meant that my "easy and fun" little business became a lot of hard work that I often couldn't find the time to do.

Sometimes the thought crossed my mind that perhaps this was too difficult, that I'd bitten off more than I could chew, that I couldn't handle this. But I'd invested too much time, money, energy and ideas into this to just give up when the going got tough. I knew that I really wanted to do this, and I hoped that the end result would be worth all the trouble.

I've learned to roll with the punches, so to speak, and change my outlook according to what life throws at me. Now that I am finally ready to open my business, it's not quite what I had imagined it to be, but it is close enough, and I can keep working at it to make it better.

I've put a lot of love into the products I'm selling, and I hope people appreciate them and come back for more. I suppose that's the best I can hope for, in the end!

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