A friend of my husbands has recently gone into the cake making business and makes cupcakes and celebration cakes (if anyone would care to take a look her website is here: Victoria Rose ) and I got to thinking that that would be a lovely thing to do full time.
I make a pretty good cupcake myself, it's the decorating that I particularly like though. Piping the swirls of buttercream and selecting the sprinkles, or maybe a sugarpaste flower or two, is very cathartic. But even though Hubby thinks mine are good enough to sell commercially, I don't think I could. I baked for a friends wedding last year; 29 cupcakes were required for a small wedding party, but since the cakes were to be driven up to Scotland, I needed to make 39 in case of accidents. But to be able to provide 39 perfect little cupcakes I ended up baking about 60 of the little beggars! The wedding theme was white and purple, so half had white frosting and purple flowers, with the other half had purple fosting and white flowers. I iced the last one at around 3.30am and went to bed with fingers stained purple from the paste colouring and edible glitter smeared on my cheeks. The cakes looked beautiful, went down well and I was glad that I was able to contribute towards making my friends wedding a lovely day to remember ... but the experience also taught me that cake making, as a profession, is not my calling.
Cross stich however, now you're talking. I could happily do that all day and would absolutely love to have an embroidery shop where I could sit in the corner, quietly stitching, stopping only to serve customers wanting to buy floss, linens or other stitching related items. Oh and maybe to make the occasional cuppa. Happy days indeed!
Of course there are more practical things to consider when running a business, but I thought that there's no reason why I couldn't do something locally - maybe I could sell some stitched cards at a local table sale or similar. So this is why last night, armed with my box of silks, I devised some small embroideries suitable for card blanks. I have a selection of designs suitable for bookmarks and I thought of making a few keyrings too. I found details of a table sale near me and my intention is to secure a pitch for December 3rd. I'll be stitching like a mad woman from this evening on and aim to produce one item each evening. That should give me enough items to display. I also thought about taking some of my other finished work and putting a sign up about taking commissions. How much would one charge fpr a commission though? I read someones blog who suggested charging a penny a stitch, more if three quarter stitches were involed. I think I will probably have a little think about what I would be willing to pay for the item and take it from there.
So I am very excited for my new venture. I probably won't make much money from it, but it will be something I enjoy doing so ... result!
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