All of the hard work by me and my elves the last few weeks has paid off, and we have scored a Christmas #1 on Amazon!
At the moment when you see the wooden letter baubles on Amazon, they have a little orange flag with them that says “#1 Best Seller”:
I’m really happy about that! But of course, it’s only a Christmas #1 in a sub-sub-sub category of Amazon (i.e. “Handmade Ornaments”), and at the moment it’s still #9 in the “Handmade Products” category:
One day I’d like to get to number 1 in that Handmade Products category. Especially because at the moment #5 in the chart is a joke “million piece jigsaw puzzle”:
I suspect that people buy those as Secret Santa gifts for colleagues, and I have a strong suspicion that their colleagues would prefer to receive a nice wooden bauble rather than a plastic bag full of sawdust 🙂
Having a craft business means that the “Christmas rush” starts early. Normally I begin sending boxes of my lasercut gifts off to Amazon in September, but this year my existing lasercutters both broke, so I had to order a new one – but it couldn’t be delivered until mid-October. Since then I’ve been frantically trying to catch up with my cutting schedule, making alphabet baubles:
This is what I look like for most of the day at the moment:
However there’s so much to do that it’s not just my Laser Lair that gets full of baubles. The rest of the house becomes part of my little factory…and the rest of my family become my little Christmas factory elves. Here is one of them putting ribbons in the baubles:
LaserSister factory elf #1
…and here are two more making up boxes and putting the labels on them:
LaserSister Christmas factory elves #2&3
Hopefully we’ll get all of them sent off to Amazon in time for the Christmas rush!
Click here to see if I managed to get them to the warehouse on time, or if they are sold out. (The link shoud go to my Amazon Handmade page, so you can get a live view of the baubles.)
Woo, get me – I’ve been trying out 21st-century technology today, and have discovered how to put a lasercutting video onto TikTok.
I’m not sure it was worth all of the effort, to be honest. I’m hoping that TikTok goes away, and that I never have to interact with it again. Either that, or I’m hoping that as more middle-aged people (like me) start using it, TikTok will realise how much people hate the bossiness of an app that immediately starts playing video and audio content as soon as you open it up. Ugh.
Anyway, in an attempt to train TikTok’s algorithms into at least showing me more relevant looping streams of video, today I’ve been trying to teach it that I like crafts and art – especially laser-cut and polymer clay art.
Below is the actual video I uploaded. My first ever attempt at uploading some content on TikTok. It was such a giant, convoluted hassle that I might never bother again. But just in case I do, I wrote a reminder to myself on my KayVincent.com website, vaguely showing how I managed it.
It was a speeded-up video clip showing my laser cutter in action, cutting this ‘M’ Christmas tree bauble decoration:
Maybe I’ll stick to YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram, and leave TikTok for the kids. Dunno.
Sander sadness…
In the meantime, the reason I’ve been making lasercutting TikTok videos instead of sanding the decorations is that my sander is broken. It’s the second sander this year that has spontaneously conked, so I’m going to hunt down the receipt to see if it’s still under warranty. In the meantime I’ve ordered another sander, but have gone for a more industrial model, rather than the (literal) home or garden version. Hopefully by Friday my little sanding station (in the garage) will be back up and running. Because I definitely don’t want to be hand-sanding hundreds of wooden Christmas decorations.
