hotwaxart art & crafts, made in Scotland

You’d be forgiven for looking at this post title and thinking to yourself “Christmas? It’s JULY for heaven’s sake!” but in actual fact the season of Christmas shopping officially begins today as Harrods and Selfridges open their Christmas departments!

If Harrods and Selfridges are a little out of your budget, you might instead like to think about planning for your handmade Christmas gifts.  After all, some gifts can’t be made overnight (handmade soap, for example, takes six weeks to cure after you’ve made it) so there’s no harm in thinking ahead.

Here are my top 5 easy handmade gift ideas to get you started…

1. Proper Soap

There is nothing more fabulous than proper handmade soap. You have total control over the size, shape, colour and fragrance – and you’ll know exactly where the ingredients came from and what they are, so no nasty hidden chemicals to worry about.  Soap making isn’t as complicated as you might think, although it’s not suitable for children due to one of the base ingredients being caustic soda, which is very hazardous.   Have a look at this soap making recipe from the Kirsty’s Homemade Home website.

If you’re not mad on the idea of working with caustic soda, try melt & pour glycerine soap instead.  With melt & pour soap, you start with a ready-made block of ‘base’ soap (white or transparent in appearance, unfragranced), then melt it down again in batches to add your own choice of fragrance and colour, before pouring it into moulds to set again. Not quite as satisfying as making soap from scratch, but you can use jelly & chocolate moulds to make some brilliant soap shapes and still have full control over colour and fragrance.  Read all about it here.

2. Bath Salts

Sticking with a cosmetic theme for the time being, if soap seems like too much of a faff then why not try bath salts? There’s a long history in salt water being good for all manner of ailments, so bath salts should be well received by all.

The process is fairly simple – get epsom salts & sea salt  (or other salt of your choice), add your choice of fragrance and colour, then pour into a pretty bottle or jar.  More detailed instructions are here.

3. Chocolate/Sweet Gifts

You don’t have to be a masterchef in the kitchen to produce some yummy Christmas treats to gift.  Here are some simple recipes that ANYONE can follow that are guaranteed to be well received by anyone with a sweet tooth!  Of course, I’d strongly recommend making some practice batches up for sampling, of course … and feel free to send me some samples if you’d like my expert opinion 

Here are some recipe links to check out…
Good Housekeeping Homemade Holiday Food Gifts
Martha Stewart Edible Gifts

 4. Elderberry Wine

If you have Elderberries near you, you could make your very own Elderberry Wine to bottle up and give to your friends and family!  You’ll find lots of recipes on this thread on the Money Saving Expert website.

5. Personalised Calendar

This really is a very personal gift for a family – create a calendar decorated with pictures and comments about things that are important to them.  Here’s a good video guide on the eHow website and you’ll find lots of printable calendars online (search Google for ‘printable calendars 2012′).

Putting a price on your crafts can be one of the hardest things to do and many people worry about pricing their goods too highly that they lose sales.  But price your goods too low and not only are you undervaluing your own work but you’re also undervaluing handmade arts & crafts as a whole.

So, here is a popular and sensible pricing strategy to help you work out a retail cost for your products:

It’s really quite simple – you need to take into account the cost of your materials, the cost of your time, the cost of your sales & marketing etc. to find a wholesale price, then add a retail markup on top to find your true retail price.

Why do you need a wholesale price?  At the moment, you may sell direct to your customers – that’s great.  But in the future, you may find yourself in a position when a high street shop or another online store wants to buy products from you to sell onto their customers (known as a ‘wholesale customer’) .  They will add a retail markup to the price they pay to you – often, they will sell a product at retail for double the price they paid you for it, to cover their own costs & make a profit.  They will not expect you to charge your customers less than they are charging their customers for the same product – this is known as ‘undercutting’ and is a great way to lose your wholesale customers quickly.

So, if you currently sell your jewellery for £10 a piece which allows you to break even (or make a small profit) and you are approached by a business who would like to buy your products wholesale, you’d have two choices:

1. Sell your products at £10 wholesale.  Your new wholesale customer may then want to sell them online for £20 and they will expect you to do the same.  Your existing customers will come to your site only to find your prices have doubled overnight!  How well do you think that will go down?!
2. Reduce your wholesale price so that your wholesale customer can sell the products for your current retail price of £10.  It is likely that your wholesale customer will therefore want to buy your products for £5.  Is that still going to be profitable for you?

Here is an example of pricing a piece of jewellery:

Materials
Cost of base material (metal, resin, etc.)
Findings (e.g. chains, clasps, jump rings)
Packaging (e.g. do you package in an organza bag? velvet pouch? fancy wrapping paper? gift tags?)

Time
This can be tricky!  You have to set yourself a reasonable hourly rate – this will depend on various factors, including your experience and salary expectations – so it’s a personal figure.  But don’t undervalue yourself and for goodness sakes don’t pay yourself less than national minimum wage!!  Once you know your hourly rate, simply take a note of how long you spend on each item – use a timer if necessary – and work out your time cost as hourly rate x time spent.  If you make your products in batches, you could time how long it takes to make the whole batch, then divide it by how many products are in each batch.
So, if I set my hourly rate to £15 per hour and it took me half an hour to make my item then my time cost is 0.5 x £15 = £7.50.

The cost of a sale
Make sure you cover your known costs here, e.g. Paypal transaction fees, commission to selling agent (e.g. Etsy).  You should also consider your other business costs – e.g. website hosting fees.  It can be hard to split that into a “cost per sale”, so just try to average it out roughly, thinking about your sales expectations (or history) over a monthly or yearly period.  You may also choose to include postage & packing charges in this, but some prefer to build that into a separate postage fee that is charged to the customer.

Add these totals together and you have an initial wholesale price.

Marketing & business growth
If you want your business to grow (and I assume you do!) then you’ll need to give yourself a budget for growth.  The amount can vary depending on your type of business, but it’s common to add a figure like 10% or 20% onto your wholesale price.  So, if your wholesale price has come in at £10, and you have decided to give yourself 10% for marketing & growth costs, you would add 10% of £10, which is £1 and makes your new wholesale price £11.

Retail markup
As I mentioned earlier, it’s not unusual for a wholesale customer to retail a product at double the wholesale price.  This will depend on the type of products you sell, so you should do your own research to find out what a reasonable markup is for your niche.
If doubling is the norm for your industry and your wholesale cost is £11, then your retail cost becomes £11 x 2 = £22.

This might sound like an awful lot of work to simply come up with a selling price!  But if you want your crafting business to stay alive in the long-term, it’s important that you make sure you are covering your costs and giving yourself room to grow.

I decided to have a bash at doing a figurine today …

Terracotta figurine

Still a bit shiny and wet in this photo, but you’ll get the gist of it!  Really enjoyed doing this, so I’ll definitely be making some more!

First time I’ve hollowed out anything I’ve made before, which was a scary experience.  Nothing more terrifying that taking a figuring you’re quite happy with, then slicing it in two with a bit of cheesewire!!

Have been playing a bit more with the clay today and have produced … a mushroom candle holder and a ‘rustic’ bowl …

The foliage in the bowl will burn off during firing and hopefully leave a nice imprint behind!

Am really still trying to get used to working with the terracotta clay, but I’m enjoying it so far.

Still haven’t fired my green man yet, as I’m too scared of breaking it!!

When I’m not crafting, I’m actually a freelance web developer.  I’ve worked in web development for more than 10 years on everything from small online retailer websites to tourist information websites to large blue chip investment company websites.

I like to spend time getting to know my clients and their businesses quite well, therefore I tend to limit the number of clients I take on in order to give each of them a good amount of attention.   Now that I’m coming to the end of my studies at college, I have a bit more time on my hands and I’m looking to take on some additional clients.

My expertise and passion lies in helping small businesses and startups to get online (or move from one of the ‘freebie’ websites to a proper system!) for the smallest amount of money.  If that sounds appealing to you, please read on!

I’ve literally just finished creating a Facebook page for my web development services which includes a very special setup offer for ‘fans’ – please pop along to the page and have a look!

When the page gets to 100 fans, I’ll be adding some more ‘special offer’ services to help give your online presence a boost, so please spread the word!

If you want to have a more general chat about your online business, please drop me a line on my other website.

I came across the Red Tape Challenge today and think it looks interesting! The idea is that the Government is aiming to cut some red tape by getting views on what is and isn’t working in terms of regulations.

They are tackling it one sector at a time and the current sector is Retail.   Amongst other things, they’re looking at Hallmarking – so this should be of interest to any precious metal jewellers out there!

I used to make soaps but eventually stopped doing it because I spent more time doing paperwork and calculating % quantities of essential oil allergens than I did making soap.

Worth keeping an eye on this, I think! You can read about each red tape challenge and leave your comments on the website.

My brother writes short stories and the latest stories he’s working on are based around a Green Man-inspired villain.

So today I decided to have a go of making a Green Man from clay

I’m quite pleased with it, for a first attempt!  The leaves will burn off in the firing, [hopefully] leaving a nice imprint of the leaf texture behind!

Well the pottery was a partial success – more about that later!

But in the meantime I’ve been making some encaustic cufflinks to complement the pendants and rings further down the page.

They are available to purchase in the online shop – only one of each unique pair is available!

Well, we’ve had a productive day! We’ve built a basic storage area for drying wood and have dug out the pit kiln!

The aim was to dig 60cm deep, but seemingly we have lots of rocks in our garden so we couldn’t get any deeper than 40cm.  So, we put a layer of bricks around the outside and raised the ground with the earth we’d dug out, until it was a 60cm pit.

The pit is made of an initial few inches of fine sawdust, paper and twigs.  Then the pottery went on top of that, along with some sea salt and veg that was past its best! After that we put alternating layers of fine sawdust mixed with more coarse wood shavings (like hamster bedding), paper and twigs.  On top of that were small-ish logs (driftwood) and more twigs.  We used barbecue lighter fluid on the top layer before lighting it.  It took a few attempts, but we got it lit in the end!!

Here are a couple of photos…

The pit is still smoking as I type, so it’ll be tomorrow until I see how the pottery turns out!

I was chuffed to bits today to get 250 red bricks for free via West Fife ReCycle, which were left over from someone’s building job.  Absolutely brilliant, as it’ll let me make a storage area for drying wood out to use in my pottery pit kiln project!

The other thing I really needed for the kiln was sawdust.  I got some coarse sawdust from Wilkinsons yesterday but the all-important FINE sawdust has been provided by Scottish Wood, who have said I can come and fill my bags up with sawdust during their lunch hour when the saw isn’t running.  FAB!  Filled four big black bags today, so that’ll certainly keep me going…