Last Weekend for Holiday Shoppers

Get your Christmas gifts while you can!

Just a quick reminder that this is the last weekend to order your Jayne hat or buttons in order to receive them in time for the holidays! Of course, my fellow Canadians still have a couple extra days left. ;)

I will still be knitting and taking orders, so no worries to those of you ordering non-holiday items.

Jayne Hat Review at DrFaulken's Very Fine Blog

A nice little surprise awaited Ma Cobb's Hat Shoppe this week! Earlier in the week I got a message from a Browncoat to let me know that he had gotten his hat, and that he loved it! But that's not all! He also sent me a link to his blog where he had done an in-depth review of the experience of opening his Very Fine Package. And now I present it for all to read at DrFaulken's Very Fine Blog! A very big thanks to DrFaulken for the kind words!And I must follow that up with another happy Browncoat in his Very Fine Hat. This one sent to me by greg of blindpigpress.etsy.com a fellow Etsian! Check out his shiny buttons and prints!

Thanks to greg for letting me borrow this one! :) I love to see happy Browncoats in Jayne hats!

The hats have been flying right out of my hands this past week, and I think there will be a couple more crazy weeks of Christmas shoppers before it gets to be too late to ship in time for the holidays. I'm trying to take it all in stride. Despite being the busiest that I have ever been, I am having quite a good time running around like a crazy person. My local postal workers have come accustomed to seeing me everyday at the post office, and they all know what is in my little boxes and envelopes. I am "the hat girl". Heehee. Nothin' wrong with that. :)

Milestones

Howdy friends of Ma Cobb,

Things have been bustling around here! I'm fair certain that the Christmas shopping season is in full-swing here on the cortex... or at least at my little shoppe. I'm not nearly as prepared as I wanted to be, but I think that's only because I have underestimated just how busy things can get. But I am wholly enjoying the busy-ness (business? lol). And I'm not frantic... yet. Also: I am so grateful for early Christmas shoppers! Thank you all!

So a couple of little milestones happened this week. First of all I wore out my first pair of knitting needles! Well, okay, it's not like they're completely worn down to the nubs or anything, but they got a couple little cracks and started splitting a bit and kept catching the yarn, kind of like a hang-nail. My diy patch-job with pink nailpolish really wasn't cutting it, so I decided that with 300+ Jayne hats under their belts, it was probably time to retire my much-loved needles.

Which brings me to my second milestone: 300 Jayne hats! Yes folks, that's right! I have passed the 300 mark! There are over 300 Browncoats walking around in the world wearing one of my cunning knit Jayne hats! Well maybe they're not wearing them right this minute, but... you get my point. The number isn't completely accurate, as I didn't start keeping track until sometime in 2005 when I started selling them (at that point I had already knit a good little number for friends and local Browncoats).

Anyway, I thought that was an interesting tidbit, for those who like to keep track. It's funny, but 300 seems simultaneously like soooo many, and yet not that many at all. Is that weird? I've been doing this for awhile now, and yet I can't even imagine what all those hats would look like if, say, they all got together to hang out, or something... But then again, maybe my sleepiness is making my brain-pan a little whimsical. So perhaps I will turn in for the evening.

See you in the world,
Love,
Ma Cobb

Beyond the status quo

It's funny: just when you start hoping things will pick up, they do, and then you start hoping that things will settle down. Or maybe it's just a case of never being satisfied with the status quo? Perhaps.

Mostly I've been busy shipping hats, which involves the very fun "trip to the post office." It seems like in the past month every time I stop by the post office after work there's a line. All summer long it was like a ghost-town, but now it's starting to pick up. It makes me wonder if people are getting ready for xmas already. And that scares me a bit, cuz I know I said I like to be prepared, but I feel like I'm falling behind already. Like I should have dozens of hats knit up and waiting for the rush that is sure to come. Maybe I'm being paranoid (it's entirely possible).

So I decided that I need to step up my hat-production. Which sadly, sigh, means more TV watching (Pushing Daisies starts tonight! I can't wait! But I guess I've already missed Chuck. Oh well). 'Tis the season, as they say. So if you need me, I'll be on the couch, staring at the boob-tube, anticipating xmas.

I hear Christmas is coming...

So this will be my first Christmas/Holiday season on etsy.com, and I'm very excited to see how things go! I know I have heard a lot of rumbling about the holiday season in the etsy community (namely the forums, where I lurk) and it seems like sales usually go either 1 of 2 ways. You're either caught completely off-guard and end up scrambling around for a good 2 month period. Or nothing much changes. Last year, Christmas on just my website was quite bustling, but it was pretty perfectly balanced between too busy and not busy enough. So I'm hoping that will also be the case this year with the addition of my etsy shoppe. But only time will tell.

People probably think I'm crazy to start thinking about Christmas already, but I would always rather be well-prepared then run around doing the scrambling thing. As a favourite character on Dead Like Me once said (and I'm paraphrasing here): "I'm always early for everything so I never have to run. People who run look stupid." "What about runners?" "Especially runners." So yeah, my thoughts exactly, Daisy Adair. ;)

So to prepare for the holidays, today I made about a million little tags, and stamped all my address labels. It was calming repetitive work, and maybe I'm crazy for liking that, but it's just what I enjoy. I think I'm just procrastinating because I should be knitting a Jayne hats "just in case" I start getting an influx of Jayne hat orders. but heck, I don't want to be too optimistic.