Crafting For Fun and Profit With Two Ladies of the Night

I have a confession to make: I'm a craft junkie. If I go to buy beading wire, I'll leave the store with rubber stamps, soapmaking supplies, and God knows what else. At a tag sale, I'm the crazy one grabbing the old buttons. Keep me away from fabric stores, yarn shops, and paperies— too dangerous. Luckily, I have a friend who is as fascinated by crafts as I am. She gets a thrill out of perusing my craft stash and reveling in my clutter.

One day after surveying my collection of supplies, Fiona suggested we should actually use this stuff. We started making jewelry, since we both had tons of extra beads lying around. We'd get together after work—by day I’m a publicist, she’s a substitute teacher. Fiona would bring her kids to play with mine; we'd feed them dinner, start them on their homework, and get down to business. I turned my dining room into a makeshift craft room. We made necklaces of all shapes and lengths—delicate silk-strung lariats, chunky multi-strand numbers, intricatebeaded flower creations.

One evening—one of our many eight-to-eleven sessions—we were working on a chunky necklace, and we started thinking how nice it would look as a handbag strap. Before you know it, we had whisked away the beads and hauled out our sewing machines. I had a huge stash of fabrics, so we sorted through to see which designs would lend themselves to purses. Instead of just copying patterns, we decided to create our own. With each bag that we made, we'd discover things that we should do a little differently with the next one. Eventually, we ended up with seven great styles of bags and launched Sadie Pulitzer Handbags online (sadiepulitzer.com ).

We now needed to decide what to do with all of our handcrafted treasures. Given as gifts, our stuff had elicited a rave response. Friends kept saying we should open a shop, but a retail venture was of no interest. But, what if we could have a shop at home? That would be more manageable and more fun. We came up with the idea of hosting a pre-Mother's Day Gift Sale. We'd sell our items and encourage other like-minded women to sell their wares, too. It would also be a great excuse to reconnect with friends. We'd hold it during the weekend so the husbands could watch the kids, and we’d serve baked goodies and punch (alcoholic, of course). It was easy to morph my dining room into a boutique.

When we approached our friends about selling their crafts, they were thrilled with the idea. Inga would sell her pottery; Susie would make funky marble magnets; Lisa would offer hand-painted note cards; and Haruna would take orders for handsewn children's clothing. It was shaping up to be a wonderful social link for a group of women with common interests but who had never crossed paths in this way before.

Invitations went out to family, friends, neighbors, classmates, colleagues, and more. We worked furiously on a plethora of crafty gifts such as greeting cards, sexy aprons, soaps, and embroidered baby items. As the date of the party approached, we became nervous that no one would show, but by Sunday afternoon, we had hosted several hundred people, had a good giggle, drank a lot of punch, and made a nice profit to boot. Now we can’t wait until Christmas to do it again.