Settled, but still setting up-and an apology for the last two years

  Well. We are in a gorgeous farmhouse, in beautiful northern NSW, and for the first time in about three years I can start to believe that we’ll stay here, in the area we’re in, for a long time.

   Our loose ends have been tidied up, everything that needed to be done has been done, and we can start looking at the present, not the future.

   Two years ago we took off for nine months of travelling, and since then we’ve lived in three different houses in three different states. My husband has studied full-time, i’ve studied full-time, we’ve renovated and sold a house, and then of course there’s three interstate moves. All done while home educating five children under ten.

Which leads to the apology for my scattered-ness regarding Pepper Place over the past two years. All i’ve had time to do is attend to the orders that have dribbled in via word of mouth, and go to a handful of markets. Of course, i’ve made sure that everything i’ve made has been impeccable, and endeavoured to provide excellent customer service, but the rest of it is sadly neglected. I have people emailing to ask whether my patterns are ready for them to buy yet (since I mentioned I was writing them up over two years ago), i’m selling new products at markets that haven’t had more than a quick mention online, like my tie-dye, and to an outsider my online presence must look like absolute chaos. Which reflects my life up until now, really!

  Now i’ve finally got the chance to start fixing it all up. I’m not ready to reopen yet, as i’m still setting up my new house and life, but i’m starting to feel the urge to get everything in order. Slowly but steadily, i’ll be oiling up the organised, smoothly-running machine that was Pepper Place back in Queensland, 2011, before it got rusty and bits started to fall off.

  AND……………I may even finish the patterns sometime this decade! I’ll update specifically about those next. Right now, I have a box of nappies to unpack and put into something more secure than a cardboard box-I tend to have nightmares about unpacking $2000 worth of stock to find it’s been used as a rodent nest and is now worthless.

Launching back into it

  Although I never really stop working, certain things slow me down. And after many of those things over the past two months (yes, the cast is off!) it feels rather good to get a decent stack of pieces sorted and begun upon. It’s like making order from chaos, and i’ve always liked that.

Welcome to the Pepper Place sweatshop

  You would think that with the husband having ten days off, we’d have been doing a bit of relaxing. But apart from climbing Mount Schank it’s been nose to the grindstone. The benefits of having a home business!

  Some of you may know that my husband cuts for Pepper Place, as well as assisting with snapping, clipping, thread trimming and other duties that don’t involve touching a machine. And when I gave him the task recently of cutting all of the nappy fabric I had stashed in my storeroom, in the form of a huge itemised list, he took it as a personal challenge and finished in a very short span of time.

57 pocket inners

  He then started organising stacks of tasks for me. Every evening he’d pull out something, and announce ‘Tomorrow, you need to do 20 pocket openings’ or ‘sew around 15 covers’. And when i’d finished that he’d have something else ready for me. Meanwhile he’s taken care of most of the housework and cooking, not to mention the parenting, so I have no excuse whatsoever to get up from my machines. He’s even delivered cups of tea at regular intervals!

 The only view my kids had of me for a whole week 

As a result i’ve gotten an astonishing amount done. I actually finally have a really decent amount of stock on hand. I have two boxes of pockets and covers completed, and a shelf full of more in the cupboard in various states of half-doneness. My problem since i’ve gotten here and become full-time parent is that I haven’t had the time to do both the marketing and then fill the resulting orders without having a meltdown, so i’ve kept quiet on the marketing front and concentrated on getting stock made. Only having 1-2 orders at a time trickling in is much easier to handle than juggling 6-8, which was the standard amount before we left Queensland last June!

A very impressive cupboard, with over 80 nappies in various stages

Beautiful results! 

  As it looks like we’re facing another interstate move next month though, I might have to remain quiet on the marketing until we get there-as expert as we are at packing, it still takes a fair chunk of time!

Update-Where am I?!

  My apologies for not updating this blog-very naughty of me, being a business blog and all.

I am currently not trading-mainly, because I don't have my stuff! We packed up our house two months ago, ready for a trip interstate to visit family, planning to head back up to Queensland and move back onto our acreage. Then it sold. Which is absolutely awesome, as it had been on the market for over a year, but it's thrown our plans out completely!

  As we had no idea where to move to, we've decided to grab this opportunity and do some travelling-us and five kids under 8 in a tent, should be bliss! Right now we've got no idea where we're going, where we're going to end up or how long we're going to be. Kind of scary, but really exciting.

  So for now, I am most definitely on holiday, and i'll let you all know when I make it back-wherever I make it 'back' to!

xxKelly.

Busyness.

   I realised the other day it has been over a month since I posted here. That’s somewhat intentional, for the last few months i’ve been sewing as much as I can, and blogging about it has taken second place to actually doing it. And as I keep packaging up and posting off orders triumphantly, and completely forgetting to photograph them to prove that something is actually happening in my workspace, here is my busy room.  Two orders waiting for topstitching and labels.

The neglected scraps pile-sorting and tidying has also taken second place to working.

The fantastic cupboard, my pride and joy-this used to be my shelf for outer fabrics. Note there are none anymore-all of this is cut, reinforced and snapped, and the bottom halves of the piles just need elastic and topstitching. Hundreds of nappies, all at least half done, yay for us! I still have a few metres of random fleeces and minkys, but virtually everything is on it’s way to being something rather than sitting gathering dust.

The last of the order rack-this had eight bags on it last week. Now that was a juggling act, and I did drop a few balls in the organisational sense. Nothing major, but phew, i’m glad it’s manageable again!

You remember my sewing room?

And how lovely and organised and shiny it was?

This, sadly, is closer to what it usually looks like. This is a bit extreme, being the night before my twins’ sixth birthday, after days of frantic creating by everyone else in the family. We do handmade presents, and this is the result. After the presents have been packed away.

I know, I know, you can still see the floor so it’s not THAT bad-but it’s about as bad as I can handle it getting. Mostly it’s the stacking of stuff over every available surface-when I can’t see the sewing machine when i’m sitting in front of it, my brain implodes, and the kids nod and say to each other ‘Mummy is frothing at the mouth again’ while I throw all of their stuff into a pile and tell them that what isn’t gone in five minutes is going in the bin.

Deep breaths!

My bigger, better sewing room (aka showing off again)

My little room was getting a bit crowded, and the kids toyroom was getting too messy. The solution was obvious-swap to give me more room and the kids less. In Queensland terms this is a sleepout-a long narrow room that’s sort of like a boxed-in veranda. I’ve been in here for about six weeks, and it’s made a big difference to the amount I can make. I’m an organisational freak, and everything here has a place and it’s in it (if the kids haven’t raided my stuff), so I can relax and just get on with it.

I just need a corkboard for that lovely bare wall-and the husband has nabbed some leftover cork tiles from his work to make me one. Isn’t he a dear?

Cutting/snapping table-our old dining table. This has been the husband’s domain as he’s taken over cutting. I would have a waiting list if it wasn’t for the useful man, I couldn’t keep up with all the orders lately by myself. 

A bare curtain rail has become the designated order area-orders in progress are hung here, labelled with all of their details and filled with the current progress. This is the best system, as I can see at a glance what’s the most urgent. Really big orders still need to go in the cupboard though-I tried to hang 30 EasyFlats up there and the rail nearly snapped.

A desk! It’s been on the to-buy list for a while because I really need a designated office area (rather than shoving receipts in a drawer and having drifts of paper covering the kitchen bench). A friend gave me this one as she didn’t want it anymore, and it’s awesome. Thanks Shelley! Maybe I can begin my bookwork for this financial year soon………. 

I’ve also commandeered a couch from the lounge room-this way the husband will sit and read and chat with me of an evening, which makes me happier to stay in longer and get more work done.

And when he wanders off there’s always Ralph-but he doesn’t talk much.

Holidays

I won’t be taking any orders or doing any email related stuff (except for current orders if needed) until the 5th of January.

Happy holidays everyone!

Emergency night nappy

Due to the recent move, we’ve been cleaning out. And one area that definitely needed an overhaul was the nappy stash-our tendency to use everything until it is well and truly dead meant we had way too many nappies with dead elastic, worn PUL, and honeycombed inserts.

My over-enthusiastic clearing out meant that my son went to bed tonight in his very last clean, dry nappy. He is 20 months old and has never worn a disposable, and he isn’t going to begin tonight. Hence, some last-minute sewing.

The result? A woolen pocket nappy from a well-felted old woolen blanket.

 

The inner is suedecloth (natural inners don’t work well on him) with a welt-style pocket opening. This type of opening is growing on me-it took long enough for me to work out, based on how to do a welt pocket opening in a sewing book of mine.

 

And two seconds Pepper trifolds to stuff-the overlocker was playing up on these, back before it had it’s service and broken stuff was discovered and fixed. I hate unpicking overlocking, so they’ve been sitting there for months-tonight was a good excuse to just go over the dodgy bits.

So tonight my youngest will be clothed up and comfy. I often wonder just how people do without knowing how to sew, with all the things I end up having to make or mend-but then I suppose they get the fun of buying stuff, which I definitely don’t get enough of!

If anyone knows where I can get some quality new woolen fabric from please let me know-this is the second one i’ve made and they work like a dream. I’d love to get the whole testing process begun for them.

More new fabrics

My parcel postie will get to know me quite well I think-I love getting mail to my door. The decadence! The luxury! Well, over a year of having no mail service certainly makes it seem that way.
These are all high-quality polyester PULs-very trim, soft and flexible.

The dragons are my favourite-it can be so difficult to get nice fabrics for boys that are truly boyish and don’t involve camo/pirates/machinery.
These have been uploaded to the customs album-go and have a drool look!

My sewing room

It has been over two years since i’ve had my own sewing room. At our last house it was particularly bad, due to the fact the seven of us were living in a 72sq/m house (it was on 62 acres, which made up for it somewhat).  There, my table was stuffed in between the dining table and wall and was also used as the computer/paperwork table. I had a fabric cupboard in the laundry, boxes under the bed and in an awkward corner of the kitchen……….it was definitely not conducive to a happy and productive workspace.

So you can imagine how much I am appreciating this. I found myself taking a cup of chai in there the other day so I could just sit and marvel and grin stupidly at my luck.

It’s still slightly chaotic (I can’t really justify doing any more unpacking  and organising in there while we’re eating with spoons because I can’t find the forks) but it’s such a fantastic place to be. It’s bright and airy, but with no glare due to the large awnings, and well-lit at night.  And as it’s the room the front door opens onto I have a professional space for people to come and pick up or discuss orders, with no intrusion onto home life.

And I now have TWO cupboards-I pinched the pantry from our last house and there’s built-ins here. Here’s (most of) the fabric stash.

Scraps boxes on top.

Top shelf-cottons and some knits.

2nd shelf-flannelette, cotton velour, suedecloth and cords.

3rd shelf-dress-ups fabrics for the kids, plus my eldest daughters sewing box and fabric. She’s six and keeps referring to this room as ‘our sewing room’ (that’s here in the top two photos).

Bottom shelf-fleeces, minkys and faux furs.

Misccellaneous stuff drawers and market display basket on top.

Top shelf-packaging, boxes of labels and trims and shoebox of overlocking threads.

2nd shelf-working boxes of snaps, PULs and minky cuts. The really, really EXPENSIVE shelf.

3rd shelf-I’ve lost a thingy for this shelf, so until I find it it’s wonky, so a bag of stock and Malden Mills fleece.

Bottom shelf-microfleece and more fleece, plus some chenilles and cottons.

Plus another 3 big bags and about four plastic crates of other things like bulk bamboo, PUL,  suedecloth, and clothes to repurpose, as well as a couple of boxes of yarn and crochet gear. I am REALLY looking forward to my next trip to IKEA because i’ll be able to have everything completely organised and perfectly set up.

Now, I haven’t just been unpacking. I decided to attack my UFO (unfinished objects) box. I am seriously shocked at just how much having a decent, well-organised space has improved my output after only a few days. And look, I can sew more than just nappies!

Pinwale cord/cotton drill skirt for my eldest daughter. The back is also two contrasting panels.

Pinwale cord pants for my twins to share (there was only one pair part-done in there, so share they must because it’s too late in our Queensland winter to bother with making another pair from scratch!)

And I found the outer for this cut out, so my toddler now has another pocket nappy. Which he’s in desperate need of-only having the power to run a twin-tub at our last place has destroyed all of his nappies. Now i’ve been able to pull out the automatic washing machine it’s finally worth making him some new nappies, as they won’t get wrecked.

Moving time!

Well, after a busy few weeks, including a near-sellout pocket stocking (four out of five sold within the hour, woohoo!) i'm up for another busy week-i've just found out today that we move house on Saturday. Short notice, but we didn't want to sit around waiting another week!

It shouldn't disrupt things too much-we still own our property so there's no mad rush to get out and get it ready for the next owners. In fact, I should be able to up production pretty substantially-especially as i'll have my very own sewing room. I haven't had that for over two years, and as that was in Tasmania and as the room was in sub-zero temperatures a lot of the time, that doesn't count.

Now, back to organising for it! I won't have internet on there for a while so I won't be online as much (a completely positive thing!) so replies may be delayed, but they will come.

ecoWeekend

Late last year I decided that this year i'd save my market efforts for events targeting the 'right' sort of crowd. The standard markets are OK, but most people are there for cheap vegies and a quick browse at the rest. The ecoWeekend was the first greenie event, and it seems as if my decision was a good one.

I've just finished the small orders I received, I have demos booked and gift registires set up, and I generally had a really good time. The traffic was slow but steady, giving me lots of time to really talk to people-mainly about nappies, but also about a huge range of DIY, self-sufficiency topics. Well worth if financially, and definitely well worth it for entertainment-I don't think i'd have cared if I didn't sell a thing! No pics of the stall unfortunately as my camera is still getting fixed, but it looked great-if I do say so myself! The time spent on presentation and organisation really seems to have paid off.

There are some great programs happening in the Bundaberg area that are worth checking out
Low Carbon Diet-find easy ways to reduce your emissions, save money and support local business (and win great prizes!)
Solar Hot Water Bulk Buy-Air Solar Bundaberg is coordinating a bulk buy of solar hot water systems to save participants big $$$$.
SustainaBundy-the local transitions town group. Discover and support everything local to revitalise and strengthen Bundaberg and the local area.

Pepper Place in print!

While seeing Pepper Place in lots of places online is fun, nothing compares to seeing my business in print. The internet is a bit unreal to me, but this ad is real and tangible.

And it’s in every household in the region now, hopefully up on the wall for the entire year, as part of the local calendar. Hopefully lots of Gin Gin residents will be curious about what modern cloth nappies are, and will then of course be blown away by how fabulous they are and become instant converts! (Well, I can always dream, right?!)

Feel free to call me on the number above-I don’t publish it online because the last time I did every time I checked the messages all 427 were from people trying to sell me stuff. It may take me a couple of days (no reception at home) but I will get back to you.

Carer's Business Discount

I am very pleased to announce that I am now offering a discount to all carers holding a Carer Business Discount Card. This entitles the holder to 10% off single products, and an additional 5% off already discounted bulk packs.To take advantage of this simply email me your card number after making your order, and i'll apply it manually. Cumbersome I know, but there's not really an easier way to do it.

Anyone who receives Carer's Allowance or Carer's Payment is entitled to a card, you simply need to apply. If you don't have one, grab one!

Cloth nappies come in especially useful when you have a special needs child, as they are usually in nappies longer. My girls were all out of day nappies by their second birthday, but my SN son wore them until after his third birthday. Conservatively, that's over 1500 extra nappy changes!

Hopefully my discount gives you some small relief  :)

How to make rain

Prewash 20 metres of bamboo and hang it on the line to finish drying. Argh!

But I won't complain. It's been the first decent downpour in months, as you can probably tell from the picture-like my 'lawn'?