Many of you know that I do make small gift items (like magnets) and Christmas ornaments for sale in my various shops. My husband and I decided that we will now be donating at least 50% of the sales price to no-kill animal shelters. I will be doing a couple of special sets that will have 100% of the sales price donated to these shelters. I cleared out all of the ornaments I had on hand and am starting fresh.

What kinds of items do you look for when buying small gifts? I do try to keep my prices down to between $5 and 10 before shipping so that it is always affordable. Some of my ideas have been refrigerator magnets, mug mats, bookmarks, blank greeting cards, and of course Christmas ornaments. I also have some designs for small pictures that would be a little more expensive, but not terribly.

But what to stitch? Just in Christmas ornaments alone, I have snowmen, Santas, angels, animals, primitives, folk-art, vintage… well, you get the idea. I do collect cat ornaments as well. I have fallen in love with the tonttu designs and begun collecting those as well.

I would love some feedback. Drop on over to my Facebook Page and leave me some ideas, please. (The ornaments above were done for family, but I would be happy to do them again and sell them for $6 each. The tonttu fits into a nice 5″ greeting card, but he can be finished as an ornament too. I like the idea of making him into a removable ornament so that you can take the ornament off the card and hang it on your tree year after year. Though I now have a die-cutter to make these cards, I also like attaching the ornament right to the card, so it becomes the design itself.)

Lots of ideas, and lots of directions we can go…