We found out from friends that the annual Tallahassee Market Days had a kids entrepreneur tent. Emily has always loved crafts, art, or anything musical. I asked her if she wanted to participate and she of course said yes. The only rules are that it cannot be edible and that the craft had to be made by the child. A long time ago, her and I had the idea of making ribbon flip flops and flower headbands...we have made the ribbon flip flops before and they were really cute. This time though, because you can't possibly buy everyone's size, she decided to wrap ribbon around headbands and decorate with flowers and other adornments and sell those. She made a couple of ribbon wreaths as well but these turned out way harder than expected and very costly to purchase the supplies. The ribbon headbands were fairly cheap...$. 50 for a dollar store headband and $1.00 for the ribbon. She sold them for $3.00. She worked tirelessly on the headbands for days...she did them totally by herself and finished the entire project, even making more at the last minute when we decided to increase the inventory...This is my Emily....artsy, creative, hardworking, performance oriented....she loved it and it is where she shines. As I have said before, she doesn't like math but we talked about how she would use math in selling the headbands, knowing how much to price them, counting profit, etc but I realized something about my girl. I'm so hard on her sometimes when it comes to math ...I get frustrated when she doesn't get it right away, I get even more frustrated when she has a bad attitude over it...which I know she doesn't need to have a poor attitude and she HAS to learn math....but I did realize that I shouldn't put so much pressure on her, she isn't going to be a math teacher, a CPA, or else...it just isn't her...she will be a teacher, a performer, an artist.....I need to come at math with a different angle...she doesn't have to love it like say someone that wants to major in Math, but she needs to be able to use it to her advantage in the things she does like. Maybe that is why measurements come fairly easy to her because she likes to cook and she is able to take a recipe and look at it and make it using the measurements...(to some extent on her own)....It's useful I guess. I always stunk at measurements and conversions. I don't need to make her into something she is not....this is my Emily. The lack of attention and detail and work ethic that she sometimes displays with her math.....somehow totally reversed itself when doing something like her craft. It was cool!
She named her booth "Randazzle Ribbons" and sold over half of her inventory. She made over $50. John Daniel even made yarn napkin rings that he sent with her to sell...they sold as well at 4 for $1. It was a great great experience which we will try to repeat again next year!
