I’m not Completely Unemployed but am much less employed until the fallout from the CPSIA settles.
We just don’t want to invest the amount of money needed to replace all our button stock with lead-free buttons. And it is not clear if we must retest each button even if we do replace all of them. We certainly don’t sell enough of the products that require buttons to warrant the capital outlay especially at this time.
At the moment I would have to order special manufacturing runs of a dozen gross (that’s 12 x 144) in each size and color. We were using 8 different buttons.
13,824 buttons…at the peak demand I was hand sewing about 650 buttons a year.
[Why hand sewing? Because the kinds of machines I’d need to do the buttons the way they have to be done would cost well over $28,000.]
So at the peak rate of usage I would have enough buttons to see me through another 21 years of manufacturing. Gee, I just turned 59 yesterday so that means I would be well equipped to sew button panels like a mad woman until I turn 80.
Uh, I’m not as dumb as I look. Promise! Meaning: I won’t be ordering new buttons.
I am hoping that smaller lots of lead-free buttons will become available some time in the future.
There are other sewn products that I can continue to make because the components are lead free. Buttons remain the difficult ones. But all the sewn products orders have fallen way off this year, maybe because we stopped advertising them and taking them to shows when I got sick.
Hey, I don’t mind! I have finally had the time to organize The Stitchery and I love having the extra floor space since I’ve put away some of the commercial machines and stock.
I have time to cook, sew, write and keep the house in a half way decent manner.
So now that I have time to enjoy life a bit I’ll share a super Favorite Thing: Wild Passion Flower!
Wow, that flower is stunning! Wouldn’t that be great inspiration for a dress a la Project Runway! Hope you can continue to work as much as you’d like. From the outside looking in, it seems like an over-reaction to problems in specific LARGE supply chains.
Belated Happy Birthday! I hope it was a good one.
The flower is gorgeous! Thanks for sharing it too.
As to the buttons, you are one smart woman.
Oh gosh, Mary Beth, Passionflowers were one of my favorite things when I grew up in middle Tennessee! And then, later in the summer, you could have great fights with friends with the fruit!