Our names are Emma and Cassidy and we are in 5th grade. Our brothers took part in TREP$ last year and we saw how much they loved it, so we were so excited to participate in TREP$ this year! We have been friends for many years and when we get together we love to craft and sew. When we found out that TREP$ was going to be in December we immediately decided to create holiday gifts!!
We came up with two ideas for our merchandise. Our first idea was to combine our two favorite things…candy and sewing. We came up with the idea to make snowman chocolate bars. We started off by hand sewing our snowman hats for the craft but it
became very time consuming. We decided to ask Gram if we could use her sewing machine to create the craft. So on one Sunday morning, after a much needed sleepover, Gram came over and she taught us how to use her sewing machine. Then we took turns sewing each hat and in no time we sewed 40 snowman hats! We both loved using the sewing machine so much that we decided we would use profits from TREP$ to buy our own sewing machines. Imagine all the crafting we could do.!!!
Our second idea came from a family friend who had suggested making ornaments. We decided to make scrabble ornaments because we knew that people would love them. We
bought 300 tiles from an internet site. The challenge was to create as many holiday words as possible utilizing the letters we had. We got very creative and used up most of our tiles including the blank ones.!!!
We were so excited for the big night! We dressed in matching holiday outfits because we wanted to “dress for success.” We decorated our table with a miniature battery lit Christmas tree which we used to display our holiday ornaments. We also put our snowmen candy bars in a festive basket. Everyone loved our display and items. We sold all 40 of our candy bar snowmen in the first half hour! We also sold most of our scrabble ornaments. At one point during the night someone asked if we could make custom name ornaments. We thought that was a wonderful idea! Word spread fast and by the end of the night we had an additional 15 orders. We have already decided that next year we will make the scrabble ornaments again but this time we will advertise making custom ornaments!!!
We had a wonderful TREP$ experience. We had a lot of success and we were proud of ourselves because although we had help from our families, we were able to make all of our
products ourselves. Not only did we love making our TREP$ merchandise we really loved the smiles of the people who bought the items. Only 365 more days until TREP$ next year and we can’t wait!
