I’m not going to give away all my secrets…
- Decide to open customs.
- Set them up on the store’s website. This takes up to two hours. Why? Because I have to go in and manually mark them all as unsold to get them to show up on the site. I could leave them up all the time, but then people would order them when customs aren’t open and it’s a huge pain in my butt. I don’t get the wholesale discount when I don’t order in bulk, add in shipping and time and energy and I end up paying them to take my stuff.
- Send email announcing customs are open and spam places I post.
- Take orders. This is the easy part LOL
- Verify those orders- you want pink and brown tie dye but you don’t it to look too girly… um…
- Close customs. Again, a couple hours individually marking them all sold. My store saves EVERY product I’ve ever listed, even if it’s long gone, so I have to sort though tons of products in the behind the scenes part of my webpage.
- Print out each order.
- Place wholesale order for blanks.
- Tap feet until it arrives.
- Open huge box of white clothes and sort everything. Make sure they sent everything I ordered, in the right sizes. Make sure I ordered everything I needed to.
- Wash and dry all the blanks. Sometimes this can take two or three loads of laundry. Don’t use dryer sheets or fabric softener.
- While the stuff is washing, prep the dyes. I have over thirty colors, so I go through the list and figure out what ones I need for the order, and measure and mix them all in the squirt bottles. This takes up my whole counter LOL
- Resort all the dried blanks into piles of LWI and tie dye.
- Take all the stuff to be tie dyed & soak in soda ash fixer for 30 minutes- overnight, depending on what is going on in my house. I do this in a bucket in my sink. The bucket holds maybe…. 4 grown up sized tee shirts. So this takes a LONG time.
- Hand wring out everything that’s been soaked. Again this takes forever and hurts my hands. I often make Aaron do it when he’s home LOL
- Rubber band up all the stuff to be tie dyed. I have a lot of rubber bands. I do this on my kitchen floor, because my counter is covered in the dye I prepped.
- Then I spread out my tie dye towels. When I first started, I took an old bath towel to put under the stuff I was dying, to soak up the extra dye. I’ve now got probably at least eight LOL
- Dye up stuff, often stopping to mix more dye of the popular colors.
- Put everything in plastic shopping bags and let sit over night.
- Wash tie dye towels.
- Repeat steps 12-20 if there’s more than what would be one small load of laundry… as many times as needed. This time- it was three.
- Get the LWI stuff ready- put each blank in it’s own container
- I mix the dyes for that in an old baby bottle as I use them, because I don’t usually need a whole 8 ounces from my squirt bottles.
- LWI dye stuff, and let sit for 60 minutes.
- Once that’s done, pour soda ash solution over each LWI dyed blank.
- Let sit 20 minutes.
- Rinse each item separately by hand and wring out.
- Throw in the washer, and set to extra large load, even though it’s only a small load. Rinse twice.
- Then wash & dry all the LWI stuff.
- Repeat steps 22-29 if there’s more LWI than what fits in my containers. This time it I didn’t need to repeat these ones
- By then it’s the next day, and I can rinse and hand wring out the tie dyed stuff.
- Rinse twice in the washer, same as the LWI, small load size, with extra large size amount of water.
- Wash and dry all the tie dyed stuff.
- Then I hand stamp all the stuff that needs stamps.
- Let the stamped stuff sit for 24 hours.
- Package up all the dyed stuff with their proper order form.
- Print postage.
- Ship.
- Pray it doesn’t get abducted by the postal workers.
- Pray the recipients like my work.
BUT maybe they can send in some action shots!
