Here are some remaining recent creations in paracord that were not sold recently.
The third picture is of three monkey fists that are made to float. The black one was my test case, after making it, I attached a stainless steel split key ring from Lighthound and one common house key. I put it in a bucket of water for over 24 hours. It still floated, so I attached another key on a #.5 Nite-Ize S-Biner, it still floated, even after being completely saturated.
The first picture is of some little fobs that I made with spare cord and downtime in the shows. Three of them have glow-in-the-dark skulls and beads, while the other two use pewter skull beads.
The second picture has some random bracelets that I made, two of them with emergency whistles as the clasp instead of a buckle. There are buckles with whistles available, but these emergency whistles are louder. The idea for these bracelets came from a custom request from a paddle boarder. The woman liked hers so much, she ordered several others for her paddle boarding friends as gifts, those in the picture were extras.
After a series of craft fairs and gun shows, we are going to take a break for awhile. We have also learned some lessons - gun shows still seem to be hte best venue for these items, with rural craft fairs being a second - urban and suburban craft fairs are not very good. We never lost any money on any of the venues, but some were just better than others. Our most recent gun show proved that they are still the best venue, even with other dedicated paracord vendors present at the show, we still did pretty well. Did we lose out to other vendors, most likely, but competition is great, and forces innovation. I not only did fairly well with patrons of the show, I also had many vendors come to me for items. I also received several comments, most on my quality and creativity - like I said, competition is a good thing - it leads to higher quality and more innovation. I also hope that the other paracord vendors did well, since it is more of their livelihood than it is mine - it is just a hobby for me, after all.
I imagine the Floaty is wrapped around a ping pong ball or some such?
ReplyDeleteThis may sound ignorant, but is there a reason this stuff is all made with Paracord? Is paracord just fun to work with or is there some secondary reason. I ask because someone, who I can't remember now, mentioned using an unraveled paracord bracelet in an emergency situation....
So, I originally typed a long answer to your questions that included history and all kinds of stuff, but something happened and it didn't publish and I can't retrieve it. So this response will be much shorter.
ReplyDeleteFirst, the floating monkey fists are tied with a ping pong ball core as you suspected.
Your next question was not ignorant at all, it gets asked a lot. The short answer is that paraacord has several uses, like duct tape. A bracelet or other item can be untied/unwoven for use in an emergency situation.