PLAN No. 448. MADE FEATHER COMFORTERS
The wife of a Norwegian farmer, living in northern Minnesota, where the winters are very cold, had brought with her from the old country many excellent ideas of real comfort, and among these was the idea of feather comforters.
They had a large flock of geese and ducks, and thus the raw material for making these wonderfully comfortable comforters was easily available and plentiful. But she did not make them bunchy and unwieldy, but light in weight, neat, pretty—and extremely comfortable. The following is her method of making them:
The feathers are held in small sacks, made like long, narrow pillowslips, of cheese cloth or regular ticking. For each sack a strip of ticking about 20 inches wide and as long as the desired width of the comforter is used. This strip is stitched together up the side and across the end just as a pillowslip is made; then turned and filled with feathers and the opening is hand sewed. The thickness of the comforter will, of course, depend upon the amount of feathers put into each sack. An exactly equal weight must be used in each to insure a uniform thickness of the comforter. About twelve of these sacks, each measuring about eight inches across when filled, will be required for a comforter of ordinary length.
The covering for the comforter may be of calico, sateen, flannel, or even of silk. The top and bottom covers are held together by basting, then lines of stitching are run across the width far enough apart to admit of the long feather sacks being drawn through from side to side like tape through a hem; then the edges of the comforter are bound and the comforter is complete. It is warm and elastic, there is no bunching up of the feathers, and the whole is easily cleaned by opening the two sides of the covers and pulling out the sacks of feathers to be dry-cleaned or hung on the line to sun and air while the covers are being washed or new ones provided.
When these feather comforters were made in the manner above described, they sold readily for $20 to $30 each, and, inasmuch as she made as high as twenty to twenty-five of them in a single season, her income from goose and duck feathers may easily be estimated. A comforter made from the breast feathers of ducks alone often brought $40.
PLAN No. 449. BOTANIST FOR U. S. SEE [PLAN No. 217]
PLAN No. 450. MAKING GAS MANTLES PAY
In an eastern town, where gas is still used for lighting stores, a little lame old man is said to make from $60 to $75 a week by taking contracts to keep gaslights in stores and offices supplied with mantles, which he makes himself, and by cleaning and polishing the fixtures. His charge is 50 cents a month per light, and he has many hundreds of these to look after, sometimes having as high as forty or fifty in a single store.
PLAN No. 451. BUSINESS MGR. FOR U. S. SEE [PLAN No. 217]
PLAN No. 452. ONE GOOD SELLING PLAN
Mail-order people have many different selling plans, most of which bring good returns, but an agent in Ohio made quite a success of the plan briefly outlined as follows:
Selecting from the articles offered by a mail-order supply house one that usually retailed at 15 cents, but which cost him 8 cents, including postage, etc., he had a neat circular letter printed describing the article in detail, its uses and advantages, and offering it at 9 cents, if ordered within a certain time. These letters he sent to all those names he had secured in former mail-order transactions, explaining that every once in a while he offered special bargains in some article or other, and that this was one of those occasions. As most people already knew it was really a 15 cent article, he received a large number of orders, and when sending the article he enclosed another circular letter, quoting the prices on the other lines of articles, on most of which there was a fair but not extravagant profit. These also brought many orders from new customers, and by continually enlarging his list, and quoting his articles as close to cost as possible, he gradually built up a permanent and profitable business.