In late October or early November every year, a Massachusetts woman buys some plain glass dishes, about five inches wide and two or three inches deep. She then collects pebbles and places them in each dish, and on top of them, so they will not touch each other, she places fine narcissus bulbs, filling in around them with more pebbles, until the dish is quite full. Then adding water enough to fill to the top, she sets the dishes on the cellar floor and leaves them there until they are full of roots. She then brings them into a light, sunny room, and as soon as they are in bloom she takes them to the woman’s exchange, where they sell readily for 50 cents a dish. The cost of the dishes is 5 cents each, and the bulbs, six for 5 cents, so she makes 40 cents on each dish.
PLAN No. 230. SELLING HICKORY NUTS
A country woman with a grove of hickory trees on her farm, made $30 in one month gathering hickory nuts, which she sent to a friend in the city, who bought them at $1.50 per bushel. That was only twenty bushels, and people who live in localities where these nuts are plentiful could multiply that number many times by gathering them on a more extensive scale.
PLAN No. 231. THUMBLESS MITTENS FOR CHILDREN
What mother has ever been able to get a baby’s thumb into a mitten? And how long would it stay if she did? Then why have thumbs on baby’s mittens at all?
These are questions a Canadian mother asked herself many times, and learned that there was but one answer: make the mittens without thumbs. And she did so.
In fact, she found that no matter how many pair she made, the baby-outfitters gladly took all she could knit, sold them for 40 cents a pair, and charged her only a small commission for selling; as the materials cost less than 10 cents, her profit was large. She used white pompadour or saxony yarn, and a large steel hook, so the work was light, pleasant and profitable.
PLAN No. 232. TAILORED HATS
Here is the story of a Montana woman who discovered that she could make a better tailored hat for girls, and sell it for 50 cents, than the millinery stores ask $2 for, and she not only made one for her own little girl, but for a hundred or more other small misses, and realized a profit on every one she made. The material cost but little, while the work on the hats was no trouble at all, so she kept it up until she had supplied everybody of her acquaintance with the prettiest hats to be seen anywhere. She made them from a pattern published by a well known woman’s periodical; and it was so easy to follow it that the making of hats was a real pleasure.
She also made nice hats for women, at $1.00 each, and on these the profits were still greater.