NCGardens Christmas card at Red Bubble

Buy these at Red Bubble and spread the seed saving, home grown message along with Christmas cheer....

tshirts

We sold two of these today! Check out this design and our new cards on Red Bubble ! Christmas is coming, so tell your friends and spread the word about our tshirts and cards.

Membership renewals

This is Chris's plot just before harvest a few weeks ago.

It's that time of year again when we need to renew our membership, and pay our plot rental fees. Louise has decided not to keep her plot this year, because she now has space at home to grow veges, but very fortunately for all of us, she will remain a member of the gardens and attend working bees etc. We certainly don't want to lose you Louise!

Calendars and Red Bubble

Thanks for your comment Anonymous. Actually we did not lose or make any money from the calendars but that was discussed heavily from the beginning. It was an experiment to see how it would go, and if we had ordered a lot more to be printed their individual costs would have gone down, and we could have sold them and made a profit, but that would have required taking a risk that no one wanted to take. The only cost was the time involved in designing it and getting it printed and collecting the money. Most people enjoyed having the calendars for themselves and to give to friends.

Sorry to have not explained the Red Bubble site more clearly. The Red Bubble site is totally and utterly free, and once again the only cost involved is time. There are no set-up costs as everything is made to order. It is up to every individual to decide if they want to purchase something or not, and once they place an order then Red Bubble make it. It takes a couple of weeks to get the final product sent to you. If people are not comfortable buying on the internet they may be able to organise to pay cash to someone who is comfortable to buy it for them.

Red Bubble set the base price they need to make their money and we choose a percentage mark-up for the money we want to make. For example a card is $4.00- it costs Red Bubble $2.50 to make and we have set a 40% mark-up so we get $1.50 on top of that. We can make a fair bit more from the tshirt sales- about $8.00 per tshirt. We can increase or decrease our chosen mark-up at will.
We will have a cheque sent to us when we make $100 or, we can opt to have it direct deposited in our account once we reach $20. Currently we have chosen the cheque option so as not to risk the bank account details on the internet in case members don't like that.

We may not make a cent from this, but it will not cost us anything either....except time. Recently a site on Red Bubble whose entire profits go to an African village sold a large number of cards and wall prints and made quite a bit of money, so it is possible.

The Red Bubble site can be very easily removed completely if it is offensive to members.

T Shirts and cards

Well, we now have our own little shop at Red Bubble and although there's not much to chose from yet there will be! Here's a look at the first couple of tshirts available in both men's and women's styles...they take a couple of weeks to be printed but are of a good quality.

The cards will be up soon too, ready for Christmas or just general greetings.

Please contact Rebecca or Marijka if you have a burning idea for a tshirt or card!

We may not make a fortune out of it, but it will help put a little bit more into the coffers at absolutely no cost to us, except time.

Fund raising and meeting

Louise, Ruby, Marijka, Ros, Chris and Rebecca met on Sunday at the gardens and had a further discussion about the rules etc. We're slowly getting there and should be able to finish it up soon.
All input is welcome from all those who are passionate about this issue.
There will be a mail-out of membership forms this month, and we will all need to fill them out and send them back to Jane (our temporary Treasurer),as well as this years membership fees. Details will be included in the mail out.
Louise also mentioned she's interested in having a go at some fundraising via a t.v. games show- could be interesting! And there are plans afoot to make some fund raising NCG Christmas cards available via the Red Bubble site, in place of the calendar this year.