Category: Projects

The Christmas market
The Christmas market is a project that happened during term 4. The final goal was to create a product in groups that would sell at the Christmas market. There were a variety of different subjects that tied into this project, such as HASS, English, Connected Learning and InnovatED. I teamed up with Brandon, Ayush and Amin to try and produce a good quality product.
Our idea was to create something that a lot of other groups would make, but our goal was to make the best of that product. We ended up deciding to make coasters out of air-dry clay. We then thought we could make some small Christmas ornaments with some of our air-dry clay. We thought we had plenty of air-dry clay, since we had purchased 1kg of clay for around $11. We ended up selling out of coasters, but still had a few remaining ornaments. This was a bad business idea because we could have made more money if we made only coasters, since the cost mark-up was more than the ornaments. We had many ideas of how we were going to decorate our ideas. Our first idea was to make nature inspired coasters, by imprinting leaves and then making the coasters colours that represent nature. We then saw a video of someone doing the same coasters but decorating them with paint pens. We thought that was a brilliant idea because Brandon already had a brand new set of pens that we could use. Mrs L then told us that it would be very costly to use those pens, Because they were very expensive and it would amount to around 5 dollars to use 1 pen, and there was 15 colours in total. We then had to scratch that idea because we only had 15 dollars to spend on pens, because we had to buy the clay and the string to hang up the ornaments. A friend of mine was telling me about his idea, how he was hydro dipping mugs. I thought that was a really creative idea, but I didn’t want to copy his idea. I was happily surprised when he told me that he was not going to hydro dip anymore, and that we could hydro dip our product if we wanted to. When I informed the rest of the group, they were all really open to the idea and were on board to do that. We thought it was a perfect idea, because I already had a lot of spray paint at home we could use, and Brandon and I were both very familiar with hydro dipping. Ayush then told us that we couldn’t use that idea because the clay was not waterproof. We started stressing a little bit because at this point a decent amount of groups had already been approved, and were on their way to building. We had to thing of something quick, cheap and easy. Our final idea was to spray paint them in different colours, since I had spray paint at home that we could use. The spray painting idea actually turned out really well, and was the main reason our products sold.
Some problems we had were the shape of the coasters. When they dried, the coasters ended up not being flat, which was bad because some coasters were not flat enough to even hold a mug or bottle. We had to buy felt strips to glue underneath the coasters so they would work a little better. We had to work around these problems, and in the end we made a profit of $20.