Two budgeting tips for crafters who decorate wooden toys
If your craft of choice involves the decoration of wooden toys and you'd like to find ways to make this hobby more affordable, here are some budgeting tips to follow.
Find some people with whom you can buy batches of wholesale wooden toys
If you'd love to be able to buy a lot more undecorated wooden toys but find that the retail prices of these plain toys make this difficult, you should start chatting to crafters on forums and social media sites who have the same hobby as you. Then, you could suggest to some of them that a few of you purchase one large batch of wholesale wooden toys and divide the toys amongst the group. Wholesale purchases of these toys usually have to be made in large quantities and so you might, for example, have to buy at least 200 of them during a single transaction. However, the price of each toy will be much less than the price of an equivalent toy sold by a craft supply retailer.
If you only need, for example, 40 of these toys, you could look for five other people on the local crafting forums and social media sites who have the same hobby as you and then each pay one-fifth of the total amount. This would allow all of you to reduce your crafting-related expenses and obtain the number of wooden toys you need to enjoy your hobby for another few months before your supplies dwindle and you need to replenish them.
Improve your paint-mixing skills
If, as described above, you get several dozen plain toys from a toy wholesaler, you'll then need quite a bit of paint to decorate all of them. Fortunately, you can do this without spending too much on paint, if you are prepared to improve your paint mixing skills.
One of the reasons why painting these types of toys can be pricey is that in addition to using basic primary colours, you might find yourself wanting to add small bits of other colours, like lilac or magenta. However, buying full tubes of these colours that you only need to use tiny amounts of and will probably never fully finish, could be a waste of money that might cancel out some of the savings you make by purchasing your toys from wholesalers. Instead, you should try to work out how to mix your primary colours to create these other shades from them. Determining the exact quantities of each paint shade you need to make the desired colour could take time but could save you a lot overall.
For more information on wholesale wooden toys, contact a professional near you.
