Coucoumelle Inc

Certain things happened at my part-time job which led me to seriously consider quitting.  It turns out that I did not have to quit, because I was fired instead, with no real explication why (although I have a few hunches).  I was more than happy to leave, it saved me the bother of going through agonizing weeks of "Do I continue and see if it gets better even though I don't foresee it getting better soon or do I quit now?"

I suppose that this was God's not so gentle nudge out the door and through a new one.  This particular job experience gave me the desire to work for myself, at something I LIKE to do.

For years now, people have been telling me I should make pinatas to sell.  So I decided I would start up my own business, making pinatas, painting pictures, and sewing things to sell.

It took a while to finally come up with a logo that I liked, that looked professional. I wanted it to be something mushroom-y because the coucoumelle is a mushroom. I also wanted it to look artsy. I was finally inspired by this photo on the internet.  I cropped it so you could see just the underside and part of the stem, and that's when the idea of this round image with the ridges of the mushroom-like spokes around the stem came to me. It's the perfect image as each spoke is a different shade, which kind of reminds one of tints, shades and tones of paint.  From this perspective, it is also reminiscent of a painter's palette, which is exactly what I wanted.  I'd been trying to do something like this for a while now, but it never looked quite right.

Coucoumelle is a user name I came up with after perusing the French dictionary one day, in search of a random word to use for a Neopets account.  I never did much with the Neopets account, but I liked the word Coucoumelle for two reasons.  I liked it because it has "cou-cou" in it, which, in French, means "peek-a-boo!"  I thought that was pretty spiffy for a username, so when I signed up on the group Mothering with Grace, that became my username there.  By the time I signed up for myspace, Bebo and Facebook, Coucoumelle had become my alter ego.  I also liked the name because my husband is an amateur mushroom-picker.  He took a course at university on mushrooms and learned which ones are good to eat and which ones are not.  The name Coucoumelle reminds me of him.

So far I have finished 3 pinatas (almost done 2 more) and 3 gift/tote bags. (I am working on a 4th bag as well).  I have plans to do some painting and maybe some gift cards as well (using scrapbooking techniques). I also made some potholders and will probably work on some placemats and other kitchen/eating accessories.  To the list of bags, I want to add activity bags (that come with matching pencil cases) and drawstring goodie bags.