Saturday, July 27, 2024
RENO — The Reno Founder’s Festival featured the work of an 11-year-old entrepreneur.
Zoe Talley, whose family recently moved to the Azle area, sold her homemade bracelets at the festival and made a cool $100.
“It was pretty fun,” she said about the festival.
Inspired by her aunt who crochets, Zoe started making bracelets about a year-and-a-half ago. Her mother Tara Talley recalled Zoe bringing her beads to her brother’s baseball games and making bracelets then. Her first craft fair was slow and didn’t have a lot of traffic, but then last December, her bracelets were a hit and she almost sold out.
Of the money she made at that time, Zoe donated some of it to the North Texas Humane Society.
“They had a list of things they needed, and she bought like everything on the list and took it up there,” Tara Talley said about her daughter’s donation.
At the Reno festival, Zoe’s bracelets featured beads of various colors including some holiday-themed ones. Her favorite ones that day had purple beads, and she usually gets compliments from people about the colors used in the bracelets.
“Some of them say that they're cute, and they have fun colors,” Zoe said. “Most of my Christmas ones sold today.”
Zoe usually gets the beads from places like Michael’s, Hobby Lobby, Amazon and Etsy. Tara Talley said Michael’s is one of their favorite shopping places because of how beads are organized by color.
“We'll just go crazy, and we'll come home with hundreds of dollars worth of beads,” Tara Talley said. “Then we're like, let's make some bracelets.”
Zoe said the time it takes to make the bracelets depends on the size of the beads.
“Some of them, like the smaller ones, they take about 15 minutes, and then the ones with the bigger beads can take up to five to 10,” she said.
Zoe described the process of making bracelets as calming. She makes them with her friend Alana Lira, who also attended the festival in Reno.
“It helps me relieve stress,” she said.
Tara Talley said she and Zoe plan to attend more craft fairs during the holiday season to sell the bracelets including at Haltom High School, where Talley works, and possibly at one of Azle’s Christmas events.
“We've learned lots of techniques over the last year-and-a-half of this and learned what works and what doesn't work,” Tara Talley said. “Every event, it’s never the same.”
