For her day job, Charlotte Hemstock is a waitress at Auburn’s Rainbow Cafe and at the Clarion Hotel, where her radiant smile and sunny personality make her a natural customer favorite.
But for years, on the side the 27-year-old woman has been quietly building her own business, too.
A business so small that as of today, it literally fits into a shoe box.
But Hemstock has big hopes.
From that shoe box Hemstock produces a greeting card. She created it for a guitar player, she says, adding that the guitar’s strings make it too fragile for commercial manufacture or for sending through the mail.
She produces another card, this one displaying a handmade bird nesting in a tree with embossed wood grain. The only thing store-bought on this card, she says with pride, is a little flower.
Made from regular paper, embossed, stamped with gold ink, tastefully pasted with stickers or brightened with flowers, each card is as unique as the person for whom Hemstock created it.
“A lot of these are meant to be given, like, if you are giving it with a birthday gift or going to somebody’s house,” Hemstock said. “Because of the thickness of them and how fragile they are, I wouldn’t suggest sending these through the postal service. You would have to put them in a padded card so they wouldn’t get hurt.”
Just a few of the many cards produced by Cheery Cherry Handmade.
Hemstock, a San Diego native, is a 2004 Auburn High School graduate.
Finding solace
It’s a cheerful business, born, however, in the darkest days of Hemstock’s life. In the wake of her mother’s early death, she said, she needed something to do, something to salve the throbbing laceration.
“I was a teenager when I lost my mom, so I needed something to direct my attention and focus, and not get really sad,” Hemstock said. “So I started crafting. I was knitting and painting and dabbling, and I wasn’t too good at any of that, but I found I was really good at scrapbooking.
“Honestly, the cards came about because I was too lazy to do a full scrapbook page! Because a 12-by-12 took too long, I thought, maybe if I do 5-by-7s or 4-by-6s …,” Hemstock said.
In those days, whenever Hemstock finished a card, she recalled, she put it away in the box, its therapeutic purpose fulfilled.
But one day a friend saw the cards in the box, and, having concluded that someone just might want them, suggested she sell them.
“I didn’t know what to do with them because mainly they were just for myself. And then I started selling them, and I found that people wanted them, and I wanted to make them for people. Then the whole idea of selling specific cards for specific people came about,” Hemstock said.
Here’s how the process works.
“Someone will tell me ‘I’ve got a birthday for a friend coming up, she’s turning 16, she just got a car.’ I’ll ask things like, ‘What’s your favorite color, what kind of stuff is she into, does she play volleyball, does she like to sing?’ From there, I take little bits I’ve learned about the person and the event that they are asking for and come up with my own creation, or a couple of creations. And I either give the customer one or show them a couple and let them choose what they feel is most like the person.
“It’s not like just going to the store and getting something that reminds you of somebody; it’s you getting a card made just for that person,” Hemstock said.
The average price for one of Hemstock’s handmade cards is $7. Her website is cheerycherryhandmade.weebly.com.
