Throwback Thursday to when I first started! I opened my Etsy shop in 2010 and this was a plate of some of my first donut designs and how I did my product photography (on plates and felt). My first donuts used a lot of fabric paint, visible stitches, and ball-and-chain attachments.

My “2nd edition donuts”, I started experimenting with more stitching (faces were completely thread) and other flavors (like bacon). I kept the plate photography but ditched the felt background.

My “3rd edition” donuts, I started expanding the flavor selection and using plastic bead eyes. I did more fruit and holiday flavors. These were all fun, and I continued making a lot of these for a while. The pineapple, mint chocolate, hot chocolate, gingerbread, and apple cider donuts were some of the most popular flavor designs.

As I evolved into my next series of donuts, I settled on a consistent eye size and started refining my donut designs. The pink sprinkled donut and coffee donuts are some of my favorite classic designs; the pink sprinkled donut remains one of the most popular flavors (of course). I started phasing out wooden table backgrounds in my product photography and started shifting to simplified and cleaner (white) backgrounds.

My current series of donuts, I’ve switched out ball-and-chain attachments to star-shaped keyrings, changed sprinkles just a tiny bit (from fabric paint to “beads in a bottle” with glitter that dry even harder than puffy fabric paint), as well as made the plush keychains slightly smaller to increase the cuteness factor and a kind of more reasonable “keychain” usage (or just bag/backpack attachment). I also started making felt pins and translating some of my old keychain designs to flat, beaded designs, such as the pineapple, blueberry, and mint chocolate flavors.

I love making the tiny felt pins and they’re fun to collect and wear!