You're listening to a Community Story from Be My Eyes. My name is Aspen Poole, and I'm from Vestal, New York. I'm totally blind, I was born totally blind. Ever since I learned about crafts and what they were, I was hooked and determined, ever since I was like four or five. My goal is to just make as many of whatever as possible and find as many people to give it to as possible. That's my destiny. I've always been that way, and I've always been a bulk person. I'll buy the biggest, best unit price of something to get more items made. I'm also a very good math person. I'm like, "Okay, one pound of beads makes 490 bracelets. I have five pounds of this kind, and I can make this many. How many days will that take?" and all this. I'm a very mathematical oriented person. I use Be My Eyes for identifying what crafting materials I have, like colors of beads. Also, I love to bake, so I've used it for saying how many ounces is this bag of chocolate chip or something like that. I do everything I do in bulk. That's just how I do. Because I figure if I'm going to dirty a bowl or a pot, I might as well feed somebody who needs it. That's my philosophy. It helps identify what color something is. It can help identify what brand, or it can help... If I'm trying to determine if two beads would go good together, I can use Be My Eyes. It can also help if I want to know how many ounces or something is so I can compare unit prices. The part that's challenging for me is more of the distributing part than the making. I try to make things that I can do 100% independently. I just buy, from Fire Mountain Gem, lots of beads. I have a tray, some plastic tray thing that I've had for years. I just use that to hold pliers, wire, the seed beads, the larger seed beads, the tube beads, anything I really need. The making in bulk is what is part of the satisfying part. The other part is finding the people that appreciate whatever it is that don't make it on their own, literally, any person that I come in contact with that wants one. Usually, they'll say yes, 99% of the time. I go to the grocery store. When I put all the groceries on the belt, I'll just put a bracelet on the belt or a Christmas ornament because it's the holiday season now. It'll slide down to the cashier, and then the cashier will usually go "What's this for?" and I'm like "It's a gift, it's yours." A lot of them are so happily surprised, honestly. I've tried selling my products, and I just wasn't satisfied. I couldn't really do it very good, independently. I couldn't sell as many as I make. I literally sold these products, I make like 50 a day, so I wasn't able to sell them all. I just don't want them to go to waste, that's all I care about. This season we're planning to wear masks and go out to the mall and go up to the little counter at as many little stores in the mall as we can and ask, "Hi, how many workers do you have?" and then give them gifts. I usually have a big bag that has a couple hundred or a thousand ornaments in it. If they say, "Oh, there's 91 people," I'll just count 91 out and give them away. I want to stand in the line of a thousand people and just go down the line and give away. That's my dream. It works because when I buy the supplies and stuff, my system is meant so that, craft items, you have to get rid of them somehow. You know what I mean? You take in craft supplies, and you make them, and you get energy or enjoyment out of that. Then, you have to get rid of them, export them somehow. At one point, I made a motorized knitting machine where I push the foot pedal. There's a knitting machine with a hand crank attached to it, and it spins the crank and it knits a baby hat in three minutes. I remember going to the American Heart Association. I remember finding out that they wanted red hats for the little babies there. I literally went with multiple people, different times, in the next week and got, literally, all of the red yarn in Michaels, Jo-Ann's, and A.C. Moore in our local area. I just bought all the red yarn. I went nuts. I probably knit 50 to 100 hats a day on this machine. I would just stand there. I would watch it every three and a half minutes or less. I don't know, it was somewhere in there. I had to cut the yarn and pull it off the machine and then start a new one. Then, I'd sit down, and I'd weave in the ends and lace-up the raw stitches on the end and finish it off. When we got to the American Heart Association, and there were six or seven huge lawn trash bags full of these little bitty red hats. There were hundreds in each bag. We got there, and we're like, "We're here to drop off red hats for the babies." They're like, "Oh, thank you." Then, we pulled out one bag, and they're like, "Whoa!" Then, I kept pulling bags out of the trunk. They said that I had beaten a company, because they had hired a company to make red hats a couple of years ago. The company didn't even make as many as I did. At Michaels, I used to work there, I would offer, like, "If you guys need Thanksgiving dessert made or something if you don't have time to make it, just tell me what you want and I'll whip it up and bring it to you." It's my own business. Sometimes I buy in bulk. They don't understand why that bulk. If I have Be My Eyes, it's kind of anonymous. I don't have to justify it on Be My Eyes. It's open 24/7. Whenever I need something, I can have a backup plan. The volunteers are the enablers. I love it. I love hearing random people's voices, and I wish that I could give them a gift over the phone. Thank you for listening to this Community Story from Be My Eyes. You can share your story too. Send it to mystory@bemyeyes.com. 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