Posts Tagged ‘etsy’

New Pattern! ‘Tree Bowl’ on Etsy

Monday, March 28th, 2011

Last year was not a great one for my development of my Etsy shop. I did not get a single new pattern in! Last year I wrote up three patterns for the next One Yard Wonders, half finished two soft electronic patterns that I gave up on because I didn’t want to deal with possible people-shocking-their-children liability issues, worked on some doll house food I never finished that I’d still like to re-visit, went through a ‘sticks and string’ dreaming-about-a-book period that I don’t think even made it to the blog, and then there was that doll pattern that has been sticking me up for months. Not one of those made it to my Etsy store, and in December I shut the whole thing down until now, because I was so depressed about it! But it is open again! Hurray!

Obviously the One Yard Wonders patterns are not a ‘failure’, but it was several months worth of working on patterns that were *also* not going to my Etsy store. 2010 was a sad year for that store, no progress! 2010 was also the year that Penelope went from 6m to 1.5yr, so there were lots of reasons for no progress, but I still felt bad!

But by picking a reasonably small goal though, I’ve made it from start to finish on another pattern, which is good, because I’m probably going to be going back to work for several months now, and getting very little done other than basic house and child survival. We will see how the blog fares through that, if I suddenly disappear completely until June you will know why! I still don’t know exactly when my contract will start though, so I’m in an odd holding place, trying to get things wrapped up so we can survive being a two-working-parent household, briefly anyway. I am so rambling right now. But YAY, new pattern in my Etsy shop.

Also, YAY, we won Rebecca’s school lottery and will be going to our local progressive hand-on parent-participation PUBLIC school. Which means FREE (almost), which means we will not be (trying to) save 20k (and then 40k for two kids) to spend on private education (that was going to be a difficult budgeting problem!), and I am SO glad we don’t have to choose between a great school and retirement. Maybe we will go to Egypt (NOT right now) and see the pyramids instead of paying for private school… Stay tuned, six years from now I’m sure I will be stressing about this all over again for middle school…

Singing don’t worry, about a thing,
’cause every little thing, it’s going to be all right…

Soft Car Pattern

Saturday, November 28th, 2009

Car Pattern

Finally finally finally! This is what I’ve been working on for the last month besides my 2007 photo book. And suddenly I find I have nothing to say… I think the pattern came out nicely though, this time I decided to illustrate it instead of photographing it. I like how it looks, it isn’t overloaded with pictures for each tiny step, and I think the illustrations are easier to understand. I wanted to get this done further before the holidays, but it’s pretty easy to make, so maybe I’ll get some adventurous takers.

pinned-bottom

I think finding wheels is a little intimidating, so I put some sets of those up for sale in my shop too, although I really don’t want to get into the business of selling wheels. If I was a business major I’m sure I’d think it was great and call it something like horizontal productization or leveraged diversification or something, but there’s a reason I’m not a business major, and I don’t run a store. Because I want to make things, not resell them. Except, now I have a store. Hrm.

On a separate note, Thanksgiving was really low key at our house this year. We were going to go over to a friends for a group shindig, but Rebecca got sick Tuesday night. Thursday it got to be time to cook dinner, well, 20 minutes until dinner is supposed to be ready is a little late to start, and I felt lame that we didn’t have anything Thanksgiving-ish. So in 40 minutes I managed to cook elbow noodles (Rebecca survives half on whole wheat noodles and half on milk and fruit), sour cranberry relish, biscuit wrapped chicken sausage bits, and roasted chestnuts. And the biscuits didn’t come out of a pop-tube either. We opened a bottle of wine, and had the chocolate cream pie Jesse made for the party for dessert ourselves. I was quite pleased with my adrenaline fueled speed cooking session. :-) It brought back the days when we used to have Iron Chef cooking parties at our house.

I should probably have some kind of giveaway now, shouldn’t I? Maybe tomorrow.

Woo! Finally.

Saturday, October 10th, 2009

Finally finally finally I have a pattern in my Etsy store. Now of course I need to start another one! But the ice is broken and I’m getting my toes wet, or frozen, or something!

DSC_6325

Now I have to go do one of those sidebar widgety things…