Apologies...

...For the long pause. It ended up my friend had to go back to Germany to get surgery on his knee. It's a total bummer on so many levels.

On the bright side, we did spend a day out in Malibu (photos to come... whenever I get the photo CD from him). You often forget what you have available to you when you live in one place for so long. I'm debating whether to make "learning how to surf" my summer goal. I adore the beach and I've always wanted to learn... And prolonged unemployment has made me have wilder career aspirations. The latest is Roxy model (or any other surf brand).

I also have an idea of going to New Zealand on a working holiday visa next year... Maybe I can also learn there. Anyone have any advice on traveling on a working holiday visa?

Anyway. I have my camera back. Here's a photo of my latest order. A bride wanted several sets of the mini envelopes and cards to use as placecards for her wedding.


In other store news, or more thoughts:
-Need to get a system down for production. I want to be able to introduce new items and re-stock the store at least once a week.

-Got a new Dennison book:

It has a lot of new patterns, including gardenias, so I'm excited to start trying projects out. I'm on the look out for a copy of the 1967 edition, which has instructions on how to make giant flowers. Let me know if you see any!

-Need to move onto making less labor-intensive items, or at least, labor intensive items that I can price so I win and the customer wins. After making so many sets of mini envelopes and cards after it was on the front page, I am considering raising the $3.50 price tag. But then again, it's not something that I think I can make very expensive, you know? It is a pretty popular item in the store, so I'm going to have to think a bit more about what whether I want to keep them in the store or not.

-Work on getting my financial ducks on a row. I bought a few spreadsheets from an etsy person. They're OK, but I'm still looking. My next shot is at gnucash. I'm still sorting through the source coding stuff, but hopefully by tonight, I'll have it down.

-Look into bookbinding. I bought a set of book binding kits on sale from Paper Source. I want to get a better idea of how to do it, because I'm deciding how I want to go about introducing fabric-covered notebooks to the store.

The text blocks included in it are 2009 datebooks (hence they were on sale). Hopefully I can find plain page text blocks to put in them instead.

Hm... this post ended up being quite dull. Apologies again. Hopefully, I'll have more interesting content up this week.