Sleep? That's Like Coffee For People With Too Much Free Time.

It's suddenly fall, overnight the weather went from warm, sunny, t-shirts and shorts to sweatshirts, jeans and warm blankets on the bed. That should mean good sleeping weather, but it's also well into the 4th quarter, and I am busy trying to prepare for what I want to believe will be a great Christmas season. That means that I sleep only when I can no longer stay awake, and wake up much to early ready to go back to work...

I find myself sitting at the computer once again, with a list of things to do longer than my arm (at least it feels that way!) While I am anxious to create, I have business to take care of before my mind is able to concentrate on that process.

The things I am trying to master include learning about SEO, which is Search Engine Optimization. Although I've always been fairly savvy when it comes to technology, this is an area I knew very little about when I opened an online store in Etsy. I never needed to know much about it before. The gist of it is, in order to get found by Google, for example, it's not enough to have great products, you have to have the right words, in the right places, in the right order. Sounds simple enough. It is not...There are probably hundreds of places on line to get help setting this up, and while there are many great tips and pages and pages of instructions, and you could spend forever redoing and refining and re reading. It seems that much of the process of SEO is clouded in mystery-and is sort of like shooting at a moving target, because the market is dynamic, and things change all the time. It shouldn't be so abstract, but it is.

Yesterday when I stopped obsessing over that process and got ready to work on new items for my store, my printer started behaving strangely again. Last week I spent 9 hours online with HP trying to get my printer to obey the simplest of commands after having spent 4 days trying to figure out the problem myself. It seemed to be fixed, until today, when it started rejecting my prints mid job for no apparent reason. Distractions. 

I decided that I would clean up my workroom and work on something concrete that had a clear beginning, middle and end, and did not require the computer to complete. 

Refinishing a yucky bookshelf to use in my workroom.

It's gross, it has stains and scratches and even some bugs and other unidentifiable things that were painted over, but I can fix it.        

  

 By tomorrow...

Duvet Covers Made from Painters Drop Cloths

Painters drop cloths are so useful!  This time I was making a couple of small duvet covers for baby sized blankets, 36" x 48". The theme was Charleston, SC.  Luckily a local tool store was selling some drop cloths that were 4'x12', with care I could get both of the duvet covers out of one drop cloth. I bought a couple of extras just in case, because the quality can be inconsistent.

Using a theme of old letters and postcards with Charleston postmarks or addresses, I painted up some ideas, and then scanned them into my computer. I made them into a group of collages to applique on one side of the duvet cover, and stencilled the location on the reverse.

"Vintage"  letters, postcards and postmarks.

I prepared the layouts and the collages on my laptop, and it looked pretty simple until the printer started jamming mid project, and then inconveniently ran out of ink.

And the dropcloth pieces: I know you are supposed to measure twice and cut once, and I do practice that - but even so a couple of pieces were unaccountably wrong and had to be recut. (THAT is why I bought extras!)

I printed the collages on pieces of dropcloth or muslin, and appliqued them on the front of the duvet cover.

The pattern was really simple, barring any mistakes, each one was half of the drop cloth, which I then folded in half, and sewed 3 sides together like a large pillow case.  I hemmed the open edges and put together the closure using a 6" strip of fabric from the extra cloth.

I made up postmarks and used my birthday as the date...
I looked at old letters and cards online to get ideas.

 

Grommets and Ties

This is the closure I figured out; a sort of modified envelope with grommets and ties. The ties were made out of the double stitched seams I trimmed off the spare drop cloth.

It looks simple, and I was sure it would be, but I could not get it right. First the grommet tool was the wrong size. Then one of the grommets got smashed, which left a jagged edge, which of course cut my finger, and I only narrowly escaped bleeding allover the almost completed duvet.
It took me 3 tries to get the closure right.

I mixed in a couple of advertising images
I found from an old Life magazine.

Finally, after sewing and resewing, they were done, and I could wrap them up, add a card to each, and ship them off to their new home!