Etsy Shop Grand Opening: Wishes & Wool!

Hey everyone!

I’m excited to announce the opening of my Etsy shop today! Since this nasty tendinitis in my wrist has slowed me down on making items for the art market… I’ve instead shifted my plan to focus on getting my Etsy shop – Wishes & Wool – up and running these past few weeks. Woohoo! I spent last week doing a TON of test photography of all the felted critters that I’ve already made – on just about every sort of background imaginable. Here’s a bit about the whole process and what I learned:

Photographing Felties
The first step was a trip to the fabric store! I bought a half yard each of about 8-10 different fabrics. Several came from the remnants bin – great way to save some money! Once I got them all home, I ironed each one carefully, getting ALL the wrinkles out.

Once wrinkle-free, I set up a simple sweep on my bedroom desk using an old canvas propped against the desk to hold the fabric up about 2 feet high so it would have a seamless sweep across the desk. I’ve got a nice bay window in the bedroom that my desk sits in, so it makes a great place to get lots of natural light! Soft, natural light, as I have learned from testing and reading a lot online, is absolutely KEY to good shots.

In the shot above you can see layers of fabric in the background – i basically just laid them all on top of each other and would roll each one up or down as needed for different backgrounds. Made things nice and simple, and kept the fabric winkle-free! Below are a few other test shots both on fabric and with a vintage wood set.

I built the vintage wood set out on my patio using some old wood I’d had lying around – stuff you can find at the salvage yard – and a vintage wooden crate I picked up at an estate sale last summer. Just laid a board over a small table, put the box on top, and propped up a few old boards on top of the box – and viola! the perfect rustic vintage setting for Barnaby Fox!

After a lot of different backgrounds and options, I narrowed it to one feature shot – something different for every critter – one detail shot and a few shots on a plain background to show alternate angles and scale. I’m hoping this will give all the information someone might want in order to decide to take one of these guys home!

Helping Empower Others Thru Creativity
One of my goals with Wishes & Wool is to use my own creativity to donate to creative causes that are helping to fulfill needs and wishes of those less fortunate than I. And so, I’ve decided to donate 10% of all purchases to a wonderful charity that I’ve been a supporter of for about a year now, called 100 Cameras. This charity is dear to my heart because it makes such beautiful use of one of my other passions; photography. They empower children in underdeveloped parts of the world to document their lives through photography. By helping them to gain exposure and sell their photography, they enable these children to create positive change in their own lives and communities through their unique creative visions. Check out their website to see some of the kids’ photos and learn more!

Come by The Shop!
I invite you to come and check out all of my creations at Wishes & Wool, and let me know what you think of the shop! Any feedback or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I’m bursting with excitement about this whole new adventure! Having my own Etsy shop is something that I’ve been dreaming of for several years now – and really putting my stuff out there for sale has been a dream of mine since I was a little girl. And even though I’ve yet to sell anything, I truly believe people will fall in love with these little guys as much as I have! Thanks everyone for stopping by!

The Day the Internet Found Me

Every blogger out there fantasizes about this moment… when somehow the little blog you’ve been pouring yourself into suddenly gets noticed and explodes all over the internet – even if temporarily. Most of you are likely reading now because you saw my last post about my boyfriend’s recent accomplishment’s on the Freshly Pressed page of WordPress. I would like to share with you how this weekend went down…

We had a party Friday night with some close friends to celebrate all the goodness of the past week… hooray! Lots of bowling, laser tag and air hockey – as we are just giant 12 year olds around here. In the morning, as Andrew went off to work I stumbled sleepily to my desk to catch up on emails and the latest happenings of Facebook and as usual, visit the blog and see if maybe I’ve broken my record of 95 visits in a day. I’m staring at those status bars thinking to myself “hmmm that’s so weird, the one for yesterday is like disproportionately huge compared like ALL the past weeks.. what is wrong with this thing?” *refreshing page several times* Then I rollover the bar of epicness and the visit number 1,274 shows up…. whaaaaaaaa!

I then go into a fury of checking email and comments and likes and followers – whole crap! How has this happened?! Thank you WordPress for showing me how people found my blog! Freshly Pressed?! What! OMG *girly noises and dancing around the house in pj’s scaring the cats… this goes on for some time* And then I realized I have to wait ALL DAY to tell Andrew about this coolness and how tons of people are sharing in his achievement since I can’t call him at work. Baaah! So there I sat in the quietude of the morning with this thing that felt so big and expanding and connected that it was about to explode the room. And my favorite part of this was that it happened not because of something I did – but because of someone’s story that I shared… and that wonderfully interconnectedness of his story and mine and the whole journey that has meant to much to us.

By the end of the weekend our little post and the blog overall had over 10,000 visits (TEN THOUSAND!). That is a number of people so inconceivably huge-tastic to be connected to for even an iota of time that my only reaction was really just to laugh in lighthearted joy and utter amazement.

Now of course I realize this won’t last – and that probably everyone who’s even been on Freshly Pressed writes a blog entry just like this one afterwards… but do I care if I sound ridiculous? Nope. Unapologetically dramatic is how I roll. I really have no clue if anything like this will ever happen again and I’m just going to bask in it fully and outwardly – with all of you!

So THANK YOU to all of you wonderful shining people who took the time to visit, read and comment… to follow, reblog, and like. It has taken several days, but we’ve read each and every comment you left, and have gotten to see so many cool new blogs we would have never otherwise found! You made a special event in the lives of two people down in Texas even more incredible with all of your kindness! And to think, I almost didn’t post this because I thought it might be cheesy or no one would like it. Just goes to show that anytime we doubt ourselves we should really just take the chance and go for it… because you never know where it will go. =)

All my best!
*s

Sooo… what have I been up to this month?

I realize I have posted virtually NOTHING this month so far – yipes! Its true, the end of the month (and year!) are sneaking up fast! Have I finished a poster yet? Nnnnope… have I even started? Not at all! But I HAVE been thinking about it! (I definitely count that as productive). Even though I manage to do a lot of creative stuff I do procrastinate quite well still.

So what HAVE I been up to all month?
Well aside from the usual holiday chaos of hanging lights, putting out decorations and gift-wrapping… I’ve been working on a new project that is likely to become another year-long project on TOP of my 12 months project next year. (Sometimes I ask myself “what on earth have you gotten into now?!”). Yes, it came to me quite randomly a few weeks ago… I’d been trying to figure out how to open up my 12 Months of Creativity to other people. I wrestled with some different ideas, one of them being to have membership to a 12 Months blog where I would post about your project once a month. That felt off to me though… it still felt too much like me controlling/running a thing (taking precious creative time away from me) and plus, i didn’t much like the idea of making people pay for it. So I kept thinking and visiting various websites and online communities… until ONE day…

Something just hit me!
You know those moments people describe where something just hits them over the head? They’re going about their business or doing nothing particularly significant and then out of nowhere BAM!!! something just slams right into your head, decides to curl up inside your brain there and purr magnificence to you. Yes, we have all heard people talk of those moments.. they make us nauseous. Well, I’m here to say… sorry for the nausea! Indeed it did – just hit me like a ton of bricks (brightly colored ones!). Of course, it happened after spending many many hours and days and weeks and months thinking and talking to people about various ideas for how to expand my project to others. So I guess really, it wasn’t so much an “Aha!” moment as it just was finally the solution that seems to fill all the needs I was looking for.

So what IS this big idea?
I know… I’m rambling and really making quite a build-up to this idea of mine. (My boyfriend can tell you this is one of my many annoying talents). So the idea is to make an online creative community where people from all over the world can share their projects together… all kinds of projects! Art projects, cooking projects, craft projects, projects with kids, community service projects, science projects, anything creative! I knew it was perfect right away… because I love WAY to many things in life to ever just focus on one – and I know many other people are the same way too. I figure if I use the mantra I did during this entire 12 months project (Does it excite me? Then I’m DOIN IT!) then I could have a shot to really create this thing!

Soooo there you have it. BIG idea. Lots of possibility. We don’t know where it will go. It could crash halfway through the year, it could never really get off the ground to begin with, OR it could fly around the freakin’ world and touch million’s of people’s lives and get creative juices flowing all over the place! Haha, who is this person? I swear I NEVER used to dream this big… what is going ooon!

We Will Create
With that I will leave you with the link to the community page… wewillcreate.ning.com
I’ve got it up and running on a cheap and not-so-fancy community platform just to get things started. A) Because I’m cheap and B) Because I’m impatient and don’t want to wait to have some massive custom site built out. It’s all one big learning process right now, there’s still plenty of quirks and kinks to work out, but would love for you to stop by and join in the creativity! Starting first of the year there should already be several people beginning projects on there! Woohoo!! Thanks for reading!