Sometimes great design ideas take time to be turned into great crafts or products. Sometimes a first attempt is a prototype fail; sometimes such a bad one that we want to throw it in a cluttered corner and hide it away… almost wanting to give up. But when that original idea has so much promise, well, just calm down for now and wait … sleep, sleep, sleep (and shower and etc.) on it. Ever get great ideas in bed before sleepiness hits? This is when you might come up with a solution to fix your craft fail. Then with new morning or coffee energy, it’s back to work with a fresh mind and renewed faith in one’s self.

And remember, if at 1st or even 2nd you don’t succeed, simmah dow’ nah (like that old SNL skit) then try, try again!

Hopefully learning this myself will soon result in a great new fun item! Stay tuned.

Bonus Tip: You might even be able to upcycle a treasure from your trashed original!

-- Ella M.

I took a bit of a break here selling and even a little bit on the creative front, yes while we’re still new. First of all, we ran into technical issues while I also exhaustively tried out different cart solutions – and we’re back using Big Cartel. More delaying issues relate to my desire for “perfectionist” pictures. Gah.

A worse setback is I needed/need to work on raising my income in my blogging pursuits (my main job partly because I am disabled), because that’s already been successful in the past, and I need more money to even create more. This too was set back with a week’s outage of Internet, inexplicably and maddening.

Add to that one very expensive obstacle; I need more ink in my printer! This is troubling with my love for custom fabric making and a new desire to make cards (related to good news below).

One good thing keeping me busy and busier than usual (and something to get used to) is that I’ve found love! Aaaaand often instead of making fashions, I’ve … well …

Which finds me desiring to participate more in Valentine’s creating and promoting – but this includes envelope clutches with printed poems on fabric, and jewelry and cards that are not nauseating  and … I’m back at needing money to even start.

At least I’ve adjusted to life once again coupled (how hard ). Adjusting to working as much as ever (note it can be hard swinging fully into writing online/blogging after not having Internet for a week) is actually a much harder part.

-- Ella M.

*Update*

We went back to the old cart even with more difficult customizations partly because our script broke on upgrade, and a shop owner shouldn’t deal with that, nor have time.

We did take some time off to find the best cart solution, to make plans and … to fall in love.

*Originally posted on Nov. 13th…* … Read the rest of this entry »

-- Ella M.