Extracurricular Sewing

It's a brand new year and yet my Etsy shop looks much like it did in 2007. The poor shop has been a bit neglected because I've been doing a lot of extracurricular sewing this month.

First, I sewed up a passel of bags for my sister's birthday.


It was a particularly special birthday for her this year, so she got an extra helping of presents! I especially like this bag:


I call it "The Light Bright Bag" because it makes me think of the Light Bright toy we shared when we were kids. For those of the younger set, a Light Bright was a backlit panel with a grid of little holes over black paper that you could poke plastic pegs into to make glowing designs. Oh, here's the updated version. My sister picked the fabric for this bag and I think it underscores her excellent taste. If you ever see me wearing anything cute or hip, there's a 95% chance it was a gift from her!

I also made a bag for a Pattern Review I did for Sew, Mama, Sew. The review will appear early next week and I'll post some pics after that. It was a lot of fun to make a bag from someone else's pattern! It's so easy to follow my own well-trodden path and get into a rut. I've been thinking of doing some more pattern reviews here. What do you think?

Anyways, now that my extracurricular sewing is finished, I'll be working on my new handbag design this weekend and hopefully will have one or two for my shop on Monday.

Happy weekend!

So little time...

I have so many things on my to-do list including:

1. putting a new line of handbags for my shop into production
2. adding the PayPal storefront somewhere over there------>
   
3. proto-typing zipper pouches
4. spinning yarn for mitts for my sister-in-law
5. working on a pattern review for Sew, Mama, Sew

And yet I'm obsessing about sewing a new shirt for myself. My inspiration is an article from the Threads Magazine newsletter called "A Figure-Flattering Tee" (and if there ever was a figure that needs flattering, it's mine.)

photo courtesy of Threads Magazine

I love Threads and have been a subscriber for years. I love to go through old issues because there is always some new technique to learn or hint to try. The above article is by Marcy Tilton, whose patterns and techniques are wonderful. I especially love this article about t-shirt construction. Anyways, it's taking tremendous will-power to not run to the fabric store and buy patterns and fabric and dust off my serger.

What's tempting you lately?

Nifty!

Just a quick note to mention some nifty things I gleaned from the Etsy forums today:

1. Heart-o-Matic

This is a quick way to see how many Etsy Hearts you've garnered! You can find out stats for your shop or individual items. It's a much quicker way to indulge my ego than waiting and waiting for my spiral of hearts to stop spinning.

2. PayPal Store Front

You can use this widget to set up a little store-front on your blog! I just messed around with it and it is the niftiest. I'll be adding a little store-front down in the lower right hand corner later in the month when I have it all updated. Here's the Etsy forum thread discussing it. Thanks to Meringue and MagicJelly for letting us in on the coolness.


Also, I just discovered Flickr Stats. You need a Pro account to activate them, but it's another cool way to track views and where they're coming from.

Any cool tools you'd like to share?

Yarn

(Sometimes good post titles escape me. This is one of those times.)

Another activity during my hiatus was knitting up some of my handspun yarn into presents. That was a lot fun and deeply satisfying. It tickles me to no end to know that I took some lovely colored fluffy stuff and turned it into something durable and fun (I hope) to wear. So, let's see, what did I make...

My Sonoma yarn spun from roving from Maine Woods Yarn became these mitts, modeled by my pal (and mitt recipient) Case. I used Midnight Knitter's Potluck Wool Mittenettes pattern.

My Hyacinth yarn, also from Maine Woods Yarn, became a scarf for one of my sisters-in-law. The pattern is Yarn Harlot's One Row Handspun Scarf - a quick and fun one to knit!

I had a lovely time spinning a chunky yarn from Knitspin's Felldew roving, which I knitted into wristwarmers for my other sister-in-law. I made up the pattern as I went along.

I also got my invitation to Ravelry which I am slowly updating. I'm MaiaL there (good user names escape me even more often than good post titles!) if you ever want to visit.

And before I forget, Happy New Year! I hope you all had a fun and safe one. We spent our New Years watching bits and pieces of the fireworks show at the Space Needle from our upstairs window. There was a computer glitch, so it was a haphazard show.