Category Archives: Etsy

Didn’t Take Long!

Ahhhh, personal weakness! Remember the post I wrote at the end of the year where I laid out a few quilting goals for the upcoming year? My second goal on the list was to sew from my stash and avoid buying any new fabric for a while. Hmmm…. how does one really define “a while”? For me, I am thinking that means a week. That is exactly how long my “fabric fast” lasted. Ugh!! Where is my will power? Ok, it isn’t that bad. Totally explainable and I hardly spent any money.

There is a local shop called Humble Fabric and Crafts located in Grass Valley. A very sweet woman owns it and she specializes in “pre-owned” fabric. She scours estate sales and sometimes people will bring in pieces they no longer want and receive credit for their fabric to be spent on others’ fabric. Another example of recycling that makes total sense. Really it is a great idea and helps contain the cost of sewing. I usually go to this shop for smaller pieces or just to look for unusual fabric. You won’t find a collection or a new release here. But, it is a mecca for the bargain hunting seamstress (which would be me). Roxy sells the smaller pieces (less than a yard) by the ounce. The price ranges from 30 to 60 cents per ounce. Weighing one yard of quilting cotton I usually end up with 4 or 5 ounces. Do the math and you’ll see this is a steal. I am on her email list and she sent out a note saying that she is moving the shop to a bigger location and was going to have a sale. What? A sale on fabric that is already a total bargain? All of the ‘pre-owned’ fabric was 1/2 off. Crazy. How could I resist? I didn’t even try to talk myself out of it. I did think to myself, be reasonable, you don’t even need anything, etc. I was pretty restrained, if I do say so myself! Here are some of the pieces I picked up.

Some were tiny and others were multiple yards.

The fabric on the far left features a tropical floral, including Birds of Paradise. It is a home dec cotton and I will use it for the Chemex Warmers that I sell in my Etsy shop.

This is a Marimekko print that I think will end up as the back of a child’s quilt. I love the bold colors. The large scale print will be fun to use as a backing. It will need to be framed with another fabric as this piece isn’t quite large enough. I think I will use a green polka dot that I already have. The dots are really big so it should work well with this.

Finally I also grabbed a large piece of cotton batting that was 36″ by 108″. Perfect for the Etsy projects that I make.

OK, so I didn’t last but a week. That doesn’t mean that I am going to drop the goal that I had set. Kind of like when you start a diet and then have dessert the next day? I wouldn’t know, but you hear of that sort of thing happening…. Just have to re-focus and start over. So, I haven’t bought any fabric since January 8th. Now how long can I last? Hoping for more than a week!

Linking to Sunday Stash at Molli Sparkles as well as Let’s Bee Social at Sew Fresh Quilts

Interrupted Plans

15 Replies

It’s all about flexibility, right? After setting my goals for this year I started thinking about the best way to achieve them. I want to make some progress with my quilting skills and also need to spend time on my Etsy shop to keep it growing. I decided to make a schedule of sorts. My nature is to hop from one thing to another and that is usually inefficient. I start something, sew and then move to something else. No real plan. So, I decided I would earmark some time twice a week to sew on my products for the Etsy shop. Any other sewing time that was available would be used for quilting projects.

Ahh…. the best laid plans. The week just didn’t allow for a schedule! If you are a local reader you probably remember we had some pretty crazy winds last week. Which led to this:

I wasn’t home when this tree fell over but my kids were and they texted me this picture. Yikes! So, with a tree that size on the ground, we had to call the tree guy to come deal with it. One thing led to another, as so often happens, and we ended up with this:

No point having the tree guy come out and only clean up the fallen tree. He took out another tree, cleaned this pine you see above and topped two more trees. Might as well get it all done. So this created activity around here and I was distracted from sewing the first day or so.

Woke up with a migraine on late Monday night. I get lots of migraines…. not very fun. I have learned over the years that the day after a migraine my brain is frighteningly similar to a plate of scrambled eggs. I cannot focus or think straight and driving is not even an option. Cutting fabric is such a waste – might as well just throw it away because it won’t be straight, accurate or even close to the right size. If I sew it is highly likely that I will stitch something wrong sides together or upside down. Don’t ask me how I know, but trust me, I do. So instead of sewing that day I sorted scraps. I had been tossing my scraps into a paper grocery sack under my sewing table for the past 8 or 9 months and it was full.

It was fun to look through all of it. Remembering all the projects that I had made over the past year or so. Didn’t take me long to get it sorted into little piles by color.

Apparently red, green, blue and brown were mycolors for last year. Very little pink and only one tiny scrap of yellow. Kind of funny to see it all sorted out. I found some jars that I had in the basement which held about 1/2 of this and the other 1/2 is sitting in Ziploc bags until I figure something out. Anyone want to make me some of those cute fabric boxes that other quilters use for scraps in their adorable, organized sewing rooms? That would be great, thank you very much.

I left the blue and white scraps out as that is the January color for RSC15. I took a quick peek at the first row for Mari’s Classic Stitches BOM at Academic Quilter and plan to get started on that fairly soon. The block is a Broken Dishes pattern using lots of HST’s. It will be fun to get started on those. She has several options for block size with each row so I need to figure out a plan before I start cutting.

I do have a couple of finishes for this week. Sunday I got the RSC14 quilt top assembled. It is so pretty. I sashed it with a light gray polka dot fabric.

I’m very happy with the way this one turned out. I wanted to add some width so the border on each side is 4 inches rather than two like the top and bottom strips. At this point I am making good progress on this one and should have it sandwiched, quilted and bound by end of the month. (I hope, I hope!)

I also managed to finish up a couple of Chemex Coffee Pot cozies for my Etsy shop. This one is my favorite for the week. The fabric is from an Alexander Henry line (Dia De Los Muertos). Most of the line was a little weird for me but this piece is so fun. I wish I had bought more of it.

So the week was kind of crazy. I wasn’t really able to work to the schedule that I had planned on. It’s ok. There’s always next week. Hope all of you are working on something fun!

Linking up with sweet Lorna at Let’s Bee Social, Connie over at Freemotion by the RIver and Amanda Jean at Crazy Mom Quilts. What a talented trio. Pop over and check out all the work that is linked up with these blogs. The links are posted at the top of the page, under Link Ups.

Custom Work

14 Replies

Over the summer I opened an Etsy shop. Kind of scary because it means putting yourself out there and hoping that someone likes your work enough to buy it. So far it is going well. I have sold a number of items, certainly not enough to make any sort of living, but enough to make it rewarding. It feels good to have someone look at an item I created and purchase it. Also for some reason, I get a kick out of knowing that I am shipping something I made to someone in another part of the country. I have sent things to South Carolina, Alaska, Oregon, New York, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Florida and Virginia. This week I received an Etsy email from a woman telling me that an item I made was on her sister’s Christmas List. I loved that! The same item had sold the day before I received the email. Luckily I had enough fabric to duplicate it and it was simple item. It felt great to make my customer happy.

Over the past two weeks I had two requests for custom orders. I have been making cozies for Chemex coffee pots and sold a number of them as Christmas gifts through Etsy. The first custom request I got was from a woman who wanted me to make one for her using her fabric. She had a gorgeous African Ankara fabric that she thought would work. We chatted back and forth a bit and she sent me a picture of the fabric. Seemed like a good idea so we came to an agreement and she mailed the fabric to me.

It turned out so pretty. She is gifting this to her sister for the holidays. (Excuse the horribly wrinkled sheet that was used as a backdrop! I mailed off the project before looking at this picture. Ick!)

It was a great surprise to see how the green pattern matched so well where it joins with the buttons. Totally happened by chance as I didn’t think to check that when I was cutting. I was more concerned with how to fit the most of that bold blue and purple stripe in the piece. I got lucky!

I had these pretty a brass buttons that added nice touch. I quilted it along the white lines that delineate the pattern. Overall, a good finish. The best thing is now I have some experience with Ankara fabric and plan to buy more. Ankara fabric actually originated with the Dutch. It was made with the intent to be sold in Indonesia but quickly gained popularity in West Africa. It is a very dramatic use of bold colors and prints and is usually made with 100% cotton fabric. The piece that I worked with washed well and was easy to sew on.

The second custom order came around as a result of a request from a woman in Pennsylvania. She wrote me and said that she liked my work but wanting to gift a Chemex cozy to her guy, she hoped for something less feminine. This forced me to take a look at the fabric choices I have been making and yep, most are rather feminine. It is interesting because when I make a new Chemex jacket to put up on Etsy, I always post it on Instagram with various hashtags. I get a pretty good response and guess what, they are predominantly male responses. But those responses haven’t led to sales on Etsy. It follows that I might be more successful in that market with some covers that are less floral! My customer specifically asked for denim, twill or flannel. This is what I came up with.

The denim is from my husband’s massive pile of old levi’s. The flannel is actually a piece leftover from pj’s that I made for my boys about ten years ago. Talk about lucky, I didn’t even have to make a run to the store!

The buttons were purchased in Lancaster, PA during my amazing fabric hunt in Amish country. (That trip was a blast and you can read about it here.)

It was a win for the customer and some new perspective for me. Question of the day: If you are selling product on Etsy, do you charge extra for a custom order? In these two instances, I did not. The items were ones that I make regularly, the customer just wanted me to use a certain fabric. However, it does mean setting aside my current project and sewing something different for each of these customers. I am not sure and would love to hear what others are doing.

As an aside, I am loving the comments I have received on my post about the giveaway for Sew Mama Sew. What a sweet group of comments. Today is the last day for the giveaway so if you want to join in, check out this post.

Enjoy your weekend! Linking to Let’s Bee Social and Crazy Mom Quilts. Find these links and more, at the top of the page under Link-Ups. (That sounds like a commercial!)