I got notification last night that a fellow West Australian Etsian has included my “Two Little Chicks” fabric art card in her ‘Wild Wild West Showcase’ Treasury featuring Western Australian Etsy sellers. Considering how many there are, I’m honoured to have made the list of 12 items she selected.
Here’s a screen shot of the Treasury (Treasuries only last a few days on Etsy, then they disappear):
Featuring my "Two Little Chicks"
Over the past few weekends, I’ve been busy making stock for my Etsy store in preparation for the Christmas rush everyone says will happen. Also, there’s a local craft fair in our town on December 5 and I’ve put in for a table, so I need to make sure I have enough to fill it!
I had a day off work today, so I completed the last of the items, took photos, wrote descriptions, and loaded it all into Etsy. Some 20 new items (which translates to about 80 or so individual pieces) took me much of the day! 😦 But they’re up now.
New fabric coasters
New luggage tags
Recently added bookmarks
Since one of our local fabric stores closed a few weeks back ( 😦 ), I’ve had thread withdrawal! Enter the wonderful Michelle who came to our quilt retreat a couple of weekends ago, and who manages Handcrafter’s House in Midland, Western Australia. Not only has Michelle stepped in and filled the breach by getting me supplies, but she offered to get me a sample colour chart of Robison-Anton rayon threads. It arrived yesterday and it’s an absolute feast for the eyes! Here’s a taste:
I’ve just spent three days with four fabulous women, laughing, eating (too well!), learning, sharing, and just enjoying each other’s company. Oh, and we did quite a bit of sewing too! 😉
We had our quilting challenge set by B and on Friday evening we shared our creations with a bit of “Show and Tell” and some local wine. What a creative bunch we are! B set the challenge back in May and while I was finished by the end of June, two of the ladies were in a race against the clock. M only finished hers a few days before our ‘retreat’. Full details on the challenge criteria are here: https://sandgroper14.wordpress.com/2009/05/19/the-challenge/
Here are pictures of our magazine page and our finished challenge pieces (mine are coming in a separate post tomorrow). However, the pictures don’t do the stories and the creation process justice. They are just the finished product and tell nothing of the trials and tribulations and convolutions of the mind that the creators went through to get there!
After we exhibited our challenge pieces, we had more “show and tell” of other quilts and fabric pieces we’d made over the past year or so. Then we had a great dinner made by B. (Meal duties were rostered, so we only made one meal each and were the kitchenhand for another meal.)
Saturday was full of sewing and talking and eating! And Saturday night we had a fabulous dinner at the local hotel, and sprung a big birthday cake surprise for B, who has a ‘zero’ birthday in about 2 weeks. After dinner, we heard G talk about her quilt trip to Paducah in Kentucky, and other places in the US and saw all her gorgeous photos. A big Lotto win that night would’ve seen us jetting off on a similar trip together next year, but alas, that wasn’t to be! We didn’t even win $10…
Sunday was more birthday surprises for B — we had bought her a bird bath for her lovely garden. And more sewing. And more eating. Sunday afternoon we went to Ford House, a local B&B and an Aladdin’s Cave of all sorts of really nice gifts and homewares. It went on and on… We had a delicious afternoon tea there too, then went up to see Judy’s new quilting studio. Judy is a professional long-arm quilter who does all my large quilts. She now has a proper studio for Millie, her 14 foot long arm quilting machine. Her new studio is the envy of us all!
Sunday night was more food, more laughter, more chat. As was this morning. Then it was all over. G, M, and F all left around noon to head back to Bunbury and Perth, and I left a short while later.
Despite all the great food, company, etc. we WERE there to sew. I made some 21 bookmarks (and gave 5 away and sold 2 to B), around 24 luggage tags (and sold 4 to B), and learnt how to do wave patterns using fabric (thanks M!). M helped me out with some neat things I could do on my machine too.
It was a great weekend! Thanks ladies! (We already have plans to do it all again next year, with G setting the challenge.)
Oh, and I sold some more of my Etsy pieces — M purchased 4 bookmarks, G purchased a luggage tag and an art piece, and B purchased some bookmarks and luggage tags that hadn’t even made it to the store! However, I’ll be adding about 14 new bookmarks and 20+ luggage tags over the next couple of weeks as a result of my productivity this weekend.
I submitted two photos of my Etsy pieces to CraftGawker (http://craftgawker.com) the other day, and one of them — “Two Little Chicks” (http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=28410150) — is currently on the front page! (I sold the other this weekend, so it won’t get listed at all)
I took a screen shot, as I suspect front page items get replaced every few hours or so.
"Two little chicks" as featured on CraftGawker
I’ve recently discovered a great online store that sells batik fabrics (known as Bali fabrics in some parts of the US) at REALLY good prices. My first experience with them was to buy a yard each of six different fabrics that were on sale for less than US$10 a yard (that’s about $12 Australian, MUCH cheaper than the typical $25 per metre we pay here for batiks). Even their non-sale prices are much cheaper than here. But as with any online purchase, shipping can make or break the deal.
The website — http://www.batiks.com — didn’t have any information on whether they shipped to Australia, nor what the shipping rates would be, so I emailed them. I got a reply within 24 hours, with enough detail to do my calculations and place an order. They notified me the day my parcel shipped, and I received it within two weeks. The fabrics were gorgeous!
I’d also signed up to their newsletter and a few weeks later found out they were having a ‘fat quarter frenzy’ of their batiks — US$25 for 25 fat quarters! That’s US$1 each!! Even cheap non-batik fat quarters in Australia start at $3.50 each and can often be around $7 each. It was too good a deal to pass up, so I ordered two mixed sets of fat quarters — 50 fat quarters for US$50. Even with shipping of US$26.90 (two parcels), the total of close to US$77 (AU$90), meant that each batik fat quarter cost me less than AU$2. As I said MUCH less than I’d pay here.
It was like Christmas opening my parcels and laying out all the fabrics on the kitchen counter top! Here they are, all wrapped up as they were when I pulled them out of the parcels (oh, and only two were the same!):
Will I order from them again? Absolutely! The communication is good, the service is prompt, and each transaction has been handled professionally. Now, if only they could add that they ship outside the US to their website, with approximate shipping prices…
Update 12 September 2009: I emailed batiks.com that I’d blogged about them. Within 12 hours I had a lovely reply from the owner of the store! Nice. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with good, old-fashioned personal service — it’ll get me coming back every time!
Over the past two or three months I’ve been really busy with work and haven’t had a lot of time to sew or to blog about it. I’ve only been making small things that I can knock out in hour-long blocks on spare weekend moments — things like luggage tags, bookmarks, and the occasional set of coasters. I’ve been trying to use up odds and ends of fabric that just can’t be used for anything else.
As a result, I’ve added quite a few more mostly ‘$10 and under’ gift ideas and ‘stocking stuffers’ to my Etsy store in the past few months. Here’s a preview — if you’d like to purchase any of these items or want to see more photos, visit my store.
Mine is the one in the bottom left corner. You can see it full size here: http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=23536451
Mine is in the bottom left corner
I forgot to post that I was in my 7th Etsy Treasury a week or so ago. Again, someone was taken with my green leaf coasters, which are still for sale in my Etsy store.
Here’s the screen shot I took at the time of this gorgeous green collection:
If you have a large quilt to quilt on your domestic sewing machine, it’s always recommended that you work on a large table, preferably one where your sewing machine can drop down so the sewing area at the same level with the table top. The other requirement is a smooth surface so the quilt can skim over the table top and not get too bunched up or drag.
You can go out and spend $1000 on such a specialised sewing table, but not all of us have a spare $1000 to spend, nor the space to put such a table even if we could afford it.
The other alternative is to think outside the square — instead of dropping the machine down to the table level, why not bring the level up to the machine? Sounds silly, huh? Not if you follow the instructions here: http://shedrum.blogspot.com/2009_01_01_archive.html
With some large sheets of styrofoam, some tape, a knife and a large sheet of plastic, she ended up with a great quilting table — and all for about $18!
Rhonda Bracey: At Random 