Happy Holidays! and oh shit... Branding.....

Happy Holidays everyone!

As I get a few days of respite I work I have taken some of this time to work on myself and my own personal ventures. I have very little work to do when everyone else is on vacation for the holidays so I might as well make the most of the time.

I am in no way, shape, or form a graphic designer but I dabble a little bit for my own sake. I know I need business cards and I need to get a branding strategy together for my wee little yarn store in the works. I didn't want to deal with bubbly or fancy lettering. I've always been a fan of a straightforward easy to read font with a little class and vintage feel. My go to font is a Courier or Typewriter style.
Since I didn't want to use the font as cute or catchy thing in my store name I decided I wanted to do a fancy ampersand. I LOVE the ampersand.

Today I broke out the good ol scrap papers with some heavy 7.0 mm roller ball pens and graphite pencils to get my rough sketches down as I work on this whole branding thang. Branding is very important to a business and I am not trying to down play it at all. It just isn't my specialty nor do I feel that I have the skill set to make it as good as it could be. But these are the breaks when you have very little, to no money allocated in the business for this kind of thing. My main focus is having the funds for stock in the store and rent for at least 5-6 months squirreled away for any emergencies.

I have taken inspiration from the Georgia BOLD style ampersand into these two iterations. I knew I wanted to use the knitting needle in some way and of course the yarn. The difficult thing is thinking how literal I wanted it to look like am ampersand. I wanted it to still have a little mystery and quirk. One of those things that you might assume and not get right away but the closer you look you can get a little chuckle from the nuance of this logo.

I think I much prefer the ball of yarn version even though it isn't as clear. It is just for branding and its like that game where you can put the letters to a simple word out there in the wrong order but the brain still knows what word was intended.

I've also started to hunker down and look at my vendor applications for whole sale ordering and realizing I need to get this business cap on and get active with the business account, email, and get card made. 

There is a lead on a possible location! but that's all I'll say. I'm not going to stress out until May about having a location but of course the sooner the better.

Cheers! and have a wonderful holiday with your family, loved ones and furbabies if you have them!

 

Eat your Heart out Martha

HALLO!

Ok so these outfit  pictures don't really correlate with the 4th of July weekend but I didn't like them so much and it made me think of Martha Stewart.  At least in the sense that I forced myself to wear something thrift aka I re-purposed it and it is smocked.  Let me tell you it is really hard for me to wear anything thrifted.  No matter how many times I wash something I just have this unconscious feeling that it is still dirty.  I was ok with this because only the shirt was secondhand and I had a purpose to wear it that day.  I was doing a smocking example in my Draping class.  I wanted them to see there are a lot of possibilities in Adult clothing for smocking not just little girl dresses.

Second Hand Shirt

Tiger tree belt and Buckle

Anthropologie skirt from Sale Section

Dr. Scholl's Silver slide Sandals

Now onto the "Martha eat your heart out" 

portion of my 4th of July weekend.

Andy on a whim decided it wouldn't be a proper holiday unless he smoked a bunch of meat and had people over.  He cooked 16 lbs of pulled pork and 3 racks of ribs.  I took this time to channel my inner Martha and decorated and labeled all the goodies.

It was stupid simple to make this look nice.  I just used some red, white and blue themed scrapbook paper I had and used my largest circle punch to make a bunch of these.  Then I used some simple left over cream card stock scraps to punch out the labels and wrote as clearly as I could what all the items were.  Glued the label onto the circle which I taped onto the end of BBQ wooden skewers and VOILA cute food plates.
For the pulled pork it was just a baking pan that I lined with parchment paper and I used a punch everywhere star stamp from Martha Stewart's scrapbooking line to put the cute stars into the paper so it wasn't so plain.

Using the circles again and a few smaller flower punches I used the reminder of the paper up making garlands.  I got the idea for these from BHLDN.  It was a project I wanted to try out anyways and make sure that my sewing machine could handle doing this.  It turned out perfectly!  I'll do a separate tutorial for this when I start to work on my wedding decorations.

The early people hanging out in my new decorated room.  Nothing huge but a little flair was nice.

Blog the Holiday!

It's amazing to me how much fame fashion bloggers have been getting lately.  In the past half hour I have seen 4 bloggers that I normally read being used in Holiday Campaigns for Fossil and Coach.
Song of Style
Keiko Lynn
Gala Darling
Glamourai



I love how this Coach Promo Video just catches so many of them off their element and you can see they are real people.  They smile, make quirky awkward comments and breath.  It amazes me and makes me happy that Bloggers are getting such recognition.  There are even conferences now for bloggers.  It's been going on for a few years but still it grows and grows.  Blogging is pretty damn near common place it seems. 

What I love about Fashion bloggers is getting to see things from their side and watching them progress in their writing styles, design and tastes.  How each personality has a different opininion or take on a particular season or trends or how they even rebel and make their own trends.  There are a million and one bloggers out there myself included but it is just a great addition of information out there.

Currently my favorite holiday looks and accessories are from BCBG. They are also having a fabulous sale on some items till November 8th for 30% off of a good number of selected Items.  BCBG is one of the very few not so common retail stores that we happen to have at one of our Malls in Columbus.  I love the overabundance and decadence that the holiday trends bring!  Below are my favorite (and there are alot) picks from BCBG

Seriously?! The Hinged long rings are to die for!  Prices are not breaking the bank either considering what BCBG Jewelry usually goes for.  Majority of those Rings are under $100.

Rush for the Holidays

If you haven't noticed I have been working hard on updating my Etsy.   It's very hard time of year because after all those craft shows and events you just want to let your guard down and relax.  Unfortunately for me the colder months are my best selling months.
~BUT~
Finally I have finished all my updating on Etsy!  it only took me 3 days including taking photos, editing and posting of over 30 items.   Well worth it though.  Hopefully I will make some last minute sales before the holidays.

The process is longer then I would like but it's a one women show especially when I don't have time for interns when I am scrapping by myself.  I'm very happy with how it turned out and borrowing a Digital SLR made a HUGE difference in the quickness of the updates.  I had much less photo editing to do then I normally do and didn't even need to take a second batch of photos because everything looked brilliant the first time around.  It especially helped that I took my time to practice the week before getting accustomed to the camera's settings and playing with lighting.  Also helpful that my cat was a willing muse.

Tiny Canary!

This weekend come see me and all the other wonderful handmade arts at TINY CANARY!!!

Located at Junctionview Studios

889 Williams Avenue

Columbus, Ohio 43212

First 100 people to enter each day will get a free goodie bag filled with items from different artists, discounts and other great things! It is definitely worth it to get there early and line up to get these.

This is also a great opportunity to start your Holiday Shopping and commit to buying Handmade to support local artists.

BUY HANDMADE!!!

Sweets

I am taking a slight break from knitting and patterns to delve into some needle felting for some expected upcoming craft show and holidays in general. I like to top my presents every year with something different and identifiable compared to all the "Hallmark" ribbons and cards.

Last year I made all my cards with Botticelli prints on them.
The year before I made my own tags and decorated each one.
This year felted sweet ornaments.

If you couldn't tell they are a strawberry halved, croissant, and Flan with a berry on top. Not bad for beginning but I can do better.

The Halloween Highball I am participating in will have models ~YAH~ provided and they have also added Terri Stevens from Project runway season 5 as well. This will be interesting. Not to be mean but I much prefer Kelli and her and I get a long really well. I might even be able to help her in her upcoming fashion show in November and do some knitwear for it. I prefer her style also. Even though mine is totally different at least we get and appreciate each other.

I did get my butt into gear this week and actually completed my jacket pattern and made myself and new pair of culottes. I also completed fair isle machine knitting two monkey scarves and have started the finishing on them. I truly hate finishing things from the machine. Blocking machine knitting items is a pain as well. Why do I even use the machine at all I wonder.... Oh that's right because it's FABULOUS! Fast knits in a jiff! making my own fabric to drape and wonder. Easy presents, shawls, fun fair isle that I never have to count rows and lose track. I can keep it all on the machine and not worry about anyone touching it because everyone fears the hundreds of sharp hooked needles! ~end rant~