Last chance to pick up a Lady B Turn-Lock Clutch for yourself, as this precious clutch pictured here is the last of her kind:

I do plan to make more clutches in the future but will likely branch out into different colors and fabrics when I do. Pick one up for yourself before she flies away!

And, ladybugs are good luck. Did you know?

• In Sweden, folks believe that if a ladybug lands on a young maiden’s hand, she will soon be getting married.
• If you find a ladybug in your house, count the number of spots and that is how many dollars you will soon receive.
• In England, finding a ladybug means that you will have a good harvest.
• In France, if you are sick and a ladybug lands on you, when it flies away, it will take the sickness with it.
• If a ladybug has more than seven spots, then there will be a famine. If it has less than seven, then there will be a good harvest.
• At one time, doctors would mash up ladybugs and put them in a cavity to cure a toothache.
• Some people believe that the number of spots on a ladybug indicates how many children you will have.
• If you find a ladybug in your house in the winter you will have good luck.

Thanks to Mrs. Seagraves QUEST Classroom page for this fine info.

8/1 update: Lady B has spread her wings and flown away! Our last Lady B Turn-Lock Clutch is now sold. Yay! To find out about new product updates through the spam-free mailing list, please email me at shop@eleen.com.

This here’s a screenshot of the craft fair planner I made for myself, updated slightly to look at how far ahead or behind (mostly behind) I was on a week-by-week basis as compared to my original schedule for the Renegade Craft Fair earlier this month:

The schedule reveals much behind what went down here at home, behind the scenes. Basically I started production 6 weeks before the show date. I had planned to calmly and steadily produce between 8~12 items per week. That’s laid out, good intentions and all, in the “Planned” top section of the spreadsheet.

What really happened was a different story. See “Actual” section, bottom half. Week 1, I did a great job. 9 items planned, 9 items produced. Zero variance! Week 2 I floundered about a bit. 8 coin purses? Didn’t happen. Not that I wasn’t thinking about it or working towards the overall goal in some shape or form; in fact, I spent a lot of time sketching and prototyping a handful of new items to see if maybe I ought to work those into the mix instead of the items I’d originally planned. That’s kind of where I got into trouble - didn’t stick to the plan. The plan! Ultimately I did end up working in 2 of the 4 new designs I made, so the time investment wasn’t a total loss. But, it may have been if I didn’t make that major push during Weeks 5 and 6.

Because, by the end of Week 4 I was in a panic. OMG, I only have 27 items for a 10×10 booth?! That lit a fire under my butt and poor Jimmy didn’t get a single home-cooked meal for the next two weeks. Well, maybe one. Or even two. But otherwise it was pretty much take-out, frozen or canned foods, or one of his own concoctions.

The things that helped me most about my schedule were:

• Countdown: This cell contains a formula that calculates the show date minus today’s date, which automatically updates to be the date that you are looking at the spreadsheet. I specifically recall starting to panic when the Countdown reached 14 days, because by that point as you can see I was already 14 items behind schedule and a whopping 38 items behind my targeted total! =/

• Cumulative Variance and Variance Against Total: How far behind am I based on my week-by-week schedule? And how far behind am I against my target 65 items?

• Planned section vs. Actual section: My background is web project management, so it was a no-brainer for me that I’d need to have something that laid out my specific goals for “the project”, alongside something that measured my progress against those goals. Otherwise, how would I know how freaked out I ought to be at any point in time? It’s all about measuring panic, after all.

I didn’t track my other to-do’s on this schedule, just items to be made. But, there was a long list of other stuff that had to be done especially since this was my first gig. Those things I worked in along the way (like buying an imprinter, picking up some shopping bags, signing up for a credit card processor) and of course we had a few long nights just before the show to do some things that I didn’t get to earlier since I’d fallen behind schedule (signage and tags, primarily).

And, here’s the XLS file in case anyone should find it useful!

>> Download Craft Fair Planner.xls

I really enjoyed stitching up these little coin purses. My mom is addicted to purse frame pouches, which got me obsessing over them as well. So when I found this Joel Dewberry fabric, it sealed the deal and the Dollface Coin Purse was born.

This fabric is from Joel Dewberry’s Ginger collection and is actually meant to be flower buds (the design is called “Modern Bud”), but I felt like the print was just dying to be turned upside-down to represent little doll faces instead. And racially diverse ones as well! There are white faces, yellow faces, brown…much like the little Playmobil guys (of which I particularly enjoy the “Asian Family” and “Mediterranean/Hispanic Family“). Heh heh.

To pick a Dollface Coin Purse up for yourself, head on over to that Etsy shop!

As I mentioned, Jimmy and I - with the help of Corrib Moving - finally moved all of my stuff over from my little one-bedroom condo into his/our home here in Alameda. Combined, the two of us have a lot of stuff. Like, a scary amount of stuff.

My stuff’s primarily craft-related, but I also just love accumulating tools and gadgets, so I also have a lot of…tools and gadgets. =] His stuff I think is a little more varied but includes a ton of old college memorabilia and t-shirts, CDs/DVDs and gifted/adopted pieces of furniture and linens from friends and family. Oh, and a lot of hotel toiletries. So anyway, all this stuff has driven me to aggressively purge a lot of my things (to start) to avoid over-cluttering our newly shared home.

But, what to do with all the discards??? We’ve been trying to adopt more earth-friendly habits here at home and we just watched this eye-opening show on the lifecycle of garbage in America, so that kind of reinforced the desire to find a more responsible way of discarding with everything even though it’d be a lot easier just to haul it downstairs and throw it in the dumpster. Well luckily here in the Bay Area at least, it’s pretty to get rid of the unwanteds. So I thought I’d share. This is by no means a definitive guide, but here’s what I found for the things I’ve had to get rid of:

Household hazardous waste (e.g. paint, cleaners, car products, pesticides, batteries, even grease/cooking oil!) can be dropped off for FREE at drop-off locations in Oakland, Fremont, Hayward and Livermore. There are different schedules for each of these locations but dropping off is easy as pie. As a matter of fact, at the Oakland location (only one I’ve been to) it was a drive-thru operation. A drive-thru! If you can pop your trunk and your stuff is easily identifiable, you don’t even have to get out of your car. Wow! See StopWaste.org for more information, including a downloadable form you need to fill out and hand over.

Electronic waste (old monitors, CPUs, CDs (and their jewel cases!), DVDs, cell phones and other electronics) can be conveniently dropped off for FREE (well, mostly - they charged us $5 to take a huge, nasty microwave off our hands for example but it was totally worth it) at Universal Waste Management’s Oakland facility six days a week. Or, you can wait for an e-waste recycling event closer to you.

Gently used household items (e.g. clothing, furniture, unused toiletries, kitchenware) can be donated to Salvation Army or of course a number of other charitable organizations, but with Salvation Army at least you can easily schedule an online pickup of your items if you have a large collection of items that you can’t drop off at a donation center yourself. When you fill out their online form, a little pop-up will tell you based on your zip code what types of items they will and won’t accept. Also, it’s the driver’s discretion on whether or not they’ll accept certain things. The only item of ours that they didn’t take was the sleeper sofa and that was only because, for liability reasons, they needed us to move it downstairs for them and I was the only one home so that didn’t happen.

OR, if you’re Filipino or have a Filipino mother-in-law like me, you’ll save most of this stuff for her so that she can do up a bunch of balikbayan boxes and ship them off to the Philippines. =]

Plastic bags can be returned to grocery stores like Safeway, where they’ve got collection bins at their entrances. Of course, this is for the plastic bags that you had to take because you forgot to bring your reusable ones. =]

For other miscellaneous items that I wasn’t sure what to do with, including fabric and clothes hangers for example, I checked StopWaste.org’s handy Recycling Wizard. For example, several Goodwill and Thrift Town locations will take plastic clothes hangers (but not wire). In fact, it seems that Goodwill will accept quite a few random things I wouldn’t have thought of dropping off there. Fabric can be donated to Goodwill or, among a bunch of other places, one of my favorite spots - the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse.

This sounds like a lot of places to waste fuel driving to, but it ended up being pretty easy to drop stuff off on the way to one place or another so I don’t think I ever had to make a special trip. I’m still a little stumped on where wire hangers are supposed to go, though. Alameda County Industries lists hangers as going in the black bin (i.e. not recyclable) but notes parenthetically that dry cleaners will take back hangers. But the Recycling Wizard lists what to do with a few different types of wire, just not sure that wire hangers is any one of these.

And yes, going through all that makes me less inclined to add NEW stuff to the mix and try to stick to buying things that we “need” vs. only “want”. Except for that Zappos swimsuit I just picked up. And Jimmy’s watch. Or watches. =D

And that is my recycling roundup for the day!

Addendum: Almost forgot! If you need moving boxes, search the FREE STUFF boards on Craigslist before you part with that hard-earned money! I totally scored and found a good soul not 10 minutes away from our place that had just moved and was giving away their perfectly good and in fact pretty high-quality moving boxes for F R E E. Yippee! We’ll be doing the same if we have any left over after all the donations are done.

The past two weeks have been all about boxes and stuff. And boxes and boxes of even more stuff. Egh! After almost six months of newlywededness, Jimmy and I finally called the movers in and had them move me out of my little Oakland condo and into our freshly remodeled Alameda home.

Moving gets tiring real fast, so it was a welcomed relief when I finally got to start in on making a new set of Big Lugs yesterday!

This set contains 12 Lugs and will therefore be the biggest number of Lugs I’ve attempted to produce in one run. There are 7 different styles/colors involved, so I see a lot of thread changing in my future…but this could not be helped. Actually, I hope to procure either a new Janome 1600P-DBX or Juki TL-98Q sometime in the near future to speed me along. Now that would help. Though, the funds are not quite there at the moment. Maybe after this set of 12 Lugs!?!

Lastly, I love picking up great tips - big or small - on how to improve sewing accuracy and efficiency. Kathleen Fasanella is chock full of these. She is the author of super-blog Fashion-Incubator.com and the book The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Sewn Product Manufacturing, which I bought in repayment for eating up all the free info on her site. My favorite blog entries related to preparing pieces for sewing are these little treasures:

• To pin or not to pin
• Tracing and marking
• Marking and cutting
• Rotary cutters, a guaranteed argument

Her material is focused mostly on industrial vs. home/hobby sewing, and though I may be but a one-gal shop I’m still a “manufacturing” business and think it’s essential to incorporate these recommended techniques, where they can apply, at home. For instance - pinning my fabric before cutting. This is, generally, a no-no. Kathleen demonstrates that pinning the pattern piece to the fabric before cutting creates waves in the fabric such that the piece, when cut,unpinned and flattened, turns out longer than a piece that’s unpinned. Oops. For handbags this is not such a big deal, but I have noticed this effect on smaller pieces of fabric.

On the other hand, it’s kinda gratifying when I find that I’m already doing things the recommended way, such as weighting my pattern down and tracing around it before cutting, or removing the pattern before using a rotary cutter. Good job, self.

Well, time to head over to the condo to meet the painter. Later today - on to cutting the linings/pockets/etc!

Z Boson hearts My Imaginary Boyfriend’s log

Of course, I took home some treasures of my own from the craft fair.

Pictured here are an adorable screen printed wool log pillow from My Imaginary Boyfriend, which Z Boson the subatomic particle plush toy from Particle Zoo is so happy snuggling up against. (Note how adoringly he looks upon his new friend).

Sigh. How cute are THEY?!?

the big lug - a collage

I’m so happy to have sold out of the small collection of Big Lug handbags I brought with me to Renegade last weekend! I didn’t manage to take photos of each bag I made for the fair, but this collage shows the variations I’ve made for the Etsy site pre-fair.

Major thanks to all the new Big Lug owners out there, including super-talented artist Kelly Rae who took this beautiful photo of her brand new bag! I found her post this morning while looking through my site stats. Thanks Kelly!

If you have photos of yourself with your new Big Lug, I’d love to see them too!

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I had the most amazing time selling my wares at the SF Renegade Craft Fair this weekend!

Thanks so much to everyone who visited the booth and checked out the goods, and *big fat* XOXO’s to those of you who purchased an item of your very own!!! I so appreciate that. Talk about warm & fuzzies!

Super major thanks as well to my hubs for being so supportive all the weeks leading up to the fair…and being right there with me both days, all day long! And thanks to my girls Clara and Jenn for helping us (wo)man the booth on Sunday so we could check out and splurge our earnings on other crafters’ goods!

I like this photo from Kevin for so many reasons:

a) It shows us in the middle of a sale - YAY!
b) It catches Jimmy totally struggling (and sweatin’ it…literally) with the knucklebuster
c) You can see Olivia giving him grief in the background
d) You can see me laughing at him from the side
e) I can see what the table looked like from the other side!

As my very first fair, the process and the whole experience - in addition to being one of the funnest things I’ve ever done - was also an incredible learning opportunity. I’ll post more about it in the coming weeks (after I move out of my condo this weekend!) but wanted to start out by celebrating the whole affair and saying my thanks online!