Obsessively designing

Hello, hello! How are you all doing? What a crazy time…I have no adequate words for what seems like ceaseless global upheaval. 

I find solace in making things when the world seems to be churning, and lately I’ve been having a love affair with designing patterns for wallpaper, stationery and fabric. I celebrated a dear friend’s birthday this weekend, and let me tell you — wrapping the presents with my own designs is incredibly gratifying. I’m getting more and more comfortable with what’s called “seamless repeats” and am challenging myself to more complicated patterns. I am drawn to simple designs too, though.

I’ve been diligently adding to my Spoonflower shop with new designs every week. I’ll be adding more items to my online shop this upcoming week as well and I’ve also been experimenting with making my own “mock-ups.” Mock-ups are easy ways to visualize what a design would look like on a product without actually sewing/producing said products. It’s all done digitally. For example, I created a mock-up of my Reversible Eco Bag pattern. You can see the same apricots pattern on the Eco Bag here:

And here are a few other versions I played with:

Fun, right? I designed the eco bag to accommodate different fabric combinations, but I often just like to simplify and cut the outer bag from a single piece of fabric as shown in the first three bag examples. I have so many strewn around my house and use them all the time.

The floral pattern shown in the first couple of images is my faborite so far and will be available soon. After I printed it out for the wrapping paper, I realized that I need to make a few more tweaks.

Anyway, today I just wanted to share this heightened devotion to puzzling out seamless patterns. It’s a good way to use my brain so I don’t worry so much about everything, you know?

I hope you are all staying safe and cozy and peaceful. Much love!

 

 

 

 

Happy Friday + Etsy Shop Update!

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photo by Carrie Hoge of @maddermade

Happy Friday, friends! I added another item to my etsy shop! For about a year or so, I’ve only had one item, and now I have a grand total of two items. At this rate, I might have three items by next year.

This fun little tooth fairy pillow I made for the FAUNA issue of Making Magazine is now available as a downloadable pattern/tutorial for purchase in my shop here. I think it’s pretty darn cute, if I do say so myself.

Speaking of Making Magazine, I’ll have another project in the next issue coming out soon and here’s a little sneaky peek:

makingpincushion
photo by Carrie Hoge of @maddermade

I really enjoyed stitching this up!

Well, it’s spring break as of this evening and my mom is visiting from Los Angeles and there is much mischief and good times to be had. I’ll be back with some sewing next week!

I don’t have to cook
And K is taken care of
Ba-chan* visits rock

*Although “Ba-chan” technically means grandma, M and I now call her Ba-chan too. She loves to feed us and play with K, so it feels like a real vacation for me as well when she visits!

Baby Steps

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Good morning! I have been sewing in the background, but I’ve also been working on giving my blog a little face lift, figuring out how this whole etsy things works, and just attacking all the outstanding to-do items that have been haunting me for months and months.

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I’m approaching it all with the baby steps mentality. I know I’ll never finish everything, but I decided to start by adding one more item to the startlingly slim offerings in my shop. I’ve learned that I’m not a big fan of fulfilling physical products so I’m testing out a digital download illustration package, and I’ll see where that takes me. I may give in and offer up physical prints in the near future if there’s enough demand. [In case you’re wondering, these are images I uploaded to my etsy shop – I’m not celebrating a birthday, per se – maybe someone reading this is having birthday festivities today. If so, Happy B-day!!!]

Do you like the cleaner, more streamlined blog design? I love it. It’s a template by Bloom Blog Shop (found via my friends at Besotted), and I’m still tweaking things, but I have to say that compared to other WordPress themes I’ve installed, this one was a piece of cake.

So thank you for your patience as I take itty bitty, wobbly steps toward getting all set up. More soon!

P.S. The winner of the giveaway is Andreia, congrats! Check out her gorgeous blog — I love everything she makes!!

Pinafore + Bloomers Pattern on etsy!

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Due to (sort of) popular demand, I’ve listed the digital pinafore and bloomers pattern on my (sort of) new etsy shop. The backstory of the shop: a few years ago, someone was interested in purchasing a print from me, so I quickly created a shop on etsy for that single sale, and then pretty much let it languish, unloved. I get requests for these patterns via email from time to time and have been doing this labor intensive PayPal workaround, and it finally hit me that I might want to make life easier for myself. I am not, as you can tell, very business savvy. [Update: since I’ve received several comments and emails regarding the sizing, it’s listed as 6 months to 18 months, which is a pretty big range, but the top especially is generously proportioned and I’ve had friends whose petite 2-year old could still wear it.]

For the last couple of months, I’ve been researching different online commerce options like Shopify and Squarespace and Woo Commerce, but you know, I figure I (sort of) already have the whole etsy thing set up, so why not roll with it?

Thank you to all the people who have been emailing me about the pinafore and bloomers! I hope you’ll stop on by my little shop — I’ll be adding other digital downloads and prints in the coming weeks!