the peaceful peacock

Well, I barely do.  Is there even a link to it in the side­bar?  Nope.

Now that the baby is finally start­ing to let me put her down for more than 15 sec­onds at a time it’s high time I updated the lit­tle sucker.  The true irony of let­ting my shop sit idle for the last year is that I am the leader of an Etsy team.  heheh.

Any hoo ~

I recently moved my stu­dio and acquired a very large piece of equip­ment (more on that later) so this first list­ing is what we in the biz like to call a de-stash.  It’s kind of like a yard sale of sorts and if you join my Fan Page on Face­book then you’ll get some pretty smokin’ dis­counts on some pretty cool stuff.

There will be fab­ric.  There will be scraps.  There will be piles of weird, old children’s books that con­tain lots of cool pic­tures and unusual type­face for those of you who make jew­elry from that kind of thing.  There will also be some ran­dom vin­tage pieces from my per­sonal col­lec­tion.  All items in this list­ing will be barter-friendly too.  woo hoo!

So run on over there and check out my poli­cies and such so you can jump right in next week.

It looks like the dou­ble vision is creep­ing into my sewing projects as well:

This is my new fire lotus applique design, fea­tured here on a pair of wrap­around leg­gings that will be in the next shop update (which is now Sun­day, Feb­ru­ary 22, 4pm MST).

Per­haps it’s time to have my eyes checked?  Or maybe I’m just pre­oc­cu­pied with thoughts of two lit­tle ones underfoot…

Last week was a pretty big week! With a huge push to get my shop updated, write an inter­view for Gypsy Road, tweak a few things here and there in the online world, and take care of my fam­ily, I must admit I’m a lit­tle tuckered.

I’m pretty bummed that this set of leg­gings didn’t quite make it in time for the big shop update:

And nei­ther did this hat:

Hope­fully they’ll make an appear­ance some­time this week.

So I’m try­ing a new approach with my work, and that is mak­ing big shop updates once a month or so rather than try­ing to list items as they’re made. In addi­tion to actu­ally cre­at­ing the stuff, the process of tak­ing pic­tures, edit­ing the pho­tos, and list­ing the work takes up a con­sid­er­able amount of time!! I tried doing a large batch, tak­ing all of the pho­tos at once and list­ing every­thing at once, and it seemed to fit in with our sched­ule a whole lot better.

I’ll prob­a­bly update the shop with a cou­ple of items here and there, but as the time for our newest mem­ber of the fam­ily approaches I’d like to tin­ker around with some ways to main­tain the bal­ance around here. This also gives me a lit­tle more room to fit cus­tom work into the sched­ule as well.

Because really, who would want to miss this?

I was reflect­ing on the work that I’ve done this year and it aligns right along with how much this lit­tle man has grown. One year ago, I couldn’t even oper­ate a dig­i­tal cam­era or upload photos…he could barely wave his lit­tle arms around and was just begin­ning to smile.

And just look at us now.

I’ll be devot­ing the rest of the month to the Gypsy Road Team Chal­lenge: Tak­ing Care of Num­ber One. This to me means fin­ish­ing up a few high-energy items that have been sit­ting for far too long. And of course I’ll be bring­ing you all along for the ride!

You know, like the Count from Sesame Street. Oh, never mind.

Here are two of the lit­tle beau­ties in all of their sub­limely green glory:

The hat on the left is a mush­room style cap made from 100% wool with hemp detail­ing. That’s a Celtic knot that has been nee­dle felted to the top of the crown, also worked in 100% wool.

The lit­tle cutie on the right is 100% wool (of course, I’m obsessed) and fea­tures a hemp brim. It’s so cute on that I will def­i­nitely be mak­ing one for myself once I fin­ish the other hat that I’m mak­ing for myself.

Both will be avail­able in the shop update on Thurs­day, Jan­u­ary 8 at 6pm MST. Holy crap. That’s tomor­row.

Back to it!

I fin­ished up my project for the Gypsy Road team chal­lenge with what, six hours to spare? Nice. Check ‘em out:

It’s a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Vesica Pis­cis, a sacred pagan sym­bol that pos­sesses much power and energy. It’s also a con­stel­la­tion that appears dur­ing the time of Sol­stice, which makes it a per­fect study for the “Cel­e­brate Sol­stice” chal­lenge. A closer look:

You can see them in The Shop for a full descrip­tion. They’ve been cre­at­ing visions of fire danc­ing in my head all week.

Have a happy new year everyone!!

Whew. Sur­vived another one. Here are just a cou­ple of the lit­tle gifties that I whipped up for the holidays:

A fancy-dancy scarflette made of a superfine mohair and silk blend that is lighter than air. I’ll be mak­ing up a cou­ple more of these for the shop soon.  This is an orig­i­nal design com­posed of a lacy Solomon stitch and a shell and picot edging.

A happy acci­dent involv­ing a pair of felted slip­pers. My attempt was to make a pair of felted moc­casins but they ended up being more like lilies, which I totally love. These will def­i­nitely be mak­ing an appear­ance in the shop as well.  This is an orig­i­nal design con­cocted once  I ditched this pat­tern and started mak­ing up my own rules.

And speak­ing of appear­ances in the shop, I’m happy to report that there will finally be some new list­ings this week!! These leg­warm­ers are first up as part of a Win­ter Sol­stice Chal­lenge for the Gypsy Road Etsy team. I’m still work­ing out the kinks with the wrap­around legwarmers–I’m not entirely happy with the applique stitch­ing on these so they will be dis­counted 10% when I list them. Noth­ing struc­tural, just the per­fec­tion­ist in me.

So now that the Christ­mas crafti­ness has passed,

where was I?

Happy New Year everyone!!!

ps–did you notice the com­mon trait of the Christ­mas gifts?  They’re pink.  It’s a girl!!!