I’m all moved in to my fancy new apartment-style dorm. This may be the only perk of being an upperclassman, but it’s a good one! We (there are 4 of us in my suite) get air conditioning and a nifty little kitchen (with dishwasher!). I’m delighting in the freedom of cooking my own food; a challenge, sure, but I love it. It will become more difficult to keep myself well-fed once the work piles up, but hey, it’s day 3. Not much homework yet.

But I do have some homework today, which is probably why you’re hearing from me. I haven’t had anything to procrastinate from for a whole week plus some! Why blog??

I haven’t been taking enough pictures lately (shame, shame!) and my new camera feels quite neglected. I’ll have to take it for a Cleveland photo walk soon… but for now, here are small snapshots of my new room.

My mini bulletin board full of bobbins on the wall… it makes me happy.

I bought this curtain at a thrift store simply for the fabric… whales! Then I realized it was the exact size I needed for my closet. Perfect.

I made some windowseat cushions for the boys’ suite… they’re pretty awesome. Photos of those to come next!

home sweet home away from home is a post from: Fluffyland Craft & Sewing Blog

Back to school time, and my little handmade cactus just wasn’t alive enough to make the passing grade. So now she has a new friend, who is desperately in need of a new planting pot.

I’m half packing, half beading, wholly full of Indian food. It’s a good Saturday. And it’s my last Saturday at home! uh oh!

a new friend is a post from: Fluffyland Craft & Sewing Blog

a handful of glorious shots from my darling new camera. last weekend i trekked down to farmville, va, to see an old friend who i hadn’t seen in ages. it was a lovely, if very short, trip. on my way out of the quaint little college town i gave my new camera a workout. i’m super pleased.

i can’t get over this whole “depth of field” thing. SO EXCITING.

shiny new snaps is a post from: Fluffyland Craft & Sewing Blog

I can’t bring myself to take pictures for this post because soon, very soon, those pictures will look pretty lame.

This little guy is on its way to my house as we speak. My beautiful Canon Rebel T1i, my first digital SLR. Order tracking says it’s been “in transit for delivery” in my city since 10am this morning… I’m lost trying to figure out how UPS can’t make it from their office to my house in 9 hours. Silly order tracking, hyping me up and getting me all antsy.

I’m so excited!

anticipation is a post from: Fluffyland Craft & Sewing Blog

I made rainbow plaid pj shorts in less than two hours today… there’s nothing quite like homemade pajama bottoms. They take no time or effort, they fit no matter how they come out, and they always feel so much comfier than anything storebought. Such instant gratification!

Since I can never tell front from back when I’m slipping on my homemade pjs, I added this nifty ribbon loop. Not only will I never put them on backwards, but I can hang them up! I’m very excited about this.

On Thursday evening I picked the first full batch of blackberries this season. They’re so perfect when they come right in from the backyard, mmm. After a few nibbles it was blackberry baking time!

These are mini blackberry custard tartlets, based loosely off a lemon curd tartlet recipe. It starts with a simple pie crust, rolled out and cut into circles then pressed into a muffin tin. The custard called for “farmer’s cheese”, a European thing… I used cottage cheese then blended the whole thing when I was done. Since I had neither lemon curd nor real lemons on hand, I poured a bit of lemon juice into the custard to make it taste less like, well, nothing. The lemon flavor wasn’t noticeable in the finished product, but I’m convinced it added something.

What made these super awesome was my blackberry treatment beforehand. Prior to starting any of the mixing, I tossed my blackberries in a bowl with some lemon juice and a decent sprinkling of sugar and let them sit as I worked. The soaked-in sweetness is an obvious plus to the finished dessert. I’m definitely going to be making these again!

And yesterday I bought these beautiful shoes for back to school. I’m not going to wear them until I get to Cleveland, so they’ll stay white for the rest of the summer (and get dirty instantly come August 15). It’s been a bright and happy weekend!

happy happenings is a post from: Fluffyland Craft & Sewing Blog

in other news… i have restored zencart to its previous functional state, so fluffyland is back.

and, there are actually some pictures listed at samantha snap! more to come in a few days, too.

le shoppe is a post from: Fluffyland Craft & Sewing Blog

I’ve been listening to CraftyPod in the car lately and it has my creative brain bouncing all over the place. There are dozens of interviews with people who have crafty businesses, and they all have such excellent advice. But half the pieces of excellent advice contradict the other half! Every day I come home with my brain buzzing as I wonder what the heck I’m supposed to do next.

Fluffyland isn’t the most profitable business. It also isn’t supposed to be; I like making things and I can’t keep them all, so really I’m just trying to reimburse myself for my fabric purchases. But it’s not like I want to be a virtual charity, because I still want to come close to making some profit. And then there’s the whole “updating zencart” thing that has the whole site in shambles at the moment… I really just don’t want to deal with that. So my thoughts are all over the place.

I even considered dropping Fluffyland to focus on my schoolwork, my busy life, and my little etsy shop. No more product shots, no more zen cart, no more narwhal tusks. But that would also make me an exclusively etsy seller, something I just don’t want to be. And it would also mean I was no longer the owner and operator of my very own online shop. Clearly, I was facing a dilemma.

So I made these two lists.

things i like

1. making stuff
2. people liking my stuff (especially enough to buy it)
3. taking pretty pictures
4. blogging
5. sending out orders
6. having my own business

things i don’t like

1. taking product shots
2. zen cart. ugh. such a pain.
3. getting a ridiculously low amount of site traffic lately
4. making narwhal tusks

The list of “things i like” made it very clear that I could not give up on my darling shop. And the list of “things i don’t like”? It’s really not that bad.

Number 1 has an impending solution: new camera!! While I love my pocket-sized Canon SD750, and will continue to use it whenever I need a pocket-sized camera, I think I’ve expanded my photography skills sufficiently in the past few years to merit the purchase of a fancy (but still on the low side) DSLR. I’m looking into that, and will hopefully have a beautiful new setup by the end of the summer.

Number 2. My nemesis. The greatest challenge. I just want a shopping cart program that runs like WordPress. Is that too much to ask? APPARENTLY. WordPress is free and beautiful and hassle-free, with an enormous and knowledgeable fanbase. There are virtually billions of shopping cart programs that range from free (zencart) to hundreds of dollars a month, and it’s difficult to figure out which are decent. I’m not making enough on my little hobby to warrant a monthly fee, so I guess I’m stuck where I am… it’s super unfortunate though. I spend so much time on the most menial tasks due to the terrible folder hierarchy.

Number 3. Who knows. I’m certainly not helping things by leaving the site down for over a week…

Number 4. I’ll deal.

So that’s that, I suppose. I’m researching cart options but they either sound equivalent to Zencart or super beautiful combined with super pricey. And it’s not worth changing everything I’ve modified just to get something that’s practically the same. But if you’ve heard any good words about particular software packages, my ears are open…

commerce conundrum is a post from: Fluffyland Craft & Sewing Blog

It’s a holiday weekend, summer’s making me antsy, and my recent gocco success has me fired up. So why not give you guys a sneak peek of my latest project?

Samantha Snap is my latest brainchild: an etsy shop focused on my love of photography combined with my recent obsession with paper goods. Yeah, I’m a little bit crazy. But this seems like it’ll give me a good time.

To start out, I’m planning on adding 5×7 prints of some of my (and your) favorite photos. I have been scanning my black and white film negatives, too, and those are even more awesome than the best of those featured in the year in haiku. And I’ve got my fresh-off-the-press orange camera gocco prints, which will hopefully be followed by moleskines.

Maybe it’s just the college kid in me, who believes in art as art. For awhile I want to dance away from the practicality of sewn objects and just toy with things that are pretty. We’ll see how this goes.

It’s amazingly refreshing to come up with an entirely new brand. The last time I did this, I was starting my freshman year of high school. I have learned so much since then about business and the internet and logos and marketing and especially about myself. I feel that right now I have the energy that starting up a business requires (at least one that’s on etsy). So there’s no fear… I’m just plain excited. It’s a refresh, and I can do it all right from the start. I’m taking budget sheets, a business plan, the works. eee!

Really, it’s all about camera love. Lately, I’m all about camera love.
And of course, it’ll be about gocco love, too. You know me. I can’t stick to one thing for long.

Fluffyland is “down for maintenance”. Is this why? Does that mean it’s going away?
No! Fluffyland is staying around for awhile. I’ll still be keeping up with all of that, this is just another project to keep my creative soul bouncing around. It’s down for maintenance because I’m installing a cart software update that’s being fussy and taking more work than I thought (like always).

Will Samantha Snap be solely an etsy shop?
I hope not. I know etsy is very convenient, and the thought of the convenience does sway me a bit, but etsy’s just a good starting point. If things go well and I decide I want to keep this going for awhile, it’ll get its own site. I like to have the control and the professionalism that etsy can’t provide.

refresh is a post from: Fluffyland Craft & Sewing Blog

Nearly one year has passed since my initial endeavor with my beloved Print Gocco PG-5. I’ve been at school, reading about circuits and thermodynamics and differential equations, and my darling Gocco has been sitting in its cute little box, waiting patiently for me to return home.

I’m here, Gocco! Let’s make some awesome prints!, I said.

Okay Sam, I love you!, it replied.

One whole tube of tangerine ink later, I’ve got billions of prints. I severely underestimated the number of papers I could print, so I just started printing everything in sight. I’ve got my screen in a ziploc in the fridge (someone said I could do that) so I won’t have to clean it off. I want to try printing on scrap wood next, we’ll see how that goes. Right now I’m lucky everything in my room is not covered in orange cameras. Or maybe I’m unlucky… because they’re pretty awesome.

Oh, and if you ever try to save leftover gocco ink in something other than the original containers? Keep them in the fridge! They mold like crazy.

(if you ever need help with gocco ink colors, i made some nifty gocco ink charts last year)

And yes, these are all shots of my creative space on this lovely Thursday evening.

Here’s the screen before I used that whole tube of ink on it. It’s an image without full blocks of color, so the ink per print is low, but to cover the whole screen took a whole tube regardless. I’ll be printing orange cameras for life! (i’m okay with that!)

Here’s my impromptu drying rack: a dish rack we almost got rid of a few days ago. It works wonderfully.

…I told you I made billions of little orange cameras. They’re so pretty…

These were my favorite prints of the night: the tangerine camera looks so cute on avocado green paper, and I made an orange camera printed moleskine!

Best part: I didn’t have to clean the screen. Yet. Cleaning gocco screens is by far the most (read: only) terrible part of the gocco production line. They weren’t meant to be reused, but what else are we supposed to do when they don’t make the things anymore? So sad. I love my Gocco. We’re very happy together.

return of the gocco is a post from: Fluffyland Craft & Sewing Blog

landon, you’ve been my hero since i was 12 and you’re still not letting me down.

thank you, team usa is a post from: Fluffyland Craft & Sewing Blog