Things Are Ticking Along.

This September marks 12 months of my Busy Work etsy shop. As that year ticked on and I knew I wasn't putting quite as much effort into the shop as I'd initially hoped I decided I would be happy to see an average of just one sale per month. And I was on track to reach this goal... until last month... when I suddenly sold 7 items! I really don't know what has driven this but I really appreciate each and every sale and am sending my thanks out to whoever or whatever has boosted my sales for that  last month. Thank you! I have surpassed my goal!

Now, I am just a few weeks away from the birth of our second child so there isn't a lot of sewing going on at the moment. I've got a stack of fabrics waiting for the next batch of bloomers and a few other items in my mind too but it might be a little while until they get made. My sewing foot is itching to do something soon though.

Lastly today I want to say a big thanks to Kylie from the Kidgredients blog for hosting a little ad for my etsy shop. I really appreciate it! Check out her blog for great, healthy meal ideas for your family. (She's running a great organic hamper giveaway at the moment too.) 

Nappy Covers/Baby Bloomers.

Happily and excitedly we will be welcoming a small, new member to our family later this year.  The weather will be starting to warm up around the time of this bub's arrival and I have found myself wandering around the clothing stores looking for some little nappy covers or bloomers. It seems to me that frilly ones are fairly easy to come by but plainer, less feminine pants are a lot trickier to find. In the end I decided to make some of my own. 

I found myself getting a little carried away and have made multiple sizes in many different fabrics. (Almost 20 pairs!) Some of the fabrics are newly bought and some have come from op-shops or my own stash.

I suspect that these are going to be very handy through spring and summer and will look sweet with just a singlet or even no shirt at all.

The hard part now is deciding which pairs to keep and which pairs to put in my etsy store!

Did you know you can join my facebook group to find out a bit about this and my other busy work if you are interested.

Zip Pouch Prototype.

A few weeks ago I was trying to come up with something small to make so that I can use up my test swatches from Spoonflower. I threw together this (wonky) little zip pouch using some of my thermos fabric and some vintage fabric for the lining. I used fusible interfacing to give the pouch some body but because it is quite small it just seems to have made it overly bulky. Next time I will try it without the interfacing. They could be good for coins, makeup essentials or your favourite Lego minifig.

Penguin Parade

This morning I was rather chuffed when I opened my email and found that my recent penguin design is one of the nine designs in the Spoonflower email advertising this week's design competition! The winners won't be known until the end of next week but I think this feels as good as a win. Especially considering I enter the weekly competition mainly to give myself a deadline to work to and a challenge to create something I might not normally do.

This week's theme is 'Penguins' and there are a lot of nice designs that have been entered. (Some can be seen in this screenshot of the Spoonflower email shown here.) Check out all the other designs here if you are feeling penguin-y.

I chose black, white and greys for my repeating pattern of penguins and drew it using Copic markers after sketching it out with pencil. I then fiddled around with my drawing on my old version of Photoshop to create the seamless repeat. I'm looking forward to receiving my test print of it on fabric so I can then decide what to make using it. Perhaps a t-shirt with this all-over print on a knit fabric, or perhaps some sort of top/blouse on a floatier fabric?

I have added the design to my Society6 and Redbubble stores and it will soon be available as fabric in my Spoonflower store.

EDIT - 16 Jan 2015.

With the help of the above appearance in the Spoonflower competition email this week my Penguin design broke into the top 40 after voting closed. I was very pleased to see that I came in 39th, considering that I average around 224th position. The only way is up! See you in Hit Songwords magazine. (Sorry... sorry for my bad "Top 40" references/jokes.)