Well, late last week, two of the items I listed sold and I was very excited. Emma sent me the mailing information for the buyer and it turned out to be my friend Ves! I was particularly touched by this because Ves actually did not think I would know she was the one who had purchased the items (she thought I had sent them to Emma and that Emma would be the one shipping them to her). When I emailed her to thank her, she said some supportive and encouraging things that really touched me.

Feeling a bit confident, I let friends on facebook know that they had to buy some things in Emma’s shop because it was for a good cause and another friend stepped up and purchased the remaining things I had contributed almost immediately! It was so appreciated and these two acts of kindess and support really set the tone for a lovely weekend.

So this week, I have two sales to get into the hands of the buyers, and I have decided to give running my own etsy shop a go, and see if there is need or interest in yet another paper goods seller. If not, I have some other ideas up my sleeve and hope you’ll enjoy following my journey.

For those of you who were dithering because you don’t have a PayPal account, you can purchase the products with your credit card instead! Just follow the instructions — you will get to a page where you will be asked to pay via PayPayl or by credit card, and it’ll ask for your credit card information. Also, if you live in my city and want to purchase the items I made directly from me, we can do that, and I will send the amount you pay to Emma. If you’d like to go have a look at the lovely offerings there, the link to the shop is http://briar.etsy.com.

Early this year, I was inspired to make pretty envelopes for cards primarily. Because my brain is wired to find the most complicated solution to any conundrum, I decided to create an envelope from scratch, through a process of trial and error, to transform a sheet of 8.5 x 11 inch paper into an envelope. I could have taken apart an existing envelope and used it as a template for my patterned envelopes but that would have been too easy and my brain would have felt cheated of the pleasure of becoming frustrated and annoyed (though in this case I found the road to a successful prototype very fun).

I finally created a prototype that I’m satisfied with, and made a few envelopes using my own template, cut from a cereal box. I haven’t made the coordinating cards for any of these envelopes yet:

A main problem I have run into though is that these envelopes take some time to make, perhaps 10 minutes per envelope. The part that slows me down is the folding: making perfect creases that will ensure that everything meets up in nice, neat corners and looks professional. I use a straight edge and a bone folder but still find the process finicky and a bit inexact.

It turns out I’m not the only one who had this problem because Shannon found a brilliant gadget that will change my life (once I order and receive it): the Enveloper! If you don’t believe me, allow the woman on the web page to show you how it works by watching her video.

If it works as nicely and easily as the video implies, my job will be made so much easier! The contraption allows you to score fold lines so that the envelopes are easy to fold and assemble. It also comes with instructions to make a number of different sized envelopes, while I’d have to go back to the drawing board if I wanted to make a new size of envelope.

I actually went tolook into ordering it once and for all, only to discover that it doesn’t actually make envelopes that would fit the size of cards I make, probably because the product was developed in the UK and the paper sizes differ between here and there. It looks like I may have to start taking apart different sized envelopes and using them as templates after all.

Here are two of the items I contributed:

Please check out the other lovely things available to purchase by visiting Emma’s shop, and thank you for passing the link on to friends if you can.

(On a somewhat related note, I wanted to thank you all for your support via comments and phonecall(!) about my last entry. It is so hard for me to just throw caution to the wind and take a risk, but I think I’m on my way!)

I contacted two people who are doing something similar to what I have in mind and they gave me some helpful information. At this stage I should write a small business plan and give myself goals to go with the plan and get rolling, right?

Of course. But I’m afraid of a couple of things. First, I don’t want to try this out and have it fail due to complete lameness of idea. What if I invest a bit of money and it’s an absolute flop? Will I regret the time, effort and money put into something that doesn’t take off as I hoped it would?

My other fear is that I may be one of those people who just can’t create. That I’m pushing myself too hard to be creative when I really don’t have a talent in that direction. God knows I don’t have talent in the analytical/scientific/mathematic direction (the Biochemistry degree was hard-won) so I’m starting to wonder what I’m good at. Everything I want to do and try to do seems to be a struggle (except blogging). It’s starting to look like I’m one of those people who doesn’t have a talent or aptitude in any one direction.

With regard to being creative, I sometimes have a picture in my head of what I want to create but my experience has been that what I like in my head doesn’t always translate well into reality: in my head it seems so cool, hip and chic; before my eyes it’s boring, unimaginative and dull. You may think I’m being too hard on myself but I’m actually not upset or depressed. This is just a stating of the facts as I know them.

Another thing that really kills my will to create is my quest for perfection. This of course is laughable to anyone who knows of my legendary procrastination skills, or my inability to achieve my goals, but yes, I have a strong (albeit picky) perfectionistic streak: if perfection means always arriving on time, and having a clean and tidy living area, I am nowhere close to perfect, but once I’ve started working on something (not to be confused to talking about working on something), I have to do it right. I will do many drafts, I will critically evaluate my finished product for weaknesses, I will refine my little heart out until I think I’m providing a most perfect result. But guess what? No one cares! I see lots of people selling things that are “not perfect” all the time on sites like etsy. Things that I would turn my snobbish nose at if it were in my workspace, that I would toss in the garbage and start again.

But people like the imprefection. They know what they’re getting and they’re ok, more than ok, with it. So why am I holding my self and my work to standards that are high to achieve? Why am I duplicating work needlessly until I get the perfect result? It’s exhausting and not at all beneficial. It’s go to stop, so that I can move on.

How it works:

1. Be one of the first 3 people to leave a comment on this post, and I will send you a handmade gift!
2. You then need to post the Pay It Forward challenge on your own blog and make a gift also for your first 3 commenters and so on it goes.

The gift can be in any price range you like and you have 365 days to post it. This is the perfect challenge for a procrastinator like me but I promise to get it out as soon as it is ready rather than waiting until the last moment.

So, are you in? If so, leave a comment below!

If you are one of the first three to comment be sure to leave a reliable email address in the email section so I can contact you for your mailing address!

And also: HAPPY NEW YEAR! May 2009 bring you all that you seek and hope for.

Work today wasn’t my most productive, and I checked my personal email far more regularly than usual (hi boss, don’t hate me for being honest!) and there weren’t any emails. It was the kind of day that made you wonder if the entire internet was unplugged because there weren’t even as many blog updates to read.

Anyhow, here I am, reporting for my NaBloPoMo duties.

I went and saw Enchanted this evening and I loved it! I actually wanted to see August Rush, but as a second choice this movie rocked, and is undoubtedly better than the latter movie will be. It was so cute! I dare you not to get a particular melody from the movie lodged in your head…go on, try it.

I donated two prizes for NaBloPoMo, two sets of marble magnets. I have a whole bunch of these suckers to make so I made some yesterday and was supposed to make more today but watching a movie was far more important. That and playing Scrabulous. I haven’t yet figured out the best way to photograph them so that the colours pop like they do live. Oh well!

Ok, I cheated. I didn’t make these ones yesterday.

I love the paper these images were cut from.

The non-blue and non-white parts are actually a pale green. I find that it looks yellow on here.

Yes! The green in the previous magnets is more like the green in these ones.

That’s what I’ve been doing. I’ll be making a decision on what to do with the money soon so if you care one way or another, let your voice be heard!

I spent last week running useless errands and while I always enjoy these time-wasting excursions, I enjoyed last Thursday’s more than usual.

I set off from my home to my favourite shopping centre, which has one of these dollar stores in it.  I realize that I confessed to hating this misnomer of a dollar store, the dollar store that makes a mockery of the idea of having a store where everything in it costs no more than a dollar, but I have since gotten over that, mostly because they have a topnotch scrapbooking section (where very few items cost only a dollar) but they are still very competitive prices and if you look hard enough, it is possible to find something there that is a good buy.

I went looking for a package of cardstock cards that I had seen a few months back.  Back then, I rejected them because at $3 for a package of 30 (with matching envelopes!) I thought it wasn’t a worthy expense.  Now that I can’t seem to find the darn cards at any store at that price, I returned, tail between my legs, only to discover some other savvy bargain shopper had snapped them up.

Instead though, I ran across an item that I had been looking for forever (2 months in Jummy time):  paper flowers!  When I was in the states last, I bought their cousin, the fabric-y flower:

While pretty, they were larger than the flowers I had in mind.

Of course, it’s while I’m looking for ivory hued items that I see these adorable jars of paper flowers:

They are exactly what I’m looking for and I can’t wait to grab some brads and make some cute cards with them:

Speaking of brads, I met a guy (hah).  What I meant to say is I found some cute daisy/asterisk brads:

I know:  more craft supplies entering my absolute disaster of a room without any crafts leaving it.  Soon there will be an equal and opposite flow, I promise.  In the meantime, I broke down and bought a contraption to organize my scrapbooking paper and doodads.  Only half of my paper has made it in so far.

No matter what you say, I call all this progress.  Maybe one day I’ll tackle the clutter in my room without buying more things.

I skimmed quickly over my entries and came up with the following updates:

Stolen vehicle
The van came back home today.  It has been fixed but is not running as well as it used to, and this could be attributed to its age [although it was running just fine before it was stolen].  The plan is to drive it until it falls apart.  Since we got the other car last August, it’s been hard getting used to being a one car family…especially since there are six people with six different schedules living under one roof.

In this entry, where I go on and on about making money, I reported that I filed the taxes for 2005 and had to pay a large sum of money.  This sum of money had 4 digits in front of the decimal point (!!!) and that made me sad.  Thankfully someone who cares about doing a good job over on the money snatchers side decided to review my calculations and returned 62% of the money I paid back to me!  What a lovely treat [party poopers may be tempted to remind me that it's my own money that has been returned to me]!  In a funny quirk, due to this process of them returning the money to me, I have to report an extra $1 of income on my 2007 taxes when I file them in 2008!  I sure hope this doesn’t put me into another tax bracket!

In the same entry I mentioned a desire to get a paying gig writing and I’ve made some progress in that direction.  As of last week, I started writing for Life Tips Daily, a site that is part of the 451 Press.  For those who are interested in writing for 451 Press, or have any questions, feel free to email me or leave a comment and I’ll get back to you.  Payment is a percentage of the monthly revenues that your site brings in from advertisements and this amount can vary from site to site.  I haven’t done much work with respect to developing my web design skills, but that is one of my goals for this year.

Two warm and fuzzy tales have had some highly unsatisfactory (semi) conclusions:  I have now lost both of the earrings that I spoke of in the entry.  All doughty attempts to find them [or even one of them] have been in vain.  I went back to the store where I purchased them and they are gone!  I’m sure they’ll turn up when I least expect them to…I hope.

And remember the restaurant that charged me twice?  Well I decided to go through my credit card company to start the charge back process.  I was told that the process will take 45 days and if my claim is successful, then I will get my money back.  All I can do is wait…that and try to find the reference number that I was given by the friendly operator concerning my grievance.

And last but not least, an update on magnet making!  I was having a quality issue with the marbles that I was using, and this problem remains but to a much lesser degree.  I’d say about 2/3 of each bag of marbles I get is useable, which isn’t bad at all [especially since a bag of marbles is not at all expensive].  I have managed to make some pretty cute looking marble magnets if I do say so myself:

A scorer and a perforator for making perfect folds in my cards, and perforating things as needed.

They look like glass globs but don’t be fooled! These are “crystals” that will be used in a craft “soon”.  I bought these ones on Friday so together they will make one happy family of “crystals”.

Pretty paper that was only a quarter each.  And double-sided!  I’m already regretting only buying four sheets but I do have a lot of paper already.

Glass globs!  They’re practically perfect (I think!) and I can’t wait to use them.  Walmart sells them for less than a dollar a pound!  I will be in heaven if they work for my purposes!

I also purchased some hair goop and comestibles which can’t be pictured because I’m in the process of weaning myself off of candy, an initiative that is working as well as my attempts to find a boyfriend and lose 100lbs.  I guess the weaning will start next week.  If only we had all the same flavours of Mike and Ikes here as they have there; then my roving eyes would have been able to avoid them entirely!

I had my first Target experience and it was enjoyable.  The store location that we went to had only been open for five days so it was still neat and clean.  Is it considered to be a step above Walmart?  Their scrapbooking/paper section isn’t that large but has pretty affordable paper…I couldn’t make up my mind so I left empty handed (until we reached the candy isle, that is).  I also found the book isles contained extremely affordable tomes and in retrospect I should have grabbed a book or two instead of being so focused on seeing what scrapbooking tools I could find.

Other milestones reached during this trip was ordering what is the smallest meal I’ve ever ordered at a restaurant:  an appetizer serving of quesadillas.  I was pretty full but I somehow made room for one of those Friendly’s sundaes.  Mmmm!

And yes:  another month of WG has ended.  Last month’s winner, Virginia, is still waiting for her prize because I’ve been having severe issues getting decent marbles on this side of the border.  I will be mailing her prize to her tomorrow along with a promise that if I find better quality marbles, I’ll happily make her some ”new improved” magnets!  Hopefully this one month lag is a one time thing.  Here’s the front of the card I’m sending with the magnets:

I have recruited my friend Matthew to send me some decent marbles [we hope], and this whole process of marble acqusistion has highlighted a severe deficiency in my city’s craft suppliers:  we don’t have enough such establishments, and the one main store that we do have doesn’t carry everything.  I can’t wait for my upcoming day trip to New York state where I will attempt to bring back my weight in high quality, unscuffed marbles across the border.

Before declaring February’s WG winner, I will wait until the end of the day tomorrow (March 2) to allow everyone to find the WG in my last entry.  And with this entry, round 3 has begun!  Happy hunting.

Oh, and Suze practically dares us to do this on her blog and I did and I got it all correct!  This is the very first online quiz I’ve ever scored perfect on so here’s my boast: