Flashback Friday - A Blanket

Many years ago (like 8), I was pregnant with 3 friends. Two of us were having our first babies and one was having her third child. I was doing very basic sewing back then and made this blanket for one of the new babies. I'm pretty sure I made one for the other baby too, but I can't find any pictures of that one. I still make these simple, 1 yard by 1 yard blankets sometimes, but my choice of fabric has gotten much more interesting.

And even though my photography skills still need a lot of work, I think I've gotten a little better at staging my products. :)

PJ Style

Several years ago I bought some really fancy embroidery software.  It does all sorts of things that I still haven't figured out.  I use it (at least in little ways) on almost every embroidery project I do.  But, one of the major capabilities of it is digitizing.  This is taking an image and making it into a file that my embroidery machine can use.  I have done some work with this aspect of the machine, but never much that I've been very happy with.  A couple of months ago, Super D told me about a friend of his that writes children's books.  He had a logo that he wanted digitized and sewn out onto some polo shirts.  I gulped and said send me the logo.  He sent it to me and it looked relatively simple, so I decided I would give it a try.  I digitized it, sewed out a sample, and showed it to the customer.  He was happy with it and asked me to embroider it onto 5 polos.  I just finished them last week.  He came and picked them up and brought me 10 more polos.

Here is the logo I was digitizing:

 And here is the logo sewn out on a polo shirt:

Feel free to check out PJStyle.com to see what my customer is up to.

Flashback Friday

I had a request to bring back Flashback Friday's now that I'm blogging semi-regularly again.  So, here are the first two hooded towels that I made.  This was before I had my own embroidery machine - I was using my mom's.  It's fun to do the designs on the different color towels, but much easier for orders and stuff to just keep things on white.

 This little hippo that I did was the first time I tried out applique on the embroidery machine.  It wasn't perfect, but I think it's so cute.  I've learned a lot since I made these towels.  I think I made these in 2005.

Embroidered Towels

Here are some towels that I embroidered for a customer. The light colored towels are the husband and wife, and the dark towels are for their 5 boys!

And a close up of the one for the Mama!

Hopefully with a house full of boys, this will help everyone keep their towels straight. :)

Business is Picking Up

So I've been working on promoting by sewing business more and it seems to be working.  I haven't done anything super over the top yet, but I have done some word of mouth advertising and facebook stuff.  Since I started trying to push it more, I've received orders for several things...

A hooded towel:

Eight personalized keychains:

Digitizing a design for a customer.  I don't have a picture of any digitizing I've done.
Seven embroidered towels:

And a pillowcase dress:

So, I'm staying busy trying to get all these orders going. :)  I've finished some of them but still have lots more to go.  And of course I'm hoping to get more orders as people continue to hear about the business. 

These pictures that I've posted are previous things that I've made.  I'm hoping to get pictures up of some of the orders I'm working on, but right now we're having some camera issues.

Moving Forward

Howdy!  My name is Page!  I used to post my fun crafty stuff on this page.  And then life happened and I haven't been around here in a LONG time.  I write posts in my head.  I think about the pictures and projects that I would like to post on here.  I even took lots of pictures and wrote step-by-step instructions to put up a tutorial on here.  But I just haven't done it.  I have some legitimate excuses and some that aren't so legit.  I could tell you how crazy busy life is and why I haven't had time to blog.  But, in reality, I just haven't made it a priority.  And I'd like to change that. 

Back in September I read a blog post written by one of my friends.  It was about dreams and vision.  At the end of the post, she asked some questions: "What are your dreams? What are you doing to make them visions?"  I started thinking about how I would answer those questions.  One of my dreams is to make money with my sewing.  And I haven't been doing much to make that dream into a vision.  Then a few months ago, my husband started reading a book.  In the book, the author asks the question: "What would you do if you were guaranteed not to fail?"  And again, my first answer was - do the sewing business thing for real.  It's been something I've wanted to do for a long time.  I have tried in the past - put time and energy and it's never really progressed very far.  But I'm ready to try it again.  I want to do this.  And if I fail, that doesn't make me a failure it just means that this thing I tried didn't work. 

I'm a little scared.  What if I put this all out there and it doesn't work?  What if I make this stuff that I think is really neat and people don't like it?  But, I'm ready to start conquering my fears.  I'm ready to start putting more time and energy into pursuing this dream.  So, if you'd like to come along with me on this journey, I'd love to have you.  I'm not really sure what things are going to look like yet.  But, I'd love your thoughts and comments along the way. 

Do you have dreams that you are pursuing?  Have you ever been scared to pursue a dream?  Do you think I'm crazy for trying to actually make money sewing when people can buy things from China for pennies?  Do you have advice/thoughts/wisdom for someone trying to make money with handmade items?  I'd love to hear what you think.  Thanks for stopping by!