Welcome!

This blog is now exclusively devoted to crafting in general, and the shop in particular! Pretty much all of my personal content has been moved to a new blog, one that is intended primarily to help keep our family and friends in the loop. (If you are interested in following the new blog, you will find it here.) This blog will continue to feature shop news, new listings, sales, giveaways, and all of my share-worthy crafting exploits.

Saturday, March 27, 2010

Business Cards

I've been playing with my business card design, and I'm pretty sure I have my layout.  Now, I'm trying to decide what shade of green I want to use: a spring green, or sage green?  Here are the options, what do you think?

Spring Green

Sage Green

The difference isn't so drastic when they're printed.  I favor the brighter green, but Brandon likes the sage.  I want to be consistent in my colors, so whatever I use here will also be used in my Etsy shop, price tags, mailing labels, everything.  Decisions, decisions.

Friday, March 19, 2010

New Logo

The lovely and talented Jessica graciously agreed to work with me to create a custom logo for my Etsy shop,  tags, business cards, etc.  She was infinitely patient with me through the design process, especially since I wasn't really sure what I wanted.   I only had a vague idea that it should include some sort of Celtic knot, which turned out to be appropriate since I settled on the name All Wound Up and Celtic knots are all wound up.  I also knew that I wanted something that would be uniquely mine, but that is frustratingly vague.  We kicked around several designs, and in the end, she presented me with this bit of genius:


Is it not just perfect?  It is, I promise you.   I'm in love with it.  Does the pendant in the middle look familiar?  It should.  She pulled it from this:


Such a clever idea, and it turned out so cool.  Thank you, Jessica.  ^_^

 I've already started playing with the design for my Etsy header, and business cards and such.  Here's a mock-up of what I have so far, for the header:


I will definitely be adding color, I just haven't decided how yet.  That was basically just the product of a brainstorming session for Jessica, and I just went back and added the finished logo. 

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Fantastic Friends, Fantastic Bags


This is the purse and wallet set I commissioned from Lizy and Katelyn, respectively.  I chose the fabric, and they did all the work.  Don't I have incredible friends??  Seriously, you guys are awesome.
  As a bonus, we got some awesome little charms in at the shop, and one of them just happened to match my new set perfectly.  So I brought one home and promptly made it into a zipper pull.


Perfect, right?  Man, I love it when that happens.  Double yay!!  More of the zipity-do-da-ness.

 This is the bag that I made yesterday.  The design was totally inspired by Lizy's cute little tote.  In fact, she gave me the measurements that she used when she made hers, but I tweaked it a bit to make it my own.  I'm really, really pleased with the way it turned out.  Between Lizy's tip on how to make the bag squared at the bottom, and Deanna's tip about using spray starch when ironing to help make my fabric behave, it went very smoothly and I got great results.  Now, what to do with it?  Keep it?  Or sell it?

inside pocket

I did another bag too, one like Lizy's pink and brown one.  It's similar to this green and brown one as well, but it'll be less tote-y and more purse-y.  This is what I got done on Monday:


And this is the finished product:


Inside pocket detail:



Strap detail:


As a side note, this is what happens when you forget to adjust the white balance setting on your camera:


And this is what happens when you correct it:



Wednesday, March 3, 2010

More on Elora's Quilt

I finally got my quilting frame, so I was finally able to get started on quilting Elora's blanket.  This is what I had done as of yesterday afternoon:



I've been using the Grabaroo craft gloves that we have in the shop to keep the quilt clean as I work on it.  They work pretty well, but I keep catching the tips of the fingers with the needle and I never realize it until I try to pull my hand away.  It's kind of funny, actually.  We'll see how long it takes before I don't think it's funny anymore.