I'm sure most of you could guess that I really don't like pink, or country, or vastly girly things in general, but I found this batch of pink scraps from a handbag that I made as a gift for someone a while back. Since I've been in the scrap removal mood lately, I whipped them up into this Cottage Rose Handbag and Zipper Pouch set. The bag is flip and sticth patchwork all over and even has little feet to protect the bottom from dirt. Holly was being a little shy modeling this one, but you can see the zipper pouch I made in an attempt to remove all pink from my sight forever. (It didn't work, but I can try.) Needless to say, if you like this bag, snap it up because I very rarely make things like this. However, I'll make anything as a custom order so just ask.



I also made another set of three cosmetic bags in the same colorway as the Tempestra pouches I posted earlier this week. This set of three Aegean cosmetic pouches have a bit more purple in them and the quilting is more wavy, except for the smallest one.

Learn how to use flickr effectively to promote your handmade goods with this insightful article from SolSister's Favorite Shiney Adornaments.

Lily from Tulips Treasures who interviewed me a few weeks ago on BlockHead Radio's Artisan Team and Group show has just been featured on The Art Zoo Blog for 12/26.

Tempestra Sea Washed Pouch set
Visit the blue waters of the Agean sea with these two cosmetic/makeup pouches in gorgeous greens and teals. Both are quilted in hunter green. The larger pouch has a greek key design. Both feature bits of a bamboo printed batik that looks like seaweed. Lined in teal with dark teal zippers. Machine washable.

large pouch: 6.5" wide by 3.75" tall
small pouch:4.25" wide x 4" tall



Arya Cool Blue zipper pouch cosmetic or camera bag
Arya (named for the elf in the Eragon series) is a dive into my scrap bin, which is still overflowing! Embrace cool blue in this patchwork cosmetic/camera bag. Zipper top lined in plain sky blue.

5.75 wide" 4.5" tall x 2" deep





Mirasol handbag
Mirasol is named for the beekeeper in Robin McKinley's book, Chalice. The fabric reminds me a little of the honeycombs inside of bee hives. It's a deep hunter green with ivory/cream geometric patterns. The flap of the bag features couched yarn, beads and a dimensional ivory on ivory origami flower with a small brass flower in the center. The flower has been hand appliqued on with silk thread. The brass flower is repeated on the couched yarn lines. The bag closes with a hunter green and slate gray zipper under the flap. It is lined in an all over in a tan small scale floral. Inside zipper pocket in the lining.

I'm always a fan of using up the last bits of fabrics. (This morning I've been making up zip pouches out of my scrap bin because it's taking over the world!) I'd like to introduce you all to another Carried Away Team Member who shares my desire to let no scrap go to waste. Say Hi to Desiree from HamnCheezr. I really like her use of multiple fabrics along a theme and her quilt is just gorgeous!

My boyfriend got a new acoustic guitar for Christmas. It sounds wonderful, especially when he plays it with the silver pick I got him from Andros Creations. I got a beautiful new canon camera which I used to take this picture.

Here's a holiday ecard for a financial services company, Mid-Atlantic Venture Association. They wanted simple and elegant with a message of hope.

During today's entrecard drop fest, I wandered over to see SolSisters favorite, Rayela Fibers. You all might remember her from Crown Thyself. She's got a great guest post for last minute ethical gift ideas. My favorite is a gift certificate to Kiva, a website that is dedicated to microfinance loans in the developing world. The recipient can then choose one of the many entrepenurers on the site to invest in. Once the money is repaid, you can reinvest in another entrepenuer or take it out of the system. Kiva let's you invest as little as $25 to help someone with the will, but not the means, to raise themselves up out of poverty and see a better tomorrow. Because these are LOANS not gifts, the recipents have an interest in working hard to make themselves successful.

$25 is so little to most of us, but it goes very far in Africa or any other of the many far flung corners of the world.

From the Kiva website:

We Let You Loan to the Working Poor

Kiva's mission is to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty.

Kiva is the world's first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world.

The people you see on Kiva's site are real individuals in need of funding - not marketing material. When you browse entrepreneurs' profiles on the site, choose someone to lend to, and then make a loan, you are helping a real person make great strides towards economic independence and improve life for themselves, their family, and their community. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates and track repayments. Then, when you get your loan money back, you can relend to someone else in need.

Kiva partners with existing expert microfinance institutions. In doing so, we gain access to outstanding entrepreneurs from impoverished communities world-wide. Our partners are experts in choosing qualified entrepreneurs. That said, they are usually short on funds. Through Kiva, our partners upload their entrepreneur profiles directly to the site so you can lend to them. When you do, not only do you get a unique experience connecting to a specific entrepreneur on the other side of the planet, but our microfinance partners can do more of what they do, more efficiently.

Kiva provides a data-rich, transparent lending platform. We are constantly working to make the system more transparent to show how money flows throughout the entire cycle, and what effect it has on the people and institutions lending it, borrowing it, and managing it along the way. To do this, we are using the power of the internet to facilitate one-to-one connections that were previously prohibitively expensive. Child sponsorship has always been a high overhead business. Kiva creates a similar interpersonal connection at much lower costs due to the instant, inexpensive nature of internet delivery. The individuals featured on our website are real people who need a loan and are waiting for socially-minded individuals like you to lend them money.

Yesterday, I was helping my sister Kim from Overall Beauty do some small tweaks to her site, and it brought to mind how effective these can be.

In my other life I am graphic designer with over 12 years of experience. I thought as a holiday gift to the artisan community, I'd share some basic communication techniques that are applicable to any visual form of communications, be it web sites, business cards, posters or brochures.

Simple Clarity.
When you are trying to communicate the first thing you need to remember is to be clear. We all have a lot to say about our products, but in that huge rush to get it all out sometimes we go way overboard and lose the ability to communicate clearly. Another way to say this is: if you stood in a room where everyone was shouting at full volume, all you'd get is a headache! Remember when you are creating something, if you cannot READ the text or the reader's eye is being pulled in every direction because so much is going on, your message is lost in a sea of chaos. Limit your use of bold/italic/flashy/color or what have you form of emphasis to only the very most important things.

Look at the ad below. Can you make any sense of this? Everything runs together, there's bold all over it and bullets just for extra chaos. The information is all jumbled together and there really is no logical order to this ad at all. Would you hire this person to sell your home when they can't even communicate what they do to you? How will they market to buyers? Will the flyer for your home look like this jumbled mess?




Now look at this one. You can clearly see what goes together. You get the message quickly. You eye follows a very direct path. All that empty yellow space is doing something ... it's making your eye go to the center and GET the message.


Find a line and stick to it.
Don't jump around with alignments, pick one, right left or center, and stay with it throughout your piece. Center alignment is weakest choice. Right or left always looks stronger and more authoritative. This doesn't just apply to blocks of text, this applies to pictures, too. Nothing should be just thrown on your page or screen. Elements need to line up with other elements, so that our eyes can follow the invisible "paths" created by these alignments and decipher the order in which we should read things. Although the realtor ad up there uses center alignment throughout, the lack of proximity and overuse of bold is overpowering the effect of a unified alignment.

Like things belong together (or the principal of Proximity)
If you saw a man and woman on the street and the man's hand was draped over the woman's shoulder, you likely make the assumption that they are romantically involved or at the very least, friends. Now if you saw the same couple and they were a few feet apart, just talking to each other, would you make the same assumption about their relationship to one another? No, because the physical distances divides the two elements. In the first example, the physical closeness implies a relationship. When you are designing something, group similar elements together and move things that do not have a relationship apart. If you sell more than one kind of product, divide them into logical categories when you present them. Do not mix up your site navigation links with the categories in your store or your "about us" information. If you are creating a business card, the name of the owner, their cell number and their email should all be together, but the business's phone number and fax should be grouped in another location.

In the realtor ad, just adding some space between like groups of text would have clarified the message. (Not to mention taking out some of it. An ad is not the right place to list your entire resume!) People have short attention spans, stick to the essentials. Here's a quick cut and paste redesign. See the difference?


Look at these two cards. The one on the left has something in every corner. Can you make sense in an instant who this card is for and how to contact her? Why is her title and her email in two different places? Your mind has to work much harder to associate the two because they have been placed on opposite sides of the card. Now look at the card on the right. Can you clearly tell who the card is for, how to find him and which number to call if you want to reach the office rather than bother him on his cell?




Of course, there is more to good communication then these few things, however implementing them will elevate your success immediately. If you'd like to learn more, I recommend The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin Williams. It's not very thick, but contains a WEALTH of valuable knowledge written for the average Jane or Joe.

What's the best tip you have for making yourself heard?

My sister Kim introduced me to a marketing group for small business owners, called The Diva Within. Despite the female-leaning name, it's for anyone that owns a small business online, including all of us artisans. There are articles on various ways to enhance your marketing efforts and of course the opportunity to NETWORK with the group's 1600+ members.

While out shopping this weekend, Holly, best friend Madi, and I visited the Santa picture booth for Heaven Can Wait Sanctuary at the PetsMart in the Best in the West Shopping Center. They were doing a busy traffic with pictures and we were pretty thrilled to see our HCWS cat hammocks on display.

Amongst the many things I found when cleaning my desk today in preparation for Christmas company, was this article in the Nov. 13-19 issue of Las Vegas Weekly. The panelists at the book festival are shown with my signage.

Need a quick last minute gift? Make an awesome floppy crochet hat with Corinne from Threadbanger.



AND if you look very closely near the end of this video when they flash through the DIY projects from the forums (right after the AWESOME Jack Skellington Xmas stuff from GothicTany) there's my A Flick of the Wrist art handbag.

Carried Away Team Leader Krystal of Solsisters will be giving a live interview about the Carried Away Etsy Bag Makers team on Blockhead Radio's Artisan Team and Groups radio show. It will air live this Saturday 12/20 at 1PM eastern time. Even if you miss the show you can still catch it on the player below.

If you like to find out more about this 80 person AND STILL GROWING team, you can visit our NING group or wander over to our blog.

Click to listen.

TODAY 12/18 ONLY: I'm going to fast forward the calendar to December 26th and start my After Christmas sale! If you want in on the deal, come follow me on twitter. To get in on the sale, go browse my artfire and etsy shops and tweet me with " I love this bag! I want 30% off bag name here."

I'll go lower the price and you can grab the deal. It'll only stay lowered for 15 minutes though ... so you gotta be ready to buy before you tweet.

This is my extremely excited daughter in the driveway experiencing SNOW (mixed with rain) in Las Vegas. As you can see, it didn't stick to the ground, but it was coming down pretty heavy.

She was excited for another reason. Parent teacher conferences were this morning and that report card had the promised STRAIGHT A's. This is her first time with the straight A's and I was a good mom. Off we went to Target right afterwards for the promised Nintendo games. She didn't even want to go out to lunch. Since she was off school, she got to hand in her PJs all day and play the new games and have cheese pizza for dinner. Lucky kid! I'm telling you, bribery works!

My daughter likes to play an online game from Disney called Club Penguin. It's a tightly controlled online game environment for kids. They play games to earn virtual coins which they can use to buy clothes, toys and other things for their penguins.

Holly had about 800 coins in her bank. Today, she donated all of her virtual coins to the site's Coins for Change charity drive .... all by herself with no prompting from mom. During December, the site is taking votes (in the form of virtual coin cauldrons to various booths representing the various charities) on how the kids think they should split up this year's donations of $1,000,000 in REAL money.


from the site's parent guide:

Last year, the Coins for Change campaign empowered the children who play Club Penguin to effect real change in the world.

More than 2.5 million children donated in excess of 2 billion virtual coins they earned playing games on Club Penguin to support the environment (World Wildlife Fund), children's health (treating AIDS in Africa) or children in developing countries (Adopt a Village). Through their virtual donations, the kids directed how much of a $1 million cash donation went to three charitable organizations chosen to represent those areas.

This year they can choose "kids without parents or who are hurt by war", "kids who are poor and can't go to school", and "kids who are sick". My girl choose to give some to all three. I am really proud of her charitable spirit. Although I am still of mixed feelings about Disney in general, I have to admit I am pleased to see them making global citizenship understandable and appealing to kids. I've always tried to set the example that everyone and everything is connected for her and I guess it's sinking in. If our children learn to care about people they don't know and learn to see the similarities in people everywhere, it can only help the world.

By the way, did I mention that I expect to be triumphantly presented by this same child with a report card bearing straight A's this Friday ? Yes, parents everywhere take note. BRIBERY WORKS. Now I have to make good on my promise of two Nintendo DS games. But I think STRAIGHT A's deserve that, don't you?

Okay, mom is done gushing now. Back to regularly scheduled craft talking :)

My favorite animal rescue group, Heaven Can Wait Sanctuary, has won the $1,000 state grant from the animal rescue site! YEAH! Las Vegas is the foreclosure capital of the nation right now, which means a huge strain on HCWS resources in dealing with abandoned pets left behind when people lose their homes. This grant will make that burden a little lighter. Thanks to everyone who clicked from here to vote for HCWS.

Here's a little Cat bag that Patty ordered for her girlfriend. It features my friend Gina's cat painting and a bit of the left over fabric I cut off a table cloth. Makes a nice back pocket to shove stuff. It's also got little office brad feet, a neat idea I picked up from someone in the craftster forums.

So last night's topological experiment worked out well. (My boyfriend firmly believes that my under construction, inside out bags look like topological math models and he wonders if I REALLY hate math as much as I confess to. He is, of course, wildly delusional in this idea.)

To make A Flick of the Wrist, I enlarged and altered the pattern for the furry bag from Ottobre Designs. I added darts to make the bag have some capacity and changed the handle construction. The fabric was handpainted by my daughter from paint left over from a mural project. Oh, you should have seen the look of intense joy as she got to fling paint EVERYWHERE! The idea for the neat swivel hook closure came from this slouch bag tutorial in the craftster forums. I think I may have to make this one up for my sister, too.

This morning, my friend John (master flash designer at MGM Mirage) sent a pic of it snowing on his truck over twitter. (the pic has since disappeared. Damn TwitPic!) But here's another frosty scene from our fair city. Yes, that's SNOW IN LAS VEGAS. It happens (but rarely!) and now you've seen it.

Personally, I've always disliked the look that prairie points give to quilts, but this inventive use of them in a hat for for a rock god is just a showstopper. I could easily see this hat gracing the head of a Broadway performer as well, or a hipster at one of the many ultra lounges in Vegas. Head on over to Rayela's shop to see more innovative fiber art and lots of imported textiles for the world over. If you'd like to know about how she made this incredible hat, visit her blog.

The blog this came from (A Few Pretty Things) is in Cyrillic (?) so I can't read the caption or story by I think the picture explains it well enough. Isn't this a cool example of reduce, reuse and recycle?

My birthday is coming up ( Jan. 1st. Happy New Year to me!) and some family members asked me what I'd like.. so here we go...


I want to learn more about LAB color and curves for my class I teach at UNLV. I've been told Dan's book is the best one.


Vintage Silver Scissors Top by Circular Accessories

Full Pound of Fresh Olive Oil Soap by Daisy Cake Soaps. My favorite scent is Sweet Orange & Spice by I like all of her soaps.

Purple and Red Sunburst Organic Batik Hoodie by Batikwalla

Etsy Filligree Tee by Monster Promotions

Still in a sailing mood, the Cypress Ship Blue Organic Scoop by Cypress Ink