a swedish christmas

I'm not Swedish, I've never been to Sweden, but I love the idea of a Swedish Christmas. I imagine clean, bright colors + rustic straw ornaments all popping off of a whitewashed background filled with a mix of chippy Gustavian antiques and IKEA furniture. I imagine modest but well-designed handmade gifts, simply wrapped and the smell of gingerbread in the air. I imagine clomping around in some red clogs, wearing a ragg wool sweater. I have no idea if I am accurate in my fantasy, but I found a few things on the internets that fit my vision...

vintage red & white wallpaper-from smilemercantile
illustration of Stockholm- by annasee
traditional pepparkakor cookie recipe (thinner, crispier version of gingersnaps)- by The Wandering Cook
dala horse pillow- by LittleputtStudio
dala horse appliqué onesie-by chirp & bloom
Swedish clogs by Troentorp- from shoebuy
traditional Swedish straw ornament- similar on ebay
vintage dala horse- similar on Etsy

I find the dala horse especially charming, so I made up an appliquéd onesie for the shop. I always like an excuse to use my floral ribbons.

God Jul!

into matryoshka dolls

I don't know why, but I'm into Matryoshka dolls, also known as Russian nesting dolls, at the moment. I guess I should say I'm STILL into them since I wrote about them a while ago here.

They just seem so festive for the holidays to me. I found these great matryoshka doll items browsing around on Etsy:
Antique Russian nesting dolls from amberfilikins (oh darn, they're sold!)
Matryoshka doll letterpress birthday card from dutchdoor
Mother-daughter nesting doll pendant set from shoplolli
Matryoshka doll bobby pins from MelissaAbram
Kokka Japanese import matryoshka doll fabric from MoonaFabrics
Hand printed matryoshka doll kitchen towels from CuddleCanvas
Matryoshka doll baby quilt from SweetnCozy
Tiny needle felted matryoshka doll from CattaDolls

And I've been working on my own items for chirp & bloom.

I made an applique onesie and big sister tee in time for the last Clover Market of the season two weeks ago, and I think they came out pretty cute. People liked them at the show anyway, so now they are in the shop.

It was fun to finally use some of the floral ribbons from my trip to the NYC garment district and it was my first time using ink jet printable fabric sheets by Jaquard. I really wanted something realistic for the face, so I created the image in the computer and printed it out. I did a wash test and the ink ran some which wouldn't do at all. So I tried again, and heat setting it with the iron, then soaking it in salt water. That brought the color down a bit, but I like the more antique look and when washed  again, the ink didn't run. See? Even in a small business you have to do quality control testing. I'll add to that that I've tested the best way to finish the edge of ribbons and ric-rac. Between Fray-Check and singeing, singeing wins as long as the content is polyester. I use a Darice craft wood burning tool for the singeing and it works great.

Back to those printable fabric sheets- they are so cool, my daughter wanted to try them too, so we had a couple of friends over to do her craft idea here.

order in the chirp & bloom studio!

I just completed a major deep cleaning of the studio! I just can't think when there's too much chaos, and I need order with the busy fall I have ahead... I just was notified that I am showing at the Clover Market in Ardmore, PA three dates this fall: September 18, October 16, & November 6. And I'm waiting to hear from an additional show somewhere else in October. I'd also like to do a show or two for the holidays. That means a lot of sewing & new designs ahead. I also have the finishing touches to put on our attic guest room renovation which has been dragging on forever and a flower girl dress to make for a family wedding in September. A clean studio is essential.

My fabric piles are the first to get out of hand.

I'm trying something new: using a folding board. The kids actually thought it was fun and wanted to help. For regular yardage, the procedure is to first fold the fabric lengthwise, selvedges together. Then fold the other way until you have an easily manageable piece roughly the size above.

My board is just a scrap of foam core that happened to be 1/3 the width of my fabric shelves, so it makes pieces that fit 3 stacks per shelf perfectly. I also have a smaller board for fat quarters and small scraps. Now all you do is fold the fabric over the board, and pull it out.

 

Fold the piece back on itself one last time and that forms a nice clean edge that will face out on the shelf.

Voilà!

And while I'm at it, it just feels satisfying to put my bobbins and thread in color order.

And why not the embroidery floss? There's just something about rainbows...

What the heck, here's a tour of the rest of the studio... Newly unearthed, a place for a friend to sit, visit, and peruse back issues of Marie Claire Idées and Domino

I've added a dedicated shipping station, so everything I need to send packages is in one spot. It can get crazy around the holidays and I'm determined to stay on top of it.

Individual bins for projects in progress keep things orderly. Each bin holds all the elements for one item, so labels & trims stay with the right piece. If I have more than 6 projects going at once, I know I'm in trouble.

Finally, a clean sewing station. I learned my lesson about the importance of a clean sewing area the hard way. It only takes one dirty smudge on an almost finished garment. I just don't have time for that!

art star craft bazaar 2011

Finally the day came yesterday to set up for my first craft show ever, the Art Star Craft Bazaar in Philadelphia. After many sunny, dry days in a row, we awoke to overcast skies and a 50% chance of rain. I was still excited to get underway, because that's a 50% chance of no rain right?

sketch by Curtis Harkin AIA

I had willing help from my family in the hectic weeks leading up to the show and extra hands the day of to help with set up.  Mom & Dad were there keeping the kids in line and toting loads of stuff up the long incline to the top of multilevel  Penn's Landing. I do feel so fortunate!

Here's how the booth came out after set up. Not far from my husband's sketch, right?

My photographer friend Heather took better pictures than I could. You gotta go see these and the rest of her work.

I enjoyed a few hours of nice traffic, enthusiastic reactions (many high-pitched "aaaaaaw"s), and my first sales using my handy-dandy card reader from Square installed on a smart phone generously loaned to me for the show. Then about half-way through, it started raining and continued off and on for the rest of the afternoon. Most of the lookers and buyers fled except for my diehard friends from New York who stayed to help with take-down.

the Ben Franklin Bridge as seen from Penn's Landing between showers

I took the slow period as an opportunity to check out a little bit of the show, not as thoroughly as when I attend a show as a buyer, but enough to see what good company I was in.

Some cool applique pillows, much different from my own birds and flowers, from dirtsa studio. Where would you ever be able to find anatomical hearts and frog dissections emblazoned on pillows besides an indie craft show? Certainly not Pottery Barn!

Festive buntings from Sweet Old Etcetera. I can totally relate to her vintagey fabric choices.

Some purses that caught my eye from hello bluebird, a brick-and-mortar boutique from Reading, PA that features indie crafters.

Back at the booth we packed damp clothing back into their plastic bins, leaving the tent and tables behind in hopes of a better day Sunday. We had an amazing dinner at Cuba Libre in Old City which was walking distance from the show. I felt more optimistic after a good meal and a glass of sangria...

This morning brought drizzle and a forecast of thunderstorms. That's when I decided to leave my wares home, which we'd brought inside to air out, and abandon the second day of the show. As an indiepreneur, every decision is such a risk. Do I do the show and risk drenching my product? Or do I stay home and risk missing a not-as-bad-as-I-thought day? I felt a little sheepish carting my tent away as most everyone else was mopping up the puddles and preparing to make the best of it, but by then there was no turning back. I emailed the news to any friends that might have planned to see me Sunday and bit my lip as the weather steadily improved throughout the day. I finally lost it when a friend called from the show wondering where I was. I am feeling such regret right now!

What a learning experience, though. It was such a bigger undertaking than I ever imagined between making all the product, getting the display engineered, and figuring out how to take credit cards. As much work as that was, the organizers, Art Star Gallery & Boutique owners Megan & Erin, had so much more to coordinate between gathering volunteers (thank you lovely Lisa who looks like Lisa LaPorta on HGTV), arranging security, and making the process organized for us vendors. All the while they had smiles on their faces. I am choked up with gratitude and a feeling that I let everyone down- friends, family, Megan & Erin, by wimping out on the second day.

One thing is for sure though, I will do another show next season. It ought to be much easier now that I have the tent and all the logistics worked out. And next time I will ignore the Weather Channel and be tougher!

a little bloom to go with the chirp

With the Art Star show coming up, I've been frantically trying to make as many coin purses as I can. I noticed the designs I had were almost all birds after about the 40th purse. I needed some flowers! I am "chirp & bloom" after all.

After fooling around with several different rose designs in Illustrator, I came up with this one. It's not so easy to reduce a lush, detailed flower like a cabbage rose down to two colors with pieces simple enough to applique.

I tried a few different shades of red & pink trying to find just the right contrast. Half the time, the fabrics I think will work don't have quite the right contrast once the pieces are cut & laid out.

The one think I was sure of is the linen background. I've been wanting to use it for a while and now I have even more ideas for linen-background things. For the lining, a recycled striped dress shirt.

My favorite part- getting down to business with the appliquéing. Just a simple zig-zag this time.

I should buy stock in Warm Company, the company that makes Steam-A-Seam Lite, my new favorite fusible web. It's essential for the type of appliqué I do. I iron-on my pieces and the web acts like glue during the applique process and after washings too, so the edges don't need turning under.

My least favorite part is assembling the pieces and gluing the frame on, but it has to be done. I'm always afraid I'll get glue on all over it and ruin my hard work. A purse takes about 3 hours to make!

I went ahead and did a few more colorways for variety and listed them in the shop. Cheers!

mass production- sort of

Well I've gone and done it now. I've applied to my first craft show and been accepted. On May 14 & 15, I'll be showing at the Art Star Craft Bazaar, an indie craft show in Philadelphia! I love attending indie craft shows, but have been too intimidated so far to be in one. How the heck am I going to fill a 10' by 10' booth with quantity & variety of irresistible wares? No turning back now!

I started production in earnest this week. My parents, sensing rightly that I'd bitten off more than I can chew, came up for the week to help out. Dad played with the kids & did chores while Mom & I sewed our little hearts out. Of course things didn't go quite as planned. The day job kicked in a with some urgent freelance work and my little boy caught a nasty bug and needed attention. A miscommunication with a supplier yielded a package of purse frames in the wrong size & color. For a while there it seemed nothing was going my way. I consider myself lucky I had help!

It was a good thing I had projects organized and ready to go before they got here. The plan was to focus on one product category at a time, starting with coin purses.

I prototyped a few new designs and colorways in advance to beef up the variety. We worked on the purses in batches, cutting multiples and performing each step on all before moving on. I have to say it's rather mind-numbing to work this way, but at least I had someone there to chat with.

There are a lot of steps to these darn things! There were no finished purses until the very end of the week.

Mom got bored and wanted to move on to onesies. We tacked labels into 50 of them while watching a Will Farrel movie one night. Then she begged me to let her design one, and I said OK. She came up with the crazy quilt heart which looks very chirp & bloom. Each one is slightly different and has recycled shirt fabrics, floral ribbon, and hand embroidery. She is a collage artist with her own Etsy shop after all!

Time management challenges, botched shipments, delegating work... it's almost like I'm back in the garment industry!

Since it's my first show, I have no idea how much to make of any one thing. I'm shooting for 6 per design, divided between 3 sizes, of each onesie. Maybe I'll do more if I finish early, but that's unlikely! There are still skirts, dresses, & hair accessories to go... Wish me luck!

new appliquéd onesies!

I must be so in the mood for spring because all I can think about are birds and butterflies and flowers!

I prototyped a couple of new appliquéd onesies this week for chirp & bloom. I couldn't decide on one colorway, so I did 2 for each. I do get requests for boy onesies, so I think the grey & blue birdies fits the bill. I just don't have a feel for sports themes or trucks and they would look out of place in my shop anyway.

A lot of trial and error and time goes into prototyping. The original design for the birdies had 16 birds! What was I thinking? There were so many and they were so tiny. It takes me plenty long to applique the 9. Then I thought it would be cute to have the odd one off kilter at the end, pecking at some crumbs. Just makes it more interesting.

The other time-consumer: getting good photos. It's an ongoing challenge for me. I am basically an amateur. I know what looks good, but how to get there is the problem.  I recently invested in a studio flash with an umbrella to boost my light indoors without glare. I still prefer the natural light to be dominant though, so I wait for sunny days and turn the flash way down to use as fill light. I wind up doing lots of editing in Photoshop never the less.

original shot straight from the camera

I prefer to err on the side of underexposure with digital shots (the opposite of what you would do with film shots) so all the color information is there and not washed out. But BLECH! The light wasn't as good as I thought and the studio flash didn't seem to help much. I had it turned way down to look natural.

final shot heavily edited in Photoshop

After several Photoshop operations it's good enough to use in the shop:
- increase exposure (+.52 in this case, but I've been known to go higher)
- select background only using selection tool (select onesie & clips, then select the inverse)
- using selective color tool, remove black from whites, neutrals, and from black itself (fiddle with the percentages)
- sometimes I'll increase the color saturation on the item a little too but I didn't this time.
- on top of it all, I increased the brightness by a little bit and dodged the bottom edge
- then there's cropping. I've started cropping to the ratio that Etsy uses for main shop photos 794px x 1000px. That way I have better control of what the shot will look like in the shop rather than being left to the mercy of Etsy's cropping.

I still may go back to the attic on a better light day and see if I can do better.

***update***

Ok- the sun came out I found a better spot to hang my clothesline. I knew something still missing from the other onesie photos! Sparkle. Can't beat good natural light (and a foam core reflector). Much less photoshopping was needed for this new photo.

on a roll with appliqué

When my grandmother visited over the holidays, she was pretty tickled to see that my son has been using this quilt she made for one of my brothers in the 1970's. She made appliquéd quilts like this for each of her grandchildren. There are more than 30 of us, so that's nothing to sneeze at!

I asked her where she got her appliqué motifs and she revealed that they were adapted from coloring books! I thought that was simply brilliant and it made me like the quilt even more. The other thing I like about it is the naive quality of the color and fabric choices- not deliberate or matched, just using whatever scraps were on hand.

I love the whale. I might have to do a whale appliquéd something-or-other for the shop.

I made more than a few cardinal appliqué coin purses in December. I use a similar technique to Grandma's that doesn't involve turning under the edges of the applique. I cut the shapes to the exact size I want and apply to the background using double-sided iron-on adhesive called Heat 'N' Bond. I think Grandma just used pins though. Then I stitch around the edges with a blanket stitch, zig zag, or straight stitch. Grandma used button hole zig-zagging in black, just like the coloring book art.

The cardinals were popular enough, that I set up a mini assembly line to meet the demand.

 

Since people liked the cardinal purse, I thought it would be fun to do a bird for each season. Unlike Grandma, I work out the designs in Illustrator and tend to agonize over the fabric combinations. Even with my huge stash, I find myself running out to the fabric store for just the right thing. For appliques with small parts like these, the fabric patterns have to be low contrast, smaller scale patterns that read as one color.

Now that I've done them as purses, I can see them as pillows or hoop art too. Ah, well. Moving on to some new onesie designs.