Handmade3D Blog

I know this bag isn’t all that impressive, but today it was a fabulous project. Let me explain the reasoning behind this bag. I am a computer animation instructor and teach using the computer for my day job. The past few weeks I have been on vacation. Two of those weeks were true vacation away from home, visiting family. This past week I have been in uber-work mode, trying to finish everything for the new quarter next week.

This past week I have had so many ideas of things to make for myself and for my shop. But alas with the new quarter on Monday I have had no time to do so. And I’m still not done with all the work! I’m in the final stages of working on prep work for the students.

This afternoon I came up with some ideas for class projects where the student needs to be given something at random. I thought they could choose the topic from a bag. Before I used simple plastic grocery bags. But today I thought since my eyes were going crazy from the monitor and my hands were itching to play with fabric, I would make one!

This bag was extremely quick and easy, under 30 mins. I followed a simple pattern from Amy Butler’s InStitches book. It’s the pattern for her recipe card holder, but thought it would work perfectly for my task.

I think it says something when you start implementing craft into your day job!

Time to go back to the paying work.

**Update – 1/14/10**
The choices bag went to work this week and added a lot of confusion to the students. Just what I wanted! Giving out random numbers and random topics for them to research and/or create from worked very well. Students became engaged and participated in classes with each other. Will definitely continue it in future classes!

Since the holiday has passed, I can now show all of the handmade gifts I gave this year!
The first was a pair of hand towels for my mother-in-law. The embroidery worked pretty well on the towel fabric.

The second is a table topper I made for my grandma. It’s so big, she might use it for a lap quilt instead!

The third is a table runner I made for my mom. We all laugh that I continue to say I’m not a quilter, but apparently I’m getting better at it.

The angel wall hanging was for my grandma-in-law. She loves angels and this applique was fun to make. Mom made the base and cut out all the pieces, her favorite part. I did the applique and stitching, my favorite part.

The ruler holder was a gift to me from my mom. Let me rephrase that. Back in February ’09 my mom and I went to a sewing expo here in Tampa. She bought the pattern for the ruler holder bag and said she would make it for me for Christmas. I opened the box it was in, and withdrew the pattern! We made the bag together over the few days I was there. The embroidery design is from UrbanThreads.

And last are pictures of my flamingo guest bath. The towels I embroidered with my mom while she was here for Thanksgiving. The wall hanging we made over the Christmas break. I love having time off to just sew! This February my mom is coming back to Tampa for us to go to the sewing expo again. Hopefully will get more projects done at that time!

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas as well.

With Thanksgiving this week, and Christmas around the corner, it’s time to shop! Handmade3D will be having Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales!

From 11/27 to end of day 11/30 all orders will receive free worldwide shipping!

Please note this offer does not include “Penny Eye Pillow Monsters.” However if you purchase a Penny Eye Monster, I will cut the priority shipping in half, having it be $5.15 to ship a Penny Monster. If you purchase anything else with your Penny Monster, they will be shipped free.

Keep in mind those silly little PJ’s are also on sale! Buy a PJ with any other item and the PJ is reduced to $5 each!

All shipping charges and PJ discounts in those dates will be refunded through Paypal. Happy Shopping!

This past weekend flew by with fabric, festive music, and sales! Holizaar Deux was a good/bad show relationship. Here are some images of my space!The show was well promoted by Coralette, aka The Crafty Hag. We had some very nice traffic for day 1, not as much for day 2. Some errors that were probably unforseen and unavoidable was a fancy-schmancy white tent craft fair outside, a block away. With all those white tents, probably lost some views. Day 2 their was a charity walk going on, which closed some of the streets for an hour.

As far as sales go, I made enough to get back the booth fee and to pay for lunch. But that’s it. No actual profit. The show was fun and I met a lot of great people, but I don’t plan on doing it next year. I didn’t hit my target audience and the space was too expensive. But it was still a great experience and hopeuflly will bring people back to my shop!

I’m worried about a similar occurence at my next show in two weeks. But hopefully with that being in Decemeber, more people will be thinking of Christmas gifts for kids and will buy, buy, buy!

It’s almost turkey time! Which means all of us crafters need to get our butt in gear! The turkey’s are done, so now on to some more festive plushies for the season! These turkey’s can be seen this weekend at the 10th Annual Fall Festival at Mildred Helms Elementary school in Largo. Come for games, rides, and plushies! After this weekend, any turkey’s not sold will be put up in my etsy shop.

p.s. I made my first international sale this week! Australia!

I feel very fortunate to say that my sales again have increased 100%! I had two sales in August and four sales in September. Now I could be greedy and say one of those sales was an order of 3 plushies, but let’s look at sales itself instead.

Now with the etsy sales, I made a high profit on ebay which was very needed for all the supplies I had to buy for my upcoming shows!

October’s goal is to continue the 100% increase each month. Should hopefully not be a problem since I have a show on October 11th. I have 55 more plushies to make for a goal of 100 at the show. I think this will give me a good variety of plush to sell, but means I have to get sewing! I need to make 6 a day, back to work!

Frankenstein has been featured on Myshoppingconnection.com Woo! So excited for the publicity, I still love this guy! Thanks Erika from MyShoppingConnection!

Hello everyone, I have exciting news! I have been accepted to The Needle blog! Click side bar image or click here. The Needle is a great blog I have been following for months for inspiration on plush artists. Plush artists from around the world post their creative works to this blog to share their designs and talents. I am so happy and honored to be selected to post their as well! Now have to come up with a great ‘first’ post, perhaps Frankenstein?

I can’t wait for Halloween! But at the same time, I hope it takes a long time to get here! I just posted to my etsy shop a new Halloween monster. This monster can get unraveled if he doesn’t stay happy!

While making him I came up with a brilliant idea! Hope to create his brilliant idea by the weekend. Stay tuned . . .

Please pardon the constant change of appearance! I am currently updating my blog so it is more customized by me!I think this will be the design for now! I am using my favorite fabric as background, it matches my avatar and my appearance in etsy.