Making the connection...

Last night I had the great opportunity to meet Chad Dickerson, Etsy CEO. That kind of sounds weird right? When do we ever meet CEOs? Especially, of a business that so greatly impacts my daily life. It was a surreal moment to tell him that Etsy has been a launch pad for my creative business and that definitely includes my book, Stitched Gifts. I gave him a Stitched Gifts postcard and felt so very proud.

Last nights event was held at the Tenement Museum (one of my favorite places to take out of town guests) to highlight their new exhibition Shop Life, all about small businesses on the LES. New York is a mecca for entrepreneurship, then and today. The room was packed with Etsy sellers all running small business in NY, probably from their small NY apartments, like me! It was amazing to hear just how many Etsy sellers there are in New York City alone- I can't remember the exact number, but I'll find it for you.  It blew my mind.

Working from home I often feel disconnected from the world around me. I left the event feeling more connected to other makers, and to the work we do here in this city, which welcomes all of us determined creative weirdos with open arms. Thank you, New York! Thank you Etsy!!

Schedule that.

One of the hardest parts of my everyday routine is scheduling my days. When you are accountable to no one but yourself how do you organize and structure your time? How do you work when the dishes and laundry are begging for attention? How do you manage all the online work that needs to get done without the watchful eye of your coworkers keeping you in check and off all those blogs, FB & twitter? It's easy to just say a schedule, but life is not conveniently chunked into easy digestible periods of time. Making hand embroidery is a labor of love and each piece just to stitch can take 2 hours (not including creating the pattern, customer care, cutting fabrics, staining hoops and backing the piece). Schedule that.

So then I heard April of Blacksburg Belle talk at the Etsy Success Symposium about creating lists with actionable tasks(<-- that link is to a post about learning Japanese, but hey you get the idea), tasks that give me the most out of my time and the most reward. This is not the monster list that is impossible to accomplish in a day, but simply 6 things to accomplish everyday.  This simple act of writing down what I should do in a day keeps my mind focused on the priorities and more than any schedule I've created keeps me (more) on track than I've ever been before.  I know exactly what I need to do everyday and can prioritize my time accordingly. My days are not limited to these things and I often add tasks just to cross them off, because that just feels good to do (personal gold stars). There's always more things to add to my list to grow my little business, but my days are slowly feeling more manageable. You have to hustle as a creative entrepreneur, so finding ways to better yourself and your work are a must. WHAT DO YOU DO THAT HELPS YOU ORGANIZE YOUR TIME & FOCUS YOUR CREATIVE ENERGY?
Also here is April's talk....

Watch live streaming video from etsy at livestream.com

bespoke....

bespoke: an item custom-made to the buyer's specification.

much of the work i do is custom, made to order embroidery.  not sure how it happened really. i went school for photography and thought i'd be a teacher.  i embroidered my families DNA as part of my thesis project and it's just become part of my daily life since.  never, never  would have imagined that, but it suits my obsessive nature, and my insane love for detail.

so here i am embroidering for a living.  it's without a doubt one of the dumbest business models.  ever.  (i'm half joking, half crying.) these little stitches take for-ever and all the other things involved- cutting fabric, creating and transferring the pattern, and mounting the embroidery- are equally time consuming. and then there is (trying!) to manage a small business....  it's all kinds of frustrating (and i know, i know also rewarding too, to be your own boss and such, but this is a pouty kind of post).

which brings me back to bespoke work. learned the word from becky of sweetie pie press, who mentions it here.  so i am behind on my custom embroidery orders. i am always behind and always will be, by the very nature of the this kind of work.   i wish very much to cross off many things on my to-do list and here are some i can proudly check off (and sorry for those who are kindly waiting):

"all famous and shit. "

yeahhh, no, but still I felt like doing the running man today when i got the tiniest mention in USA Today...
find the full article here.
thank you allison for the post title inspiration.
and thank you to Laura Petrecca for giving me a little something to smile about today!