Quite literally.  I spent Monday feeling worse and worse, Monday night being sick, Tuesday being feverish, nauseous, and headachey, and today I seem to be left mostly with the headache and a little dizziness.  I’m not ready for “real food” quite yet, so until then it’s Saltines for breakfast.

Oh! There is so much to catch up on!  It looks like I’ll have to pass on Kids Clothes Week, which is a shame, but necessary if I’m going to make up for lost time.  The most important thing I have to deal with is my Polka Dot Creations email and order processing, so if you’re waiting to hear from me, it should happen today.  I’m somewhat hampered by this headache since using the computer makes it worse, so it may take me a little while.  You’re definitely on my radar, though, and I appreciate your patience!

I was really looking forward to indulging all kinds of creative pursuits at the beginning of this week.  Instead, I dozed in and out while watching hours upon hours of bad daytime television.  Oh well.  At least I can feel the fog lifting now.

PDC customers, I’ll be in touch today sometime!

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© Lisa Clarke for Polka Dot Cottage, 2010. | Permalink

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It’s a beautiful Sunday.  I nearly succumbed to the temptation to have my breakfast out on the patio, but I decided it’s still a tiny bit too cold for that.  Instead I sat in my favorite living room chair, as always, and I opened the window next to it.  Best of both worlds, I think.

So that has been the “pleasure” part of my day, and of my post.  The “business” part of my day is going to involve income tax.  Shoot me now.  The worst part of the whole experience, I think, is in doing the calculations for my home office – I’ll be in much better shape next year, since I’ve started keeping a budget and I will know exactly how much I’ve spent on home maintenance, but this year it’s still a matter of digging up all of the bills and doing the calculations by hand.  It’s all just too boring for words.  Which is why I’m going to stop talking about it now!

I’d much rather think about sitting on the back patio with a glass of lemonade, leisurely flipping through a creative magazine.  This brings me to my next piece of business:  just because I am a last-minute tax-doer doesn’t mean the rest of you are.  Those of you who have already sent in your forms are free to spend a lovely afternoon getting your crafty groove on, and to that end, I’d like to introduce you to the Polka Dot Creations magazine blowout event.

Eighty-one issues of the popular Stampington & Company magazines (Belle Armoire, Belle Armoire Jewelry, Art Doll Quarterly, Altered Couture, Artful Blogging and more) are up for grabs for less than I paid for them.  I don’t normally have sales this drastic, but when you combine a need for space with a need for cash, well, crazy things can happen.  You should definitely take advantage of this before I change my mind!

Check out what’s available here.

Also of note: I still have a couple of the Out of Print issues of PolymerCAFE and Art Doll Quarterly available.  I’ve added them to the website in the Out of Print section.  They won’t last long, so if you’re interested, now is the time to go for it!

And lastly, I should mention that the new Confident Color DVD is in stock!  Or, let me rephrase that: It was in stock for about 12 hours before it sold out, but I’ll have more by Thursday.  I watched it while packing up the preorders, and it’s full of interesting ways to use stripey skinner blends – if you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you’ll know I enjoy a good stripey skinner blend…

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Seven of the first eight issues of PolymerCAFE, all of them long out of print, turned up in my basement in excellent condition.  These issues are, in my opinion, some of the best the magazine has had.  I especially remember enjoying the first three issues, but really all of them have some quality projects.

I hope some of you will take the opportunity to fill out your PolymerCAFE collection!

Be back later, with a little polymer and metal clay eye candy.

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We were lucky that once Neil pumped out the water, it stayed out.  The biggest challenge we now have ahead of us is our family room full of stuff.  It’s so full of stuff, we’ve got little more than a few narrow pathways to walk.  So many of the boxes that were in the basement only ended up there as a result of pre-party last-minute cleaning.  There are several years’ worth of that kind of thing.  It’s tempting just to throw those boxes away without looking inside, but what if there’s something I’ve been missing in there?

It’s been so overwhelming, I haven’t known where to start.  (Which would explain why it’s a week after the flood and it still looks the same.)

Well I finally figured out what I wanted to do after one too many frustrating attempts at shipping book orders.  My “warehouse” area has gotten more and more disorganized over the years, to the point where it’s a hair-pulling experience trying to find some things.  For the past year, I haven’t put away new arrivals – I’ve been stacking them in a pile on the family room floor.  And now that there’s little space in the family room, digging through that pile for what I want has gone from minor annoyance to major pain in the butt.

So that’s where I need to focus – my pile of “new” arrivals.  But I can’t put away the new arrivals until I organize the shelves in the basement.  And I can’t organize the shelves in the basement until I find a place to put some of the non-book-store stuff that’s been accumulating there.  And I can’t do that, until I deal with the four huge stacks of my crafty books on the floor that Neil has been asking me to sort through since 2004.

So yesterday I put on a few LOST podcasts, plopped myself down on the cold basement floor, and dug through those book piles one by one.  What I ended up with at the end was one pile of garbage, two piles of books suitable to be donated somewhere or other, and two piles I wanted to keep.

I further sorted the keep pile into “business” and “personal.”  I was relieved to find that only a dozen or so books were in my personal pile – a relief because it shouldn’t be too hard to find someplace to keep them.  The business pile, I sorted yet again, into books, project books, magazines, and DVDs.  I put away the project books and DVDs, and made a small dent in the magazines.  Today, I finish going through the magazines, and start in on the books.

But here is the payoff, for those of you who have stuck with me through this story: buried deep in those piles were some treasures that I forgot I had – old popular project books that are long out of print, and a few copies of the first several issues of PolymerCAFE, also long out of print.  I know there is a demand for these things – I get email from customers often, asking if I know where to get copies of them.

So sometime in the next week or so, I’ll be putting them on eBay.  I’ll let you know when the auctions start, in case you have a particular interest in anything and want to keep your eye on it.

Also, I’ve come to the conclusion that my magazine area is completely out of control.  To that end, once I get this all organized, there is going to be a magazine sale at Polka Dot Creations the likes of which you’ve never seen before.  I’m willing to take a big loss on these, just to get them out of here, so you’ll be able to get some fantastic deals.

So, it’s a busy day today.  It’s order packing day and they just went out the door, there’s more basement work to do, and my new laptop that I ordered three weeks ago (before our self-imposed spending freeze) is finally supposed to arrive.  Yep, busy day, but I’m actually enjoying getting in the trenches and accomplishing something!

By the way, those of you who didn’t win my giveaway of Perfectly Paired this week should hop over to Patti’s blog.  She’s giving away a signed copy.

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I have Sherri Haab to blame for all of this.  And by “this” I mean the polymer clay supplies that lurk in many corners of my house, the business I’ve built around clay books + videos, and the piles and piles of polymer jewelry mostly gathering dust in my bedroom.  (You know how that goes – you have your two or three favorite pieces, which soon are replaced by new work, and this continues through the years until you have a jewelry box full of stuff that is just hideous compared to your most recent masterpiece. You wouldn’t be caught dead in them now, but you feel funny throwing them away, knowing as you do all of the blood sweat and tears that went into making them back in 1996.  Please tell me you do this too.)

Anyway, I’m sure it’s completely unfair to blame Sherri.  I should probably be blaming Neil, who brought the book into the house in the first place.  Or maybe I should just accept that polymer clay and I were destined to meet one way or another, and the mechanism by which we came together those 14+ years ago is largely irrelevant.

In any case, I did get my first exposure to polymer through Sherri Haab, I enjoy her style, and I like her books, even the ones that are not specifically about polymer clay, like this brand new one: Sherri Haab Jewelry Inspirations: Techniques and Designs from the Artist’s Studio.

There are three polymer projects in the book, all of which are interesting, but none of which really float my own particular boat.  Luckily, what Sherri lacks in polymer clay depth here, she makes up for in general clay breadth.  In other words, I don’t mind the lack of polymer here because she’s playing with other kinds of clay that I find pretty neat.  In particular, metal clay and epoxy resin clay.

I plan on dusting off my metal clay supplies in the next week or so, but until then I decided to try a more instant-gratification project.  I had trouble choosing between the Sea Urchin Rings and the Resin Clay Flower Bracelets, but in the end I chose the bracelets.

Like I mentioned a few days ago, we’re in a financial crunch around here, so I didn’t want to invest in any new materials (as super cool as that epoxy resin clay sounds) so I substituted polymer in making the flower.  This is one case where the material used really doesn’t matter, because the sculpted part could be cured by itself.  (In other projects, it might not be appropriate to substitute an oven-bake clay for an air-dry clay, because the materials embedded in the clay may not be heat-resistant.)

I also used some of the leftover clay from the flower to make the easiest. button. ever. instead of using a mass-produced one.

I actually think that this bracelet looked just as nice before I put the flower on it.  I may have to make myself a little pile of braided fabric bracelets with matching solid-color buttons for the spring…

So I had fun with this book.  There’s nothing overly artsy or complicated here, just plenty of fun, lighthearted, and hip designs to play with, and a handful of new materials to explore.

How about you?  Want to have a little fun with this book?   Learn to make this bracelet, some big funky rings, vintage glass bead earrings, metal clay charm pendants, and more?  Leave a comment on this post, and I’ll choose a random winner sometime Monday evening (3/15).  Good luck!!

Until then, here are some links to keep you busy:

• Buy the book from me at Polka Dot Creations
• Read all of my blog posts about this book
• Visit Sherri’s website

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© Lisa Clarke for Polka Dot Cottage, 2010. | Permalink

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Last summer, I was asked to submit a beginner-friendly polymer clay project for the upcoming Craft Hope book. The book will feature pairs of projects and charities, the idea being that you can make the projects and then donate them to the charities.

I was honored to be included, and so I set to work and designed a heart pendant that was attractive yet simple, and then sent it off happily to the publisher.  A few weeks later, I was disappointed to find out that the charity my project had been paired-up with was not interested in receiving polymer clay jewelry.  They wanted “glass only.”

That was a really big bummer, of course, and it might have been nice if the charity had let their preferences be known up front, before I spent all of that time working on my project, but what can you do?  On the bright side, I now had this tutorial written up, and all of these photos taken, and I only needed a place to use them.  Well, last week (five months later), it hit me:  these hearts started with Craft Hope, why not use them in that way now?

In case you haven’t yet heard, Craft Hope has opened an Etsy shop for Haiti.  100% of the proceeds from every sale will be donated to Doctors Without Borders.  The shop is stocked with handmade items from all over the blogosphere (they’ll be accepting more items after they’ve had a chance to catch their breaths, if you are inclined to donate something yourself).  As of this writing, there are nearly 170 items listed, and over 1500 ($27,000+) sold.  In just a few weeks!  I think that’s just wonderful, don’t you?

So I spent last Tuesday morning putting my instructions and photos together into a 6-page PDF, and am now pleased to announce that 20 copies of the Polka Dot Cottage Hearts tutorial are available for sale through Craft Hope. Please consider this little splurge, particularly if you’ve thought about playing with polymer clay, but were intimidated by long supply lists, or were put off by a need for expensive equipment.  You can make these hearts with nothing more than a few colors of Sculpey III, an old kitchen knife, and a toothpick.  Everything else is optional.

Alternately, I stumbled across Hearts for Haiti on etsy a few days ago, and since a heart tutorial seemed like the perfect fit for such a shop, there are now also 20 copies available there.  Both shops are donating to the same charity, so please just feel free to purchase wherever you prefer.  You may also get your copy directly from me at Polka Dot Creations, but I do hope that you will check CraftHope and HeartsForHaiti first and buy through them for as long as they still have copies.

Even if you’re not intrigued by these hearts, I urge you to head over to either shop and see what else may be of interest.  Buy yourself a little something special and help make a difference in the world at the same time.

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Every first full week of January, having just re-opened my two shops (Polka Dot Creations and Polka Dot Cottage, if you’re new here) there is always the mad dash to get 2+ weeks’ worth of orders processed, invoiced, and out the door.  I’ve been known to spend the entire month of January just trying to keep up!  Well, allow me to pat myself on the back for a moment, because as of about an hour ago, all of the in-stock orders from my vacation have been shipped.  Yippee!

It’s a wonder I got this far, though, I have to tell you.  I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but I am very easily-distracted.  (Well, duh!)  Ever wonder what attracts a mind like mine, when it should be stuffing DVDs into padded envelopes?

Ad space auctions.  As I mentioned a few days ago, I decided to offer a sponsor spot on the blog.  It uses an auction model, so I started the bidding off at $0/day (i.e. free).  Well, let me tell you, friends, for 48 hours I have been mesmerized, refreshing my screen to see the bids creep upwards.  Trust me, nobody is getting rich on this – the high bid as of this writing is ten cents per day, which should buy me a cup of fancy coffee in about a month and a half.  There’s just something so fun to me about watching the process.  At least, when it’s actually moving.  The same person has been high bidder since yesterday and I’m getting a little antsy for some action over there… C’mon, let’s see those bids roll in! Mama needs a Gingerbread Latte.  Hee hee.

As a testament to my need to see people duke it out virtually for a tiny piece of blog real estate, I added two more ad boxes.  Purely for my own entertainment.  Clearly I have an illness, but as long as the blog doesn’t look like one ridiculous billboard, and small crafty businesses like mine are getting a bit more exposure, who am I to argue with myself?

PolyPubs. I posted a new list last night, and ever since then I’ve been thinking about ways to improve the service.  PolyPubs started out as a simple yahoo group, but a few months ago, I gave it its own website, and added links to other shops where readers could buy the books and DVDs.  I’d like to add even more features, most of which I’m not ready to talk about, but boy, have I been thinking about them.  Entirely too much.

My sweater.  Still knitting it, still optimistic that it will look like a sweater when I’m done with it.  Wanting to drop everything else to work on it, so that I can get it far enough to try it on.  Resisting, but not for long.

Other work: I’m doing a little website consulting for a local company.  Mulling over solutions for problems and blah blah blah blah blah.

What I am not thinking about but should be is laundry, what’s for supper, and when are all of these Christmas decorations going to be put away.  Only so much space in this head right now.  Wouldn’t want to overload the circuits or anything with all of those houseworky thoughts.  >shudder<

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Technically, I am still on my Christmas vacation until Monday, but I had promised to take a day out of my holiday-having to ship Bettina Welker’s new book when it arrived.  I’d been checking the tracking information online every couple of days, but there’d been no change in status since December 15th.  Ack.  So you can imagine my surprise when Neil wandered into the family room at 11:30 this morning, lugging a big box of books from Germany.

Oh, they’re here?!  Great!

It was uncharacteristically forward-thinking of me to get customer payments ahead of time, and to print out the shipping paperwork before I started my vacation, but I did do those things, and as a result, I was able to jump right into packing these books up and printing the postage.  It was admittedly a long shot, but I actually managed to drop them all on the doorstep and put the flag up on the mailbox before the postal pickup today.

So, yay! The first wave of books is on its way to those who had preordered and paid before my vacation began.  New orders will go out next week.  And I still have a (very) small handful available if you’re feeling tempted now.

You know, after looking at the cover for so many months, I’ve been increasingly eager to get a look inside this book.  It’s written entirely in German, but there is a small pamphlet that comes with the book, which includes Kathi Briefer-Gose’s English translation of all fourteen projects.  I can imagine it might get a little awkward to have to flip back and forth between book and translation, but these projects are so fabulous-looking, it just might be worth it.

For now, though, I’m all about gawking at the eye candy.  My clay is packed up, and may very well remain that way until my annual trip to Atlantic City for the Clayathon in two weeks.  This book (along with Kathi’s translation)  is for sure going to be in my travel bag that weekend.  I’d like to use these earrings as a starting point for somethingorother. Probably – fittingly – a pair of earrings.

Oh, and speaking of books that arrived here while I was technically on vacation, Christi Friesen‘s got a nifty new book called Steampunkery that marries her signature style with gears, watch parts, and all things steampunky.  While it’s not really my style, I have to admit I couldn’t put the book down – I read it cover to cover.  And I just may find myself applying some of those ideas to my own work.  Hey, I’ve got a whole Clayathon during which to play, right?

Speaking of gears, I need to change mine now.  A certain six-year-old is attending a friend’s birthday party tomorrow, and I’ve got a sock puppet to finish making.

Happy Weekending, everyone!

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Now that both of my kids are school-age, I find that I appreciate my role as at-home Mom most deeply in the summer.  I’ve gotten used to having them both on schedules and gone for a great portion of the time during the school year, but in the summer?  In the summer, we can drop everything and meet friends for a movie if we want to.  Or we can make last-minute plans to spend the day with grandparents.  And there is no reason at all why we cannot follow the call of the ocean when we hear it.

My youngest and I did just that yesterday.  It’s a relatively short trip – about ninety minutes when there’s traffic – and when you know there is an aunt and a grandmother also there for the day, and a bedroom you can crash in if you want to, well, the decision to take off for a 24-hour vacation kind of makes itself.

Now, if you are a polymer clay fan and a book addict, you probably know that there was a new book due out yesterday, too.  And if you know me at all, you probably can guess that I got some crazy hairbrained idea about sewing myself something for the beach at the same time that I had a pile of books I wanted to pack up.

This is how I became a multi-tasking crazywoman on Monday night.

I’m happy to report that the books were packed up and sent along without so much as a hiccup.  The sewing? Not so much.  My Garden Party wrap skirt saw much seam-ripping, re-cutting of panels, and creative substituting of fabric to replace what was mis-cut.  It also took me about twice as long as it should have.  And in the end, the skirt ended up being a good three inches narrower than it was supposed to be.  Being a wrap skirt, it was still wearable, but I will admit I wasn’t entirely confident on the windy boardwalk and spent a lot of time holding the flap closed with my hand.  Just in case.

The things we do for our creative urges, eh?

I feel like there’s still one more shore trip in me before summer ends, although the calendar may think otherwise.  I hope it’s do-able, because really, there is nothing like waking up in a bright sun-lit room, with an ocean breeze caressing your bare shoulder.  And if you also happen to have a snuggly six-year-old and his boardwalk-won stuffed doggie for company, all the better.

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It has rained here so much this summer, that dark lazy mornings have become the norm.  Rainy days bring out the loafer in me, so you can imagine how hard it has been to get anything useful done lately.  Luckily, when I loaf, I can still be productive, albeit in a way that may not have been completely necessary.

Case in point: PolyPubs.  PolyPubs is short for Polymer Clay Publications, and is a mailing list I began several years ago, in an attempt to publicize new books, dvds and such to the polymer clay community.  It was working just fine the way it was, doing it’s job for about 800 subscribers, but somehow yesterday I found myself registering a domain name and giving it a website.

I blame the rain.

Still, it is pretty cool, if I do say so myself, and I’d love for you to drop by and have a look.

There have always been unobtrusive links to my shop, so that you could buy the items on the list, if you like, but the main goal was to provide readers with enough information about a new title, that they could easily find it at their favorite bookshop.  That goal is still alive and kicking, but I’ve added to the online shopping options. Now in addition to my own Polka Dot Creations shop, PolyPubs has partnered with amazon.com and Powell’s Books (and hopefully soon a fourth choice, once I get it set up).  There ought now to be enough buying options to suit most people, and the formatting is much improved for those who still like the idea of printing out the list and shopping locally.

I have further ideas for evolving PolyPubs, but they’ll have to wait for another rainy day in the somewhat distant future, I think.

Two

Have I introduced Flufy to you yet?  Flufy is the moniker of my six-year-old, which he adopted sometime this year. When we started up his blog last month, we knew it would be the perfect title.  Flufy doesn’t do a whole lot of blogging just yet, but he has posted a few entries, and this weekend we began a project together that he’d love your help with.  If you have a camera and a car, drop by Flufy’s blog and see if you might like to help out with the License Plate Game!

Three

I procured for myself this weekend, a pair of highly unnecessary, but totally fun reading glasses.  It’s too bad I don’t wear glasses when I read…

Four

We have a winner in the Deliciously Dated Giveaway, chosen randomly by BOG and Flufy!  Congratulations to bzzzzgrrrl for her HOT STUFF memory.  I’ll have your goodies on their way to you shortly after I photocopy that one outfit I like. Heh.

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