I love mail day!

I knew I had good mail coming today! Check out what I got from Fat Quarter Shop today:

Most of it will become sandwich and snack bags, but it will become other stuff too. I had a great idea from a loyal customer when she asked me to make some water-proof water bottle holders for her Sigg bottle. The bottles are great, but I know condensation can make everything else get wet, and a waterproof holder would be ideal!

From the left: Bot Town (the first four pieces, I have more coordinates), and then a great new zoo print in two colorways.

From the left: A fun and funky print from Moda, some great dots, three colorways of a fantastic tree print, and my favorite - blueberries and strawberries, on light green and cream

A few cowboy prints, I can't wait to work with these!

Things Happen for a Reason...

PHEW! May was one of the busiest months of my whole life. Thanks to a completely unexpected shout-out in an "Etsy Finds" email/blog post on Earth Day, I was beyond swamped with orders. Earth Day was definitely a lot more like Christmas this year, and totally busy, but wonderful. Things are starting to get back to normal, and I have started to even take a night off every now and then (I generally sew in my studio from 8 pm - 2 am every night).

Funny thing...the DAY before Earth Day, I got this strange urge to move things around in my studio. I have this beautiful, and LARGE Sylvia cutting table, and I knew I could reconfigure it so that I could open out the table the whole way (It has two drop sides, and I only had one side up).

What I thought (ha!) would be a quick project, turned into 8 hours of complete reorganization and a fantastic and completely productive new set-up. Little did I know that 24 hours later, I would be on my way to making over 600 new sandwich bags, and finally have the perfect set up for such a mass-production? Kind of cool how things worked out that way.

Thought I'd post some before and after pics. The before pictures were taken in January 2009, so just less than 4 months before I decided to do a switch-a-roo. Oh yah, and I added new lighting - it's like a whole new world!

View from the entrance - BEFORE:

View from the Entrance - AFTER:

Fabric Storage/Cutting area: BEFORE

Fabric storage area/Ironing area: AFTER

View of Ironing Area: BEFORE

View of Cutting Area: AFTER

New shelving to hold the rapidly multiplying fabric stash:

View from the sewing machine: (My space is optimized, and there is a much better flow/path through the area)

And a few last photos...that moving around was good, because I need LOTS of floor space when I'm packing orders: