Weiswomen Creations

I teased you all recently with a photo of our dog in a handmade Snuggie. Here's another shot of the handsome devil in his lovely handcrafted garment:



Now, a rational person might wonder why I decided to sew my dog a fleece snuggie in the middle of the summer (and before you say I was cruel to the dog, he only had it on for a few minutes and we were in an air conditioned room). The story starts last October with a pumpkin decorating contest at my husband's company. A several day process of brainstorming, craft supply shopping, painting, and bedazzling led to this beauty:
It was shiny and pretty and sparkly and had geeky, pumpkin-related humor. It didn't win. I vowed never to enter the contest again. Then they announced a new contest - a photo contest featuring employees and their family members wearing company swag. My super-competitive nature started kicking in. I had taking sewing classes this year. McCall's had just released a new pattern for snuggie-like blankets. Joann Fabrics was having a sale on McCall's patterns that weekend. It was like the perfect storm. So I got the pattern and some test fabric and in a few hours Bunk had a snazzy new garment. My husband helpfully provided me with a company-themed fleece blanket and now a photo of Bunk in his logo-adorned snuggie has been entered in the contest. If we don't win for that I swear I'm not entering more company contests. Until the next time of course.

You know what else I've been doing on my blogging vacation? Sweating. I know, oversharing. But this summer has felt particularly brutal. I read today that it was New York's hottest summer and while I don't know the stats for the Boston area we may be in the running for that title as well. Take a gander at the thermostat on our third floor taken today:

As I explained/complained last summer, we live in a very old two family house which means a couple of things: our bedroom and my home office are on the third floor and central AC isn't a viable option. Thankfully we have two window units but on days like today I basically go back and forth between my home office and the bedroom. With so many days like today I've been feeling a little stir crazy. Current forecast is for one more day like today and then a break in the heat. Feel free to remind me about this post when I start complaining about how cold it is...

So, um, yeah...I know how bad this looks. It was over a year ago that I returned from a blogging hiatus and now I'm back in the same boat. I have no real excuses...lots of stories and pretty pictures and shiny objects but no real excuses. In a fit of productivity this weekend I resumed tweeting and decided to focus primarily on our Weiswomen Creations shop on Artfire. I also did some major stash-busting in the bead collection and have lots of new earrings (and a few bracelets) to be posted in the coming weeks. In between showing off the new shiny objects I'll attempt to entertain you with some of the highlights of the past year. A few photos to hopefully pique your interest:

That's right, I said sale. Thanks to a cool new feature at ArtFire, we're have a 20% off sale on all of the jewelry in our shop there. Lots of earrings from our Etsy shop have even been temporarily moved there so you can have a wider selection to choose from. The sale ends this Saturday, October 10th and use the code OCTOBER at check-out.

More frequent entries coming soon about my new precious (i.e. MacBook), why weekend with your girlfriends rock, and the dates for this year's holiday shopping open houses.

Well, maybe not famous. But one of Judy's fabulous fall photo cards was featured in the Find of the Day on FoundHandmade! They did a wonderful collection of scarecrows and we're very proud that the photo in this post was included. FoundHandmade looks like a pretty cool site and I'm planning on checking out more of what they have to offer.

It's been busy here at Weiswomen HQ. The other half of Weiswomen Creations (aka, my mom) is headed to Boston as we speak, along with another Weiswoman (aka, my sister). We have a fun-filled weekend planned, including a Duck Tour. In addition to getting ready for their visit (oh, and working at my day job) I've been ramping up different aspects of our business. I already posted about rearranging our Etsy shop but there has been lots more going on:

*Making more jewelry (like the lovely starburst earrings pictured in this post).

*Adding all the new jewelry to our inventory program, photographing it, and listing it.

*Listing our fabulous Fall themed photo cards in all three shops.

*Setting up an ArtFire kiosk on our brand new Facebook Fan Page.

*Ordering a new design for our business cards and labels, by the wonderful Thompson Designs. They are going to have the same awesome design as all of our shop banners.

*Ordering mailing envelopes, jewelry boxes, earrings displays, and gift bags.

There are still lots more new products to come, including our Halloween photo cards. Plus, be on the lookout for the announcement of our first ever sale!

I'm so excited. After a long (reaaaaalllllyyy long) wait, we can finally rearrange our Weiswomen Etsy shop. Every who knows me can attest to the fact that I'm a little (well, a lot) anal retentive. It has always bothered me that our shop looked disorganized - the items are featured in the order they were posted, so items of different colors and types were all mixed in together. Well, today was my lucky day. The new "rearrange your shop" feature went live and I could take action. There are so many possibilities! Do I put all the channel set Swarovski earrings together? Or all the photo cards? Or all the cloisonne?

I decided to start with organizing by color, a preference I've mentioned before. Of course there are dilemmas - like the pretty mixed stone memory wire bracelet in the photo, where does that go? What did I decide? You'll have to visit our shop to find out.