Five more days until the show!

This time change is really throwing me — I can’t believe it’s already dinnertime!

I’m feeling buoyant and cheery today, partly because the weather is just beautiful, and partly because I went to a new yoga class at our climbing gym and it was amazing. During all my recent show prep, exercise has very much fallen by the wayside, and with it any kind of physical self-care. As I say constantly, crafting takes a terrible toll on the body, so when I’m doing intensive sewing and paper crafting without accompanying exercise and stretching, things go downhill rapidly. Today’s class was called Yoga Tune-Up, and it turned out that this meant only a couple of yoga poses (halasana and shoulder stand), but a lot of really, really intense massage and physical therapy-type exercises, with the aid of props. I cannot believe how phenomenal my shoulders and neck feel right now — though tomorrow I’ll probably be very sore! These are areas of the body that hold a lot of tension, and we rarely do anything with them to ease that strain; moreover, since everything in the body is so interconnected, when I hurt my hands and wrists doing hand sewing, that translates into more neck stress, and so on. I’ve definitely noticed myself tending more toward restorative and therapeutic yoga these days, rather than the vigorous Anusara practice of my LA days. I think this is a good thing, but I really need to be keeping my strength and endurance up regularly rather than pushing myself hard with crafting every day, and only dragging myself into the studio a couple of times a week just for basic maintenance!

I made one more zip pouch today, after discovering a 7″ zipper I’d forgotten about (whee!). It’s a funny little critter, almost square-shaped. I like it. 🙂 Now my inventory is up to 50 items, which, for me, is tremendous. I think at its biggest my Etsy shop only had about 36 items in it, and it hasn’t been at that level for some time now. It still takes me lots of time to make anything, but I’m definitely getting faster and neater, which is great because it means I can proceed on to more complicated projects without having to devote a week to each one! And zippers are becoming my friends… thank goodness. 🙂

When I spend so much time holed up at home making stuff, I get very antsy for contact with the outside world, so I tend to be on email, blogs, and social-networking sites way more than I always say I will. (Hello, resolution to only check email three times a day? What happened to you?) But sometimes this has its benefits! A mini-swarm of Buzzing this morning brought me a lovely tip from Eurie, and now I can cross “buy floral foam” off my action list: I’m using beans to prop up my brooch/hair clip blooms instead! They look so much more charming than floral foam would have, and they give new purpose to those black-eyed peas and mung beans languishing in my pantry… beans are a win all around! (As they were in medieval Europe, the historian/vegetarian in me feels compelled to add. Historivegetarian? Surely there’s an audience for that scholarship…)

I’ve been working on some smaller decoupaged items, since I realize my bigger boxes are going to have to be well out of most people’s price range (including my own, were I not the artist!). Those boxes may be absurdly expensive (but not so absurdly expensive as these), but I can price the smaller pieces at much, much lower points, since I’m only doing one surface on each one and it’s a little one. What makes the bigger boxes more expensive: sheer surface area, doing the exterior and the interior, dealing with corners and edges. I haven’t yet fixed on the actual price. When I started doing these boxes, last summer, I was thinking in the $200 range, but I’ve gotten a bit faster since then so I’m not sure I’ll keep them that high. On the other hand, as I do more of this work, I’m less and less able to use scissors for long periods of time (meaning more than half an hour at a go), so I feel I ought to take that into account.

But these little guys pictured above will absolutely be less than $20 and may even be less than $10. I know the picture is horrible, but I just put sealer on them and so they’re on colorful newspaper fliers. If you zoom in you’ll see them better. The four bigger ones are magnets, and the smallest is a box lid. With the cigar boxes I try to go for a more sophisticated look, since I figure decoupage already has kind of a tacky connotation that I want to avoid as much possible. But fridge magnets are a little tacky already, don’t you think? I mean they’re not haute décor by any means. 🙂 So I just went with fun themes: butterflies, vegetables, fruit, and bling. And I quite enjoyed it. 🙂