Tag Archives: Etsy

Fun Fabrics

I was asked recently by My Girl Thursday to share my sources for the fun fabrics I have. She says she has the bug now, if you kind of sort of like fabric I’d leave now because you’ll be totally addicted to hoarding it after this post. Almost all of mine comes from Etsy shops so I’ll share some of my favs with you. Sometimes I just do a search for scraps, but my brain gets confused with number crunching the prices and shipping combos and I usually head back to the stores I know.

I’m addicted to cutesy Japanese prints. Boqinana has great stuff. It’s so hard not to fill my cart with ribbon after ribbon after ribbon. This store is also full of some great fabrics.

This and That from Japan . . . well the store name says it all. Sadly on vacation at the time of posting this but check back, it’s totally worth it. They carry great fabrics, supplies and craft books. Pages and pages of awesome I tell you!

The Hey Day Shop has fun fabrics and usually has a selection of scrap packs to choose from.

I’ve ordered from The Dainty Squid’s destash store before, not sure if it’s still up and running.

The only place I’ve been able to find fun Japanese fabrics in person is at Quilt A Bag in Markham, which is only good to know if you live nearish to there. The ladies are lovely and they carry a lot of Japanese craft books and supplies for projects, coin purse frames, handles, cute ribbons, Japanese craft books. They attend the Creativ Festival in October and carry a lot of great kits with everything you need to finish the project.

I’ve ordered vintage fabrics from Pink Fawn Designs before. While it’s pretty easy to find vintage linens if you go thrifting you can expand your collection, handy if you have a certain project in mind, and not have to use the entire sheet you bought on the one project.

Starlit Nest has packs sorted by designers, themes and even offers a big ole flat rate box deal. Shop 4 Craft has some great wooden buttons, if I’m just in the mood for buttons I go there if I have a hankering for fabric I’ll hit one of the shops that carries fabric AND buttons and get all splurgey.

For snaps I go to Cowgirl Snaps. When I found this shop I thoguht that the pictures must be tweaked adn there’s not way the colours could be that vibrant but when they arrived they were amazing. The colours are great and there are options for mixing and matching.


On my wish list are these great fun scraps. Sometimes, being in Canada, it’s hard to find scraps worth purchasing because shipping can get ridiculous. Someday I’ll splurge on these teeny bits of loveliness.

Noella Beauty Works

I’m in love with this shop. I think being a little more daring with eyeshadow is part of my ‘accesorize’ mission I’ve been on this year. Earlier this year I bough about 6 colours and then a few weeks ago I got a little crazy and ordered some more.

They’re great colours and go on so well. If you like the Facebook page she hosts giveaways often and has a weekly deal. There’s also bundles in the shop and buy X get 1 free things too.

I must have been in a cool colour mood though since they’re all bluey and greeny.

Small business reading.

Ok so as I’m writing this post about all the craft business books I have piled up to read, physical and eformat, what do I do? Wander off to read an Etsy article and end up buying this! I’m insane. I’m like a craft book hoarder. Someone else please tell me you have this problem too.

Ok so here are some of what’s in my stash and hopefully I can get through them this summer and start implementing all my great learnings in the fall.

I have read Creative Inc, however I read it in my KOBO app and made notes there and since my app died on me a few times I’ve lost those notes. So a re-read is in order.

I’ve also read Handmade Marketplace, but I forget all the wisdom. Sheesh, for a teacher I’m apparently a terrible reader and retainer . . .

Mom Inc is a great read, I’m about half way through when a shiny object distracted me. What I like about this book is that it’s written by 2 Canadian ladies and since often it’s US authors writing small business books there’s entire parts that just don’t apply, mostly financial bits. It’s nice to read things from my own country since getting supplies and shipping costs and financials are so different from country to country.

Craft Business Handbook is yet another book I carry around in my bag and might maybe sort of look at from time to time . . . kinda. This book is written by a UK author but so far I haven’t found that too much info doesn’t apply.

Crafty Superstar is in progress . . . yeah I have a lot of those.

Mollie wrote about this book so of course it’s on my wish list now.

I know I’ve already got my work cut out for me here but if you know of a book I’ve missed, small business of creative type stuff, please leave a comment! Also, if you’ve actually finished any of these and have anything review-like to say you can do that too.

Brilliant packaging.

While I own a 1 inch button maker, my friend Joanna and I rented a slightly larger one for a weekend a while back and went crazy making larger magnets. I packaged mine into little zip locks, in sets of 2 or 4. Joanna had a great idea to create larger sets of her photography magnets and she packaged them in old CD cases.

They look great and it’s a great use of cases when you store your CDs in another way.

SewTara in Hamilton.

Well, it appears I’m a bit addicted to attending any Etsy event I can. Since I’ve hopped the borer twice it didn’t seem like such a big deal to head down to Hamilton for a meet up. This time it was a joint effort between Etsy and The Beehive Collective. I also sent a Tweet to Elycia since Hamilton is her town and asked what I should check out while I was puttering around downtown Hamilton in the scorching heat. I’m glad she had ideas because I found White Elephant and Needlework.

The lovely ladies behind the collective are gearing up for Supercrawl and a huge art instalation piece. Last year they covered a building in knitted ‘bricks’. This year they plan on covering buildings for a block or so with fabric hexies. We all met up and spent a night whipping up some hexies for the instalation.

If you’d like to help you can download templates here and here and drop them off at a list of places in Hamilton or Toronto or I’m sure you could contact The Beehive and find a way to send your contributions over.

See all the photos in the EtsyCA album.

Friday Create Along & a giveaway!

Well since I already unveiled my better late than never Create Along project earlier this week I don’t have one to share. But I do have an up next project as well as a giveaway!!

Shannon of BLISSFULpatterns has generously offered to give away a PDF copy of this fabric basket.

Giveaway will be open from Friday July 13th until Tuesday July 17th. I’ll announce the winner on Wednesday July 18th. That won’t leave you time to play along and reveal with me next Friday but please share in the future.

To enter just leave a comment below (make sure there’s a link/email/contact way for me) and tell me what you’d be using your basket for. I might just have to steal your idea, I don’t *neeeed* a fabric basket but it’s so stinking cute and I love to try and stitch up new things!

Normally I don’t make people jump through hoops and earn extra entries but if you do happen to share on Twitter, your blog, or the Facebook please do come back and leave an extra comment, you’re worth it.

Good luck!

More about the Etsy meet up in Toronto.

Well the pictures are up and now so is the video. Photo credit: Claire Louise Foster. Here’s an awkward shot of me, I really have to get used to this posing thing. Here’s the full article on the Etsy blog with links to the speakers and such.

You do have to watch the video all the way to the end to see me, but it’s totally worth the 3 minutes.
Also I was getting nervous in an empty room with about 5 people just looking at me waiting for what I had to say, so pardon my fidgetiness.

Toronto Meetup from Etsy Inc. on Vimeo.

New cozy design.

I had a custom order that involed this sort of idea a while back. Then I handstitched it for the order but since then I decided to make a screen print of it. But then it was the great ‘to cute face’ or ‘not to cute face’ debate.

I decided on the cute face. I blame this on knowing Mollie.

If anyone has this please find a way to share!

Well today my Martha appearance aired. My friend from all events Etsy, Amy of TinyGiraffe, says we were in the first 20 minutes quite a few times.

Here’s my professional shot from the end of the show. It’s posted on the Martha Stewart site. I’m hoping they get everyone’s picture up, I really wanted to check everyone out.

We watched a How To by this lovely lady and we were given her book along with some materials to give it a try.

Spot my cozies on the Martha Stewart Show!

Well thanks to some help from Outright.com to pay for my part of my Etsy Success Symposium trip, I was able to justify traveling back to NYC this past weekend to be part of The Etsy Show at the Martha Stewart Show. It was a special show with the audience made up of only Etsy sellers. We were invited to attend, many of the people had been at the symposium as well.

I know I still haven’t gotten to writing much about that day yet and here I am forging ahead but at the symposium I sort of stood out, being Canadian, having travelled so far, receiving the Outright scholarship thingie. I was known to Etsy admin and some of the people attending.

It was really neat to bump into many of them on Monday again. In fact, things ran a bit late and I realized it was after 4 and I had a 7:30 flight so I ran down to jump in line in front of Etsy admin Kimm so I could get out quick and run off to the subway. Luckily she remembered me, she had the job of telling all the people who were given corporate gifts at the symposium the good news so we spent some time talking.

The show is going to air tomorrow details here. I’m not even sure we get the channel up here in Canada so someone let me know if you get to see me waving my cup cozies around. I’m the one in the green shirt with a white cardigan. The girl behind me had a giant sparkly M so that might distract you but try to look out for me will ya!