Just over 8 years ago I made my very first sale on Etsy.
That is a horrific photo, lol.
I’m always all about finding ways to spend the least possible amount of effort, so I came up with a semi-ingenious way to fold ribbon so that it looks like a cat ear.
It changed my life, yo.
Okay, no it didn’t.
But the headbands I made with the ears were pretty cute and I sold a fair few of them.
The End.
Back in 2007 I got a new toy: The Badge-A-Minit handpress!
Oh, it was glorious. I wracked the shit out of my hands with that thing. I’ve never in my life tried to scrapbook, but I love scrapbook paper and collect it like a weirdo. (If you look at all the photos of my kitty hats for the past few years, you’ll notice I have a lot of backgrounds. All scrapbook paper/cardstock.) Now I had some kind of use for that shit!
Pinback buttons/badges are friggin awesome. Custom ones are friggin-er awesome-er.
I bought some little alphabet stamps and started stamping random words that were small enough to fit on the 1.5″ buttons.
That wasn’t enough for me, though. No, I had to find a way to use more than one paper at a time!
I started using paper punches for cute shapes, but the leftover scraps had to be used, too. I loved using them as stripes or some sort of fake demented hatching.
I’m not much on collage (there are many art forms I am terrible at, so I say “that’s not my thing” or “I’m not really into that” to make it look like it’s disinterest instead of inability) but this was quick and dirty and didn’t really take much creativity.
These relied almost wholly on a rudimentary sense of color and composition, and I can fake those things!
I’m also really into instant gratification, so this was awesome for me.
While I hadn’t heard the term “upcycling” yet, I managed to do it. I can’t afford to do it anymore, but I used to bulk order decent tea from Stash. So I had catalogues. And these were born:
I still have #18.
I actually still have a stash of hats I haven’t decorated… perhaps if I ever do get enough together for an actual runway show I can force beautiful women to wear such ridiculous things.
They’re pretty fun, though. 😀
This is the first thing I ever sold from my first Etsy shop!
I made a lot of plastic headbands with ribbons folded and glued to make cat ears. I still think the idea is pretty clever, but the execution… not so much. Maybe I’ll have another go eventually.
Holy crap I did a lot of patchwork skirts… Be glad I couldn’t find pictures of most of them. I also did a few tops, but this is the only one I could find.
I made a lot of hemp jewelry while watching TV that year. Mostly because I’d moved to northern California and NorCal swings between hot as fuck and cold as shit. My studio was in the garage, so the weather kept me in the house quite a lot.
I love orange. And I love purple.
And I’m super tacky sometimes, so I love them together. Also, these glowed in blacklight.
I have a few young friends who say they were “ravers” as teenagers but I can’t think of them that way. They were born in the 90s. The majority grew up here in Phoenix, AZ. I was partying in the late 90s in San Francisco. Back in the days when getting dressed to go meant putting clothes on instead of taking them off. I sound like an old person.
“You whippersnappers don’t know what you’re talking about. In my day, the DJs had actual turntables and the drugs were a lot stronger. You youngsters got the girls out of most of their clothes, but it costs more to get them high enough to let you touch ’em!”
This is the last one from ’02, I promise. Next week we begins 2003!
I found this chick who did amazing hand dyed fabrics and who sold them not only by the yard but also in bundles of precut patchwork squares. I’m sad I can’t find her anymore. The work was seriously amazing.
I named this piece Sundae because of the cream colored super soft thin wale corduroy I found on sale. And, you know, sprinkles looking squares of cotton.
Too bad I can’t find a photo of the front, the top was really pretty.
Really, I should see if I can find anyone who makes these squares. They’re soooooo nice!
I remember putting this up on eBay and trying to figure out how to describe the colors. Different monitors in my house showed the photo in different shades. Just different browsers on the same computer. So I went with one of the constants of the universe: Crayola crayon colors. I think this one was Apricot and Burnt Sienna.
I still like the way it looked, with little stripes of the lighter fabric running up the sides of the skirt…
Too bad I don’t have better/more pix, but I had to retrieve these from The Wayback Machine.
This top and skirt were made waaaaaay back when I started making hippie wear. My son’s dad had used to wear this really terrible pair of patchwork corduroy pants that he paid something like $75 for (in 1999, for the sake of perspective here) and I’d always hated that kind of crap.
Which makes it kind of amusing that I started making it myself, but you can see here that I did it better.
I’m an intensely neurotic person and I love symmetry or, at the very least, balanced composition. The haphazard, thrown together look of most crap I’d seen at festivals and the like drove me nuts. I made these things largely in an effort to spread my aesthetic values a little further into the world, lol.
BethSophia 