Yay, Glasgow. Considering I did not grow up here, nor do I have any family here, you know I really love Glasgow. Seriously, I would not really be interested in living anywhere else (well, I would but not for too long). I came here in 2000 so it has been a while and I’ve lived in 5 different areas so I know most of the good places. I would like to apologise to the Southside though – I know there are tons of awesome places there but I just never go.

Anyway, Ann-Marie (hi!) asked for some tips of places to go so I promised a blog post and here it is! It encompasses all my favourite places in Glasgow so that’s parks, shops, restaurants, hangouts and crafty haunts. Obviously, this is not all the best places in Glasgow, but my favourites. I’ve split them into areas as that seemed to work best, and how I do my own trip planning. Everything here is on a special Google Map I made so I haven’t included addresses or websites, and there are a few extra places on the map I haven’t written about because they’re really obvious or not my style, but still worth a visit. And let me know if you are visiting – maybe I can show you around (if you buy me cake).

These areas all overlap a little so you can easily do 2 or 3 in a day. Good ones would be City Centre (South) and East End, both West Ends, both City Centres or use the bus, trains or subway to skip around. I’ve put some travel tips at the end.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t plug 5pm here (I work for them but they are ace anyway) – they have great restaurant deals for Glasgow/Edinburgh and also The Big Deal, a Groupon style sub-site where you can get massive discounts on hotels and attractions.

Anyway, onwards!

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I’ve decided to make it official (or at least public) and commit to having a regular Admin Day. That sounds really dull but it’s going to totally improve my business. Here’s what I’ll be doing on my Admin Days (and you should too!).

1. Re-check my prices

Supplies costing more, or less? Postage gone up? Currency conversion changed dramatically? Run out of those free envelopes? All these things affect my costs, and thus my profits. And also potentially my sales, if someone decides against a purchase because my €/$ prices or postage costs are now completely inaccurate. I’m going to do this at least every quarter, and/or after I make a large restock of a product.

Bonus tip! Use it as a sales opportunity. Work out your new prices and then use your blog, Twitter, newsletter etc. to tell your best customers which products will be going up in price so they get a few days to pick up something cheap!

2. Sort all those receipts

I am awesome at doing my online accounts every month but somehow I always seem to forget about that pile of paper receipts stacking up by my bed. Considering that’s mainly bus tickets, pound shop envelope purchases and special Post Office trips (Recorded Delivery etc.), it can make quite a difference to my monthly figures. Plus it’s a right mess. And without accurate accounts, how can I do point 1?

3. Do the online housework

If I don’t update things regularly, it’s easy to forget and then I discover they’ve been stagnating for 6 months. A regular day to do all those boring tasks will be a big help. This includes adding new products to my Gallery, sending stuff to my newsletter signups, updating my wholesale product list, adding new work to my portfolio site, changing the featured products on my homepage, Etsy, DaWanda etc. Regular updates are sure to keep people more interested than big dumps of stuff every few months.

4. Do regular stock takes

I’ve tried many many ways of keeping track of what I sell/use against what I have in stock and none of them work because they require me to do something every time I make a sale and I am easily distracted. If I try and do a batch at once, then I forget which orders I already marked, or run dangerously low before I get there. I’m going to make a list of the things I run out of regularly and just check those weekly. The rest can fare for themselves (it’ll be a while before I sell all 250 Jammie Dodger cards). I’m also going to be packaging more stuff up in advance – it takes up more room but it’s a better early warning system for low stock and saves time on shipping days too.

5. Check in with my stockists

I have awesome stockists but we’re all busy people and sometimes we fall out of touch. I’m going to make more of an effort to check in with them personally (and definitely not in a mass email way!) to see how things are going and let them know about any new products I have available. I should also take the time to get back in touch with potential stockists who never made an order and look for new shops to approach.

Then make something fun, for free!

Okay, so this isn’t boring admin, but once I’ve done my boring admin I’m going to treat myself to some no pressure fun designing time! Especially the sort of designing that isn’t for products or clients but just for the heck of it. So expect more freebie wallpapers and downloads and things. Yay!

What do you reckon? Want to join me? I’m going to do this on Sundays as a start because I hardly ever leave the house on a Sunday and I may as well have something to show for myself at the end of the day.

A few people asked about how I made my book so here are some details.

UPDATE: I’ve just added a link to my InDesign template at the bottom, which might save you some time.

Choosing a publisher

I did a bit of research last year for another publishing project I would still like to do sometime and decided I preferred Lulu. I can’t even remember exactly why now but the marketplace is promoted more on Lulu and the community forums are pretty good. I tested the system by putting a couple of my PDF zines up for sale – I haven’t sold any yet but the process was fine. I hear good things about Blurb too though.

Once that was decided, I did some experimentation with the Project Options to decide on a size etc. I really wanted to do a square book and in colour, and the rest is really decided by how many pages you have. So I got all the dimensions and got ready to make my book!

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PhotoPaperDirect.com specialise in inkjet printer papers and were kind enough to send me and the Glasgow Craft Mafia some samples to test. Although I own a pretty great Epson printer/scanner/copier I don’t really print many products on it. It prints my badges and coasters, a lot of my packaging and of course lots and lots of postage labels. So I was keen to see what it could do. I chose A4 Light Inkjet T Shirt Transfer Paper and A4 Matt Vinyl Self Adhesive Sticker Paper to test and here are my honest opinions.

For the sticker paper, I tried two things. First up, something I’ve been needing for ages – ‘Look inside’ stickers. At craft fairs I have a sample of each card on display and you can pretty much guarantee that no-one looks inside the ones that have a design inside. Sometimes they look inside a blank one and then decide they must all be blank. So I designed a little round sticker in Illustrator and printed them off. The paper came with full instructions on dpi, printer settings and most importantly, which side to print on. They came out beautifully and look awesome on my cards. Yay!

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This post is probably very dull if you’re not interested in fabric design, sorry!

If you remember back to this post, I created a pattern using safe colours for Spoonflower fabric. Spoonflower uses LAB colours, which can be a bit of a hassle. Basically, it’s the same as how CMYK can’t accurately display all RGB colours.

Here’s an example of out of gamut colours. In the left, my yellow was not a LAB yellow so it marks the area in grey. If I go ahead and send this to Spoonflower, it won’t print grey but it will shift the colour to the nearest match, which may or may not be what you expect. I left some out of gamut colours in my Vintage Flowers print because they were so small and I didn’t have this palette – the yellows came out almost fluorescent. That’s not a big issue for a few tiny lines but if my whole fabric background was suddenly fluorescent yellow, that’s a problem.

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I felt slightly guilty after giving in and purchasing an iPhone late last year but that was soon forgotten when I realised I had bought something pretty much indispensable. No jokes, this has totally changed my life.

I think my favourite thing about the iPhone is how light I can travel. If I’m only going across town, I don’t need my iPod and if I’m away somewhere for a couple of days then I don’t need my laptop. Or maybe my favourite thing is how I can keep up to date with my shop/s wherever I am so I know about new orders and can delete sold things at craft markets. But no, actually, my favourite thing is how I can check my email, Twitter, weather and news headlines without having to get out of bed. Double bonus if you’re sick. Hurrah for Apple.

Anyway, I have immediately become hooked on installing apps to do whatever random thing I just thought of. Not that you can’t have hours of fun looking up the weather in Tokyo, or typing PIE LONDON into the maps thing to find the nearest pie seller, but these apps make my life even more fun.

Hello Kitty Camera (£1.79)
I read about this aaages ago and had to get it myself as soon as I had an iPhone. Basically, you take a photo of your friend/s and pass it to Hello Kitty who will place fruit on their heads and otherwise decorate the screen like a 3 year old. To hilarious effect, of course. It’s always been a dream of mine to wear a pineapple on my head and Hello Kitty can make that come true. Although, having posted about it here, I’ve lost the element of surprise and won’t be able to collect so many idiotic photos of my friends in future. Disaster! At least Angel Bunny is a willing subject.

WordPress (free!)
The first app to truly blow my socks off, as it lets me do almost everything I can do on my computer – write and edit posts, approve comments and do that on all 5billion of my blogs. Which doesn’t explain why I never blogged once from my sickbed, hmm. It does mean, I will quite likely BLOG FROM JAPAN later this year. Amazing. See also the Flickr app, though it’s a bit less amazing.

Brushes (£2.99)
Since the iPhone has a touchscreen, clearly people like me want to use it for drawing. Brushes has a great interface with colours, brush sizes, zooming and everything, plus layers so you can draw on one and add colour on another. Now if only I could control my fat fingers better. Might be investing in a stylus soon for this.

Facebook (free)
Notable for being an app that is infinitely better than the website. At least I now check in with my FB friends on a dailyish basis. Might even start posting things again soon.

The Guardian (£2.39)
I like The Guardian best for news because it doesn’t update too often – when I had BBC news on my RSS, it used to update with about 700 stories every minute.  It also has lots of writers I like. This app is a bargain, as you can choose which sections to get updates on and even download a bunch of articles to read on the train. Other newspapers/magazines take note.

Solitaire City (free / £3.49)
This pretty much saved me from stabbing my eyes out on a number of occasions including extremely delayed train and illness-induced insomnia. The controls are really nice and the design isn’t too hideous. The free version did me fine for ages but I just upgraded to the full version and it has so many more games and variations. Farewell, boredom!

PicGrid (free / £1.79)
Picross on the DS is literally my favourite game in the entire history of the Universe. It’s tricky enough to make me forget about work stuff but enormously fun and satisfying too. I’ve played through the whole game twice and am missing it so much since my sister borrowed it a few months ago. So, the first app I searched for was picross. PicGrid is the best of a bad bunch – sadly the small screen means the puzzles never get bigger than 10×10 but it’s still fun, even if some of the pictures are ludicrous.

Amazon UK (free)
Like I need an easier way to buy stuff off Amazon. This is a truly dangerous app, which not only lets me search Amazon’s inventory but gives me access to my wish list, and allows me to pay for stuff with 1-Click. Argh! It is actually very useful for wishlisting things I read about in magazines etc. but I fear for my bank account. I also note it has a new feature where you can photograph covers and it will look ‘em up for you.  Wait, WHAT? When did we arrive in the future?

iBattery (free)
One of my “I wonder if..” app searches. It just tells me how much battery power is left and what that actually means. You get a breakdown of time left in various uses – internet, 3G, phone calls, standby etc. As the owner of a camera that can work on a third battery power for about a week, this is hella useful.

National Rail Enquiries (£4.99)
£4.99?! Are you insane?!, you’re thinking. Best £4.99 I ever spent. It would be almost worth £4.99 just for being able to see when the next trains are leaving Bridgeton station (in real time!) so I don’t have to type all the info into the website every time I want to go across town. Even better though, if you’re taking a train, say, to Inverness on Christmas Eve during some unexpectedly heavy snowfalls, you can look up your train and see if there are any delays or problems along the line and get real time updates along the way that your train is currently running 40 minutes late. That way you can text your dad and tell him to carry on shopping and not stand around in the train station waiting for you. Mind you, if the train staff actually ever told you when you might arrive at your destination we wouldn’t need iPhone apps for it, but you know, best £4.99 I ever spent.

If I’d had 11, I would have added Tweetdeck, but really all Twitter apps are great as Twitter is pretty much custom built for phones.

If you fancy any of these apps, do buy them – just search for the app name in the App store. Most of them should work on iPod Touches too, though in a less useful way once you’re out of wifi range.

What have I missed? Tell me about your favourites so I can install them too.