Well, I have been busy. Actually, I really haven’t, and if things don’t improve, you’ll be seeing a drawing of me in my pyjamas at the end of the month. However, I have managed to stay awake long enough to design a few new products which are making their way into the shop.

First up are these I Love Buttons notecard sets featuring three of my favourite vintage button designs. They’re the sort of things handy to keep in a drawer for a quick thank you, congratulations or happy birthday.

They were my favourite new product for all of 24 hours until these arrived:

Sun and Rain writing pads! I have always wanted to design my own letter sets and it took me a long time to realise I could do notepads instead (much less complicated). I’m really pleased at how bright the colours are, and have already snaffled one for my own use.

Also in that parcel were a couple of test prints – here’s a sneak peek at one of them…

I should have them in stock in a week or so.

In other news, my button shoes are on their way!

So I finally got some sunlight to take pictures of my recent gocco printing. I wasn’t actually printing anything entirely new but printing my buttons on to GREEN kraft paper. I’m ashamed to admit I have owned this roll of green kraft paper for at least two years, with this intention, but never actually printed it up. In my defence, I printed so many copies on brown paper that there was never a need to do reprints. I did finally run out though so I took the opportunity to print buttons on as many sheets of green and brown paper as I could manage.

Most of them will end up as vintage button badge sets but some will be cut up and made into gocco book hearts. It still always amazes me how different inks look on different papers.

Anyway, they’re all listed in my shops now. If you mention Valentine’s Day in the comments/notes to seller etc. before the 14th, I’ll include a free Cakeify gift tag. Yay!

I’m currently waiting for SIX new products to arrive. Hopefully, they’ll turn out good.

Ooh, it’s a whole new year. I’m going to continue doing these monthly updates but I have made lots of changes! First up, I am doing a drawing of either my most usual outfit of the month, or something awesome I wore. That was generally my problem doing What I Wore Today, that I pretty much wear the same things every week until the weather changes, unless I have something out of the ordinary to attend. Also, because I have barely bought any new clothes in the last 3 years.

I’ll also be updating on what I’m reading, watching, playing, faffing with and working on, how I’m getting on with my resolutions and what’s coming up next month. Plus a DIAGRAM of some sort. At worst, I will improve my Illustrator/Photoshop skills in creating stupid stuff, which is always useful when working with Monsieur Le Bun. Let’s go!

(BTW, I would love for other people to start doing this too, using whatever categories you like. Go on!)

Reading, Watching, Playing

A TV Guide to Life by Jeff Alexander
AKA M.Giant who writes the 24 recaps for Television Without Pity. Recaps which are often so funny I sometimes think I only watch 24 so I can read the recaps after. If 24 makes you snort with laughter far more often than an action/drama show with large helpings of torture and explosions is intended to then you should give them a read. Anyway, this book is a lighthearted look at what we can learn from TV shows, which is to say basically taking the piss out of all TV writers ever for their cliched plots, lame sets and enormous institutions run by 5 speaking parts. All good fun and worth your cash.

The Roads To Sata by Alan Booth
You may remember I read his other book a while back and Claire bought me this one for Christmas. Hurray! Thanks Claire! This was the earlier book where he walked the entire length of Japan. Of course, that makes it extremely interesting as you get to see the differences between the 3 main islands. On the downside, I now pretty much want to visit everywhere in Japan. As with the other book, it’s full of hilarious anecdotes of his adventures and the people he meets in the inns and bars and restaurants. Totally recommended.

Alias
I enjoyed S1 of Alias so much I decided to buy S2 since it’s all so cheap these days. And then I saw I could buy S3-5 in some crazy cheap Amazon deal so I did that too. Excellent choice me, as they all arrived just in time for my weeks of illness so at least I was entertained. I have to say, in retrospect, that S3-5 were a bit ropey for the most part, but that was less obvious when ill. It’s a timely reminder how terrible LOST could have been without the end date, and what might happen to Fringe if they aren’t careful. But still, Alias is definitely in my top ten TV shows ever.

24
Most of my LoveFilm DVDs this month have been 24 S7 which was remarkably less ridiculous than previous seasons, though clearly still hilarious. Actually it was totally ridiculous. I will never forget the scene where the head of FBI reasons it’s not possible Jack Bauer would have managed to get hold of a gun in the last 15 minutes which is correct, though Jack Bauer has actually now acquired a knife, a car, a laptop and a fancy phone and killed a man using a front-end loader and a portakabin. S8 here I come.

Cooking Mama 3
I need to write a big old review about this for diskant but suffice to say, it’s just like the first 2 games only better, mostly. A lot of tedious tasks are now easier, and a lot of the more boring ones are now insanely complicated. Um, thanks. As well as the normal cooking with Mama games, there’s now a bizarre minigame where you have to go fetch ingredients from the supermarket. I need to play it some more before I can adequately describe the madness. Most worrying though, is how many recipes involve catching food falling from the sky (and not BONES), and also making sure you choose the correct food stuff and not a BONE. Why Mama has such a large collection of bones in her kitchen is probably something we’re best not knowing.

iPhone app of the month

Bookworm
As in the Flash game where you have to finds words in a wordsearch stylee before the library burns down while a creepy worm watches your every move. I used to play this a fair bit back in ye olde times so it was fun to play it again and realise quite how many brain cells I have lost since then.  It’s much better as an app though as you can save your game and stuff. I could have had a more interesting choice if I hadn’t written that Top 10 iPhone apps post the other day. Duh.

Resolution update

I could be forgiven for doing terribly at my resolutions so far but actually I am doing awesome. My only failure was booking to visit to the trade show at the SECC and then not being well enough to attend. Booo.

- I started a thread on Tripadvisor for ideas for Japan
- I have just about finished one of my zines I started months ago
- I’ve been working on pattern ideas (including the button print for shoes)
- My Folksy, Etsy and DaWanda shops are now almost exactly similar in product range
- I posted a guide to iPhone apps
- I did some gocco printing, even if it wasn’t entirely new. A start at least!
- As you will see below, I have been thinking A LOT about project #1 in my Big 5 projects. After many false starts, I think I have figured out the production so now I just need to decide exactly what I’m doing and do the design. It is going to take months though so don’t expect to hear anything soon.

Websites I’ve been enjoying

- Ruby Star Rising (awesome illustrations by Melody Miller)
- Mori Girl and Lessons in Cute (pretty pretty Japanese fashion blogs)
- It Will Stop Raining (lovely daily food photos)

Things to look forward to in February

- LOST S6 (Far. Too. Excited)
- My SHOES arriving
- Ponyo, the new Ghibli film, finally gets a UK release (I hate you Disney)
- New Errors album (already pre-ordered)
- Glasgow Film Festival (where I am booked to see the Mogwai live film and 1234 which features a cameo by my mates Sunnyvale!)
- my sister coming to visit
- getting JAPAN TRIP booked

Online sales

Items sold on Shopify: 36
Items sold on Etsy: 14
Items sold on Folksy: 27
Items sold on Dawanda: 8

Busier than December! Madness! But Awesome!

Diagram of the month

This is a cross section of MY BRAIN during the nights of the last few weeks where I have been unable to sleep until 3am. One day, I hope to feel sleepy again instead of just tired.

Yay! The Glasgow Craft Mafia’s relaxed Sunday afternoon markets return for 2010. We won’t be there every month like last year so get along if you can. I will be there this Sunday with a selection of my wares including perfect Valentine’s Day gifts and cards, and a bargain box! I’m not bringing all my stuff so if you’re coming along and want something in particular let me know so I can make sure to bring it!

I did the flyer too, using Chloe from Kuro-e’s lovely illustration. There’s some more of my recent design work on my portfolio site.

So, I ordered my shoes! Exciting times. However, they take a week to make, another week or two to ship (from the USA) and then they’ll almost certainly get held up at customs before Royal Mail extort some more “admin fees” to hand them over. But still, exciting! I’ll be sure to let you know as soon as they arrive.

In the meantime, you can see some pictures of actual Zazzle mousepads I designed. My mum was needing some so I got them sent to my house so I could assess the quality. I’m glad to say they are excellent – much thicker and shinier than I would have thought. If you’ve been considering one then I say GO FOR IT. Only took a week altogether as well. My shop is here.

Winter! You’re annoying! I’ve been doing a whole lot of gocco printing lately but even at 2pm there’s not enough light to take any photos of the process. Boooo. The results of my printing will have to wait but I can’t believe I have never shown you my Cakeify paper bags! Unless you bought something off me in the last few months, in which case you probably got one. If not, here is a rubbish photo. I made a batch of these last year and have been using them to wrap up orders and delight my craft fair customers. I printed another 200 at the weekend and it was very tedious but it’s all worth it in the end.

While I was ill I did a bunch of supplies shopping (most eBay, fact fans) and was amused to discover I had accidentally ordered tiny paper bags instead of the big ones. These are a mere 5″ square but perfect for badge sets and sticky note pads. Obviously I had to stamp these too, because I am insane. They’re done with a rubber stamp I had made ages ago.

And if I can’t show you anything new I have printed, at least I can tell you that Cakeify gocco notebooks, vintage button badge sets and gocco book hearts are now all fully stocked again – yay!

Ever since I opened shop on Zazzle and got to design shoes, I’ve been desperate to own a pair myself. They are a bit pricey though, which is probably why I haven’t sold any yet though they get a lot of nice comments. Anyway, my aim with my Zazzle shop then became to make enough money from sales and referrals to pay for my own shoes. I finally reached that in December and since then, I have been trying to figure out what the heck to order. It’s one thing to be able to design your dream shoes, but quite another to actually know what that is.

I think I finally have a design I’m going to buy so I thought you might like to see the process.

Firstly, I didn’t go for one of my current designs (above) as Glasgow is a bit grimy and white shoes would be a bad idea. I also wanted them to go with most of my outfits and be suitable for most occasions, which kind of rules out bunny shoes. I already have at least 3 pairs of ridiculous shoes.

So I turned to my button design. This was the first try:

The grey background is a must, as grey is my absolute favourite colour, despite not even being a colour, and the majority of my staple clothes are grey. I love the colours in this but it looked way too garish on shoes. I think it will be nice for stationery and maybe also as fabric.

For version 2, I removed and swapped some of the colours but when I put it on the shoes I immediately thought a) I don’t actually like the pink and b) what on earth was I thinking with the red/grey button. Back to Photoshop…

Much simpler. By this point, I’d also learned where the buttons ended up best placed on the shoes, so the colours are positioned best for that.

And here are the shoes! Getting the trims and sole and insole to match all nice was probably the hardest bit but I think I’m happy. These are probably not my dream shoes but they definitely fit my brief so I think I’m going to order them. They take 4 weeks though – how can I possibly wait that long?

Depending on how the actual shoes turn out, I may make a habit of this, if my Zazzle store stays successful. Bunny shoes next time for sure!

What do you think? Would you wear them?

You might have noticed the shop is looking all lovey dovey now that Valentine’s Day is on the horizon.Whether you’re after a cute card or a sweet gift, there’s lots to choose from. Check out the Valentine’s Day collection for ideas.

I’ve also added another new product which is ideal for Valentine’s Day – custom book heart cards. I made a few of these for weddings last year and thought I’d make them available in the shop too. You get to customise it to match the couple so the font style and book heart designs match their tastes.

These Little Button Bags have been sitting somewhere in the back of my head for a long time. It took the arrival of a huge parcel of mini bags at the same time I was stamping buttons on thank you cards for it finally to come to realisation.

So, if you only have a little button stash, these will suit you perfectly. They’re also great for little gifts and for transporting and storing jewellery and other favourite things. Buy them singly or in packs of 3 from my shop right now!

You’ll also note the shop is gearing up for Valentine’s Day – more on that soon. In the meantime, don’t forget the SALE as a lot of the items will be removed in the next week. It’s also your last chance for FREE UK SHIPPING on orders over £10. That’ll be going back up very soon too. Hurry hurry!

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.