Have you ever considered teaching sewing in your community? Teaching is a great way to add a new income stream to your handmade business and it’s fun and interesting, too. No matter where you live there are people who would like to learn to sew on a sewing machine. Because let’s face it, sewing machines…
Finding Your Right People: Indie Plush Makers at Comic Con
Comic Con New York Comic Con is an annual convention for fans of anime, comics, video games, and toys. It’s held at the Javits Center and sells out with over 75,000 people in attendance. There are other comic cons in the US, including a huge one in San Diego, but New York is a pretty…
Awesome Handmade Toys: Snuggly Ugly
This post is part of a new periodic series called "Awesome Handmade Toys." These posts will feature toy makers whose work I think is particularly fresh and inventive. I also pin toys to my Inspiring Softies pinboard on a regular basis if you're looking for more inspiration. an original Snuggly Ugly Indira Villalobos-Starr is a…
New Pattern: Rabbit in a Magic Hat
It's time for a little magic… Abracadabra…hocus pocus…shazam! Pull a rabbit out of a hat! I have a new pattern in my shop today. It's a neat hand puppet. To make it work, put your hand underneath the magician's hat and bring it up into the body of the bunny (the hat and the bunny…
Diversify Your Income Stream: Teach People to Use Their Sewing Machines
I’m teaching a Get To Know Your Sewing Machine class next Thursday, October 11, from 9:30-noon at Sew Easy in Wellesley, MA (if you live in the Boston area and would like to register you can do so on the Sew Easy website). Sew Easy is a locally owned sewing center for kids, and I…
How Getting Rid of Perfection Can Make You a Better Designer
Everything I know about soft toy design I learned in one of two ways: sewing toys designed by other people and experimenting with my own patterns. These are the two tickets to my growth as a designer. The more patterns I study, and the more times I try to incorporate a new technique into my…
New Pattern: Cute Critters
I've been working on these little felt critters for the past few weeks and I'm pretty excited about them! Plush keychains are huge for elementary and middle school kids here. I see them on almost every backpack. I figured it might be really fun to design a pattern so that you and your kids can…
Happy New Year
We went apple picking on Sunday. It was the last day of the apple season at the orchard near our house. The baby found this apple on the ground and gnawed on it the whole time and during the car ride home, periodically saying, "Apple!" and "Mmmm!". The orchard was pretty picked over so finding…
5 Simple Ways to End Procrastination and Jumpstart Creativity
Do you ever find yourself procrastinating from doing the thing you love most? Let’s say you’ve been really busy recently with a big project for work and now it’s finally finished. All the time you were working on the project you were longing for free time to sit at in your studio space and just…
Squeaky Snakes: A Softie Pattern In the Making
I'm fascinated by how ideas evolve. I little while ago I described how my turtle pattern changed over the course of five years, eventually resulting in Scooter the Turtle and today I have another example to share. Right after I finished the manuscript for The Artful Bird I began to experiment with designing new animals….
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