Here’s a little time-lapse of the bag-making process… enjoy.

Thanks to BlancoWilms for the music.

New year, new website… why not? After months tweaking I’ve put the final touches on the new website & donated it to the internet. I’m very happy to have a bit of a new look & I’m curious to know what you think.

For Firefox & IE7 users, it’ll look like that first image up there. For older IE users & some others, it’ll be similar to the old site, just a little prettier.

8 new wrist cuffs available now at etsy.

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Thank you, NaBloPoMo for mucking up the blogosphere with more irrelevant, blogging-for-the-sake-of-blogging posts than usual. And why exactly do we need new posts every day of November? Le blogosphere does not have a shortage of (relevant or irrelevant) posts, so it’s not like, say, writing a letter every day of the month so you can remark upon what it used to be like “back then.” No… blogs are now & not in short supply. The only hope I have is that by purging oneself of posts for 30 days, maybe the toxins will float away & the December posts will be amazing, concentrated, intelligent writing the likes of which haven’t been seen since Paris in the 20’s. I happen to know that that’s mere fantasy, for if it were true, this here post would be pure gold, due to the purging of my thoughts since my last post on October 4th. Oh well.

(Oh, and one more piece of advice. I wouldn’t recommend sounding out the “word” NaBloPoMo for the fun of it. At first it’s a nice little word game solitaire but soon you’ll find your brain intoning it in the little crevices between thoughts. Before you know it, you’ll hear it in your head and just when you assume you’ll have another normal thought you’ll just think, NaBloPoMo and then you’ll kind of see the word floating in front of you like a screen saver and you’ll hear it again until you have to physically shake it off. Not good for the blogosphere or the head are you, National Blog Posting Month.)

What else have I been doing besides crafting in my head a bitchy blog post about blog posting? Mostly work at the wine store, but also some studio time & a lot of designing. I’m kind of a fuck up in that I have pretty low stock, a low amount of supplies and three projects in the design stage even though I’m 9 days from the biggest buying season of the year. What better thing to shoot than your own foot, I ask you? So I am currently looking for twenty dollar bills on the street to help me pay for some lining and then I’ll be set to sell plenty of interesting accessories sometime in mid January after everyone has bought all they could buy and put their wallets away until April.

I just finished the yoga bag and I’m just about ready to bring the new pieces from the design world into the real world. I’m probably going to do a line of mini-v.5 bags and more Cordura c2 bags.

stock photo for lazy bloggers

My life is not just spent in front of my sewing machine and this screen. Most of the hours of any given week are taken up selling wine at a boutique wine-only store. Not only does it afford me the pleasures of having a “day job” and therefore funding — barely — my design habit, I get to be a part of and representative of the wine world. Most of my sales are made through suggestions because we don’t sell Yellow Tail or Ecco Domani or just about anything else you’ve heard of. I have to explain a lot to the customers, but I think, in the end, they learn more about the wines they buy than they would if they went straight for a familiar label. I really like the part of my job that lets me engage with people about wine. It’s fun to talk about wines, to make fun of wine culture, to share drinking experiences. The best part, though, is the mental feasts I dine on throughout the evening. One of the easiest ways to make a suggestion for someone is to find out with the wine will be paired with. That simple question produces answers ranging from spaghetti & Paul Newman sauce to pan seared Copper River salmon with a sesame seed crust & a salad of microgreens with an orange and balsamic vinaigrette. The flashes of imagery my mind makes after these descriptions are better than eating any meal. For that moment, the dish is perfectly cooked with tendrils of steam rising from the plate and it’s all perfectly lit at a beautiful table, just like those shitty soft-focus pictures that food magazines are filled with. I summon the taste center of my brain for an wine accompaniment and then, mentally, the flavors highlight each others’ strengths and downplay their weaknesses perfectly. It is a moment of (food) perfection that I rarely experience in real life, but that mirrors the pleasures of designing. Design is trying to achieve the same moments of being. I see the bags as I’m designing them perfectly lit, functioning perfectly and practically. I guess those moments of, albeit fantastic, perfection create the momentum to power through the very imperfect reality of creating the meal, the bag, the days. I have to see the reality of all of my bags, but all of those meals wait in stasis, never to be loudly chewed, never to be thrown out or cleaned up after. If only that was a world more available to us everyday.