Second yoga bag is half done. I’ll have it available for sale either on etsy or at subdivision soon.

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.

I had both Tuesday & Wednesday off completely this week, so I decided to spend the whole time doing studio work. I have a lot of little projects waiting for attention and a lot of little tasks that I need to work on, so I was looking forward to crossing things off the list. But as soon as I got to the studio on Tuesday, I could tell it was going to be a battle all day. I just couldn’t think much… I had the dumb. So I moped around a bit and then worked on some other geeky projects that have nothing to do with ish (fixing a couple x-ray light boxes… yay! and at least stuck out my time there, hopefully exorcising some of the demons. Well it worked. Wednesday was start-to-finish what a typical day at the studio should be like. Days like that make me believe that I could spend days on end in the studio, though I know half of the days would be like Tuesday. I really wanted to tackle a new project, so I made a Cordura version of the c2 bag. I considered starting the backpack, but I don’t have enough fabric to justify that right now. I am really happy with the way the c2 came out, but I’m even happier that I was able to start & finish it completely within a day. I built it as a no-frills prototype with no external pockets & absolutely no decorative elements at all, both things that slow down the process a little bit. Overall it is a good achievement to balance out the underachievement of Tuesday.

It was a long week of work, both at the day job & in the studio. One boss, who does not live inside my head, left for West Palm Beach for the week and the other one who, of course, does live inside my head was working overtime. So I had to both work lots of actual hours for actual boss and then pile on more ephemeral hours for headboss. I’ll say this, but please don’t repeat it… headboss can be a lazy fucker. Most weeks he sits in his ‘72 la-z-boy with a bullwhip drinking buds and falling asleep before thinking about getting me in gear. I’ll show up to the studio, ready to go &… nothing. No structure, no nothing. But as soon as headboss gets a call from the district manager (district manager meaning, of course, any customer… a boutique owner, someone interested in a bag &c.) he whips right into shape and things plug along. So, like some old adage, the more work I had to do, the more work I got done. Headboss & myself finished the project with aplomb, regained some of our confidence & sent away a great package full of ish happiness. The dread I have in the days & weeks before a large workload comes down to me turns into a sort of busy pride once I’m in the work. It’s great to turn down friends’ requests for activities with “oh man, I’m just swamped with work at the studio once I get done with my regular work.” It makes me realize how great it is to actually have a studio as well as having enough work to keep busy in it. Now that everything’s finished we’re still a bit buzzed, I still catch headboss eyeing his la-z-boy every once in a while. I know that soon enough he’ll be back to drooling on my timesheet.

A couple photos from this week…