Friday Webstore Feature and FABRIC!

Since it's Friday, I thought it would be a great time to point out another cool feature on our webstore. On any page, you can see a group of links on the left sidebar. The top is the Shopping links, which are categories for your shopping ease. The section under that is called "about" and this is where you can find some info about the Crafty Girls. You can click on the About link and read about Regina and me and what inspired us to start up Crafty Girls. The Events link will take you to a calendar and if you live in the San Antonio, TX area, you'll see any scheduled events we have planned for a particular month. The Contact link will take you to a form where you can send us an e-mail if you have any questions about our products or anythying. The Catalog is another way to search the webstore. The last two features are pretty pretty cool, I think. We have one called Web Site Links. This is where you'll find a link to join our e-mail newsletter, participate in our Crafty Girls photo sharing group, visit the blog, or even link to the sites of some of the designers of patterns in our shop. The last link is called Guest Book, which may be self explanatory, but I think it's a neat way to let us know you visited and add some input about our webstore (it's still growing and changing). We'd love to know where our webstore visitors are coming from. It may just be the computer geek in me but I feel these are features that make our webstore more personal for our visitors and customers. Something we didn't have as much of on the Etsy shop.

Now for something you'll REALLY like, FABRIC! Yes, Spring is approaching and that means we're getting some beautiful spring color fabrics in. Have you seen the Verna fabrics we've recently listed?

Wouldn't these make into some adorable little girl dresses or cute tote bags for SPRING!? It's time to get a jump start on those spring projects. Tell Mr. Groundhog that you aren't going to accept his assessment that Spring is not here yet and make this REALLY cute vintage jumper, perfect for Easter.

I've heard really good reviews of patterns from the Favorite Things line and I think this would be a perfect beginner project. I wish I had a little girl to make it for! Well, I hope I gave you something to think about for the weekend (and maybe grab one for a future project.) You can click any of the photos above to visit the listing in our webstore or just click the link. Thanks for visiting! I'll be linking this on a couple of linky parties today.

Have a great weekend!
Happy stitches,
Anna

I'm on a Roll!

I made something again, that's two weeks in a row! This time I used a funky sheet I found at a thrift store in Houston. I thought these cats would make up into a funny and ironic toy for my hyper dog (see last post for a picture of Starbuck). I put a cat picture on each side of the toy, lined it with thick canvas for durability and stuff it with polyfil. Then I stitched it closed and top stitched the entire thing! Fast and CHEAP project! Don't those cats just look like the are daring you to play with them? I'm linking this up to Everything Etsy and any other linky party I can find today. Sew Proud of myself!

Happy Stitches,
Anna

How Do You Feel About Advertising?

Starbuck, my baby, hiding among stuff in our guest room.

OK everyone, this is a feedback post, I REALLY need some feedback here. PLEASE leave me a comment with your opinion about this.

How do you feel about a blog that allows people to advertise on their site? Regina and I are considering offering this option here on the Crafty Girls Workshop blog. It wouldn't be a high cost thing, and we'd make sure that we only allow people to advertise who sell/make items that are relevant to what our readers want and, of course, don't compete with what we sell. That's part of the reason I need your feedback. It might seem a little over the top to ask people to pay for us to add their button to our blog, especially since we already sell fabric and kits and patterns but I want to offer people the option. Perhaps you're a reader of this blog and you LOVE to sew but have NO idea how to make cute jewlery, why not let us provide an image that links to a webstore of someone who sells pretty jewlery? Do you see where I'm going with this? So, hit me, tell me what you think, yeah or nay about advertising and IF you are someone who would be INTERESTED in advertising on here, please let me know as well. Of course, it would be sort of a let down if we went to all this trouble and no one wanted to advertise with us. Believe me, it's going to be VERY inexpensive to start, probably $5 a month! Most of our advertising budget goes to purchasing ad space on various blogs and we've paid anywhere from $10 to $85 a month for those ads, so I believe that $5 a month is VERY reasonable. I'll also do my best to help drive more traffic here so you get maximum exposure.

One more point: By asking for help with sponsoring our blog by purchasing some ad space, it will help us generate a little bit of money to be able to pay for ad space on other blogs. This will help us keep our prices on fabric, patterns and kits low and fair. We aren't doing this because we're greedy, but we do need to keep our ads on other sites running and hopefully we can do that and help promote some great crafty people in the process!

PLEASE leave me a comment with your opinion, no matter what it is. If you don't want your opinion to be public you can send me an e-mail anna@craftygirlsworkshop.com

BONUS: I will do a DRAWING from the responses (so make sure you leave me your e-mail) to win a CHARM pack of fabric! Drawing will be on Sunday March 7th. Thanks!!

Happy Stitches to You,

Anna

Friday Follow Yippee!

I'm really starting to look forward to Fridays now because of Friday follow! Here is some information about it from One 2 Try's blog:

Here's how You can join the celebration:

--Link up your blog name and URL using the McLinking (on One 2 Try's page) Only need to add one blog to be see on all the blog hops.

--Follow the Friday Follow hostesses listed in the first 3 slots

--Follow as many blogs as you'd like

--Take a moment to comment on the blogs telling them you're from Friday Follow

--Follow back when you get a new follower through Friday Follow

The Blog Hop is the same at each of the three host blogs so you do not have to add your blog at each site. Just one - but you can follow each blog. Follow a few or follow them all.

The list is new each week. The links do not carry over. Please link up each week for new participants to find your blogs. The list is only open to add your blog lines on Fridays. It will be visible all week to visit the blogs listed.

Phew, that's a lot of info! But you should certainly check out One 2 Try, Hearts Make Families, and Midday Escapades because they are the lovely ladies who host this fabulous event every week! I can't believe it, it is barely even 8:45 am Central time and they already have 391 links!! Wow, can't wait to add mine!

Happy Stitches and welcome new followers!

Anna

We were featured!

I can't believe it, but someone chose some of our fabric to show in a treasury on Etsy! That's totally cool. Well, I can't figure out how to get it to show up here, but you can see the treasury if you click the underlined words.

Thanks Crazy Daisy Designs!

Happy Stitches,
Anna

Yes, she DOES sew

And yes, she IS obsessed with red and aqua! Look at these adorable pincushion cuffs I made today! I made one for myself and decided they were sew easy that I'd make another one for Regina at the same time! I used the Lil Plane Jane Aqua and Red and White Dot from Michael Miller. They were SUPER DUPER easy to make and so fun and fast! I dug around in some buttons I inherited from my grandmother and found a really cool white pearly one and one that had a little flower crocheted in the center. Can you see it in this picture?

The neatest trick I learned while making these was to add an old cut up credit card behind the pincushion part, on the wrist band to protect my arm from stray pins! Neat idea! Thanks KeykaLou Patterns for this great tutorial! It feels so good to have actually fininshed something from start to finish today. Yesterday I managed to get most of a quilt top finished too. I just need to grab some more fabric to finish the outside border, backing and binding, of course. I call it the Love U Charm Quilt because I used 1 Love U Charm pack and 1 yard of Bella Solid Mint for the sashing.

I think this will be a great blanket for a little boy (or girl), the fabrics are so fun and cute! I can't wait to go to Regina's tomorrow to get the rest of the fabric. That's the update for now. We have some yardage of Martinique coming in soon and Make Life from Sweetwater, which is going to be super adorable for those of you who enjoy scrapbooking.

Happy Stitches to You!

Anna

I am SEW proud to be able to link this up to i made it! Blog party Thursday over at Everything Etsy!

Also linking to V.O.T.W.

And while I'm at it, a jump on next week:

Can you tell I just discovered the LINKY LOVE of link parties??

Nicey Jane Fabric

I was poking around on my computer last night, saving some pictures from my camera and I came across some pictures I'd taken back in October at Quilt Market in Houston. The picture above is Heather Bailey's booth, of all the beautiful Nicey Jane fabrics. Aren't they just luscious? We loved the vintage-y look and feel of them at the time but were rather overwhelmed by all the fabrics that we were seeing. We have now opened an account with Free Spirit and guess what!? Nicey Jane was at the top of the list of fabrics to purchase. Here are the fabrics we purchased from this line.

Click the image to go to the page on our webstore and purchase anywhere from 1/4 to multiple yards! I can't wait to dig in and sew up some samples with this fabric!

Happy Stitches to You!

Anna

P.S. If you check our webstore, you might find a pleasant surprise, all our fabrics have mysteriously GONE DOWN in price! This is NOT a temporary sale either, this is a PERMANENT price change. Better get that yardage fast before it's all gone!