The Holidaze

So I feel funny. Not a sick funny or an excited funny, but just funny. For some reason the end of this semester has come as kind of a surprise to me. I don't remember ever wanting the end of a semester to come this badly. Now that it's over I have nothing to worry about except not foundering on cookies and pie and keeping up with the orders from TealTown. We had another order yesterday (prompting me to drive the hour back home from my parents house) so I'm thinking that perhaps we'll keep up a decent sales rate even after Christmas, which would be nice.

I've done a massive amount of printing in the last week and I'm glad that every time I print a shirt I'm entertained and it makes me proud to see them come out. We've even got some info on a non profit organization that is looking for some clothing and we're shipping out a box full of shirts and scarves to them. Our own little corporation is starting to plump up.

Unfortunately I'm afraid I might plump up with it.

Stupid cookies.

Nuff said

Please Click to Enlarge

We came, we saw, we conquered

Or at least we tried. Finals are okay so far, Etsy on the other hand is fantastic. Yet another nice addition to our growing Etsy resume. The Dad Gift Guide has featured our Head Case shirt as one of the great gifts for Dad. We're honored. Good thing I had nothing to do and decided to browse through the Guides to kill some time. In other news, it is 70 degrees on December 11th, a feat for the ages, and we've got to go do something to take advantage of the weather. I have no idea what that is, but we'll think of something. Then I'll spend tonight either studying for my exam tomorrow, or avoiding studying for my exam tomorrow. We're playing that one by ear.

Sweden is good for money and chocolate

I printed up the shirt we sold to a lady in Sweden today. I'm excited to send it out, not so excited to go to the post office.

I took my online exam today, the first of 2 take home exams. It's nice having an exam you can take home and go over on your own time schedule. My next exam is tomorrow at 5PM, which I'm not sure how I feel about. I'm just going to study for a while right before I go so that might be nice that it's later in the day. Another on Wednesday and turning in a takehome on Friday. So all in all the week is nicely spaced out and won't be too bad.

I don't really feel like doing much. It's that end of the semester slump (which lasted all semester). I have plenty to do, I still need to make a custom shirt for a customer and print that up, but she's in Canada until Christmas and wants it just shipped to her parents house so that can wait until the other stuff is done. I spend a lot of time in the chat rooms on Etsy, just shootin the breeze and hoping for some exposure.

Tomorrow we've got business cards arriving, which is super sweet. Sam posted the pics on her blog. I think she's happy with them, which is good because a lot of the time she dislikes her own work, but this time she knows its good. I can't wait to hand them out to someone, but at the same time I don't want to just give them away because they're so sweet.

I've been trying to think of some cool freebies to throw in with our packages but I'm not coming up with anything. It's not like I can afford to send a free shirt out. If we can keep the business up to this level we'll be able to get something nice to go along with our stuff, which will be yet another milestone.

And that's pretty much it for now. Too much thinking and exams and whatnot doesn't lend for very interesting material

Tote this

Sam wants to try to start sewing, and she's thinking about making some tote style bags. So I picked up a premade blank one to see how printing would work. I think it'll be fine but I'm not sure I made enough passes at this one. But DelorisKaren wants to see it so this post is to show her. I think it's pretty cool.

Proof positive

Eat it. No, really do. It was pretty good!

International mystery man

The other day I received our first order from out of the states. Luckily it was someone I've talked to on several occasions so they were patient enough to wait for the shipping to be changed to reflect an international shipping price.

And since we've had a few convos about international shipping in the past (where people promptly stopped conversing with me after I basically told them I had no idea how much it would cost) I decided to break down and do the dirty work to figure out international shipping costs.

Turns out it wasn't that hard. USPS offers a nice online calculation that is accurate. I checked the calculation page before shipping to Canada and it was spot on with what I was charged at the post office. You can find that page here. It's pretty standard to do US, Canada and Everywhere Else. For reference our packages for 1 shit round up to 7oz, mailed in a manila envelope. Our shipping to Canada is about 30 cents more than domestic US, and Everywhere Else is less than double domestic. I checked in the UK, Australia, Brazil and Russia and they all came up the same.

So here's to the weakness of the dollar. Exports are much cheaper these days so hop to it international buyers. It's only a matter of time till we bust out a whole bunch more gold and our dollar goes up. At least that's what we're hoping.

Now for our Featured Presentation

How privileged are we? Today we're being featured on the blog of QuirkynBerkeley and as far as I know that is the first blog that we've been featured on. I'm glad that we got this opportunity, and that Quirky enjoyed our stuff enough to post it to her site.

I was supposed to write up some info for her, but Sam and I spent 10, count them, 10 hours in the Architecture studio with our 2 partners building a 12 foot bridge. But not only a 12 foot bridge, a 12 foot foot bridge. Our partner Lauren must successfully negotiate her way across the bridge without it tearing into pieces. An interesting proposition considering two massive parts broke while we were trying to put it together. It actually turned out to be kind of fun for me. It was neat to see our idea come together, we did something completely different from any other group, and our team is full of nice people - and funny to. I'll post some pictures of the bridge later, they're e-mailing them to me tomorrow.

But for now, I'm going to go to bed. It's been a long day - the bridge, made and shipped out 3 shirts, our first international package to Canada. I'm beat, although I am tempted to jump in the chat room real quick. But no, that would be a bad idea.

My new addiction

Hollah out to Chat Room Red. I went in last night not knowing what to expect and I came out laughing and excited to go back soon. Some of the same people are in there every day, paperzombieink is apparently in there all day, every day. I left for hours at a time and I would come back and she was still there, typing up a storm and whatnot. Nice people and I was happy to meet them. Not to mention that many people in the chat seemed to love our designs, at one point the page was flooded with images of our shirts. Needless to say (because I've been saying it for days now) I'm excited that people really do like our stuff. As you can see just because your item shows up in the chat doesn't necessarily dictate that the conversation will surround your work... or touch on it at all, really.

Through the course of chatting Ancienet Artizen contacted me to do some OOAK work. The object is to come up with an original shirt based on Ancient Artizen's artwork to be worn at exhibitions and art shows. It's a great idea and I'm excited to work on it. I got ahold of the piece I'll be working with and it is a style I've never experimented with before. Very tribal and mystical, as you can see that is a theme in their store. That's going to be a good project that allows for a lot of creativity on both parts.

In other news, the Secretary of the State of Ohio got our paperwork. We just received notification of the acceptance of our official business name: Teal Town Ink. And here's the proof, go here and search for Teal Town and viola! Wait, isn't that the name of a musical instrument... do they spell it the same way? Ah crap, you get the idea.

Thank God for complaining

A lot of people have been upset over the Gift Guides because they feel that it is not inclusive enough, or that it isn't as democratic as it should be. I didn't have much of an opinion on the subject. I searched for our items in the different categories I thought we would appear in and found nothing. If anything I was worried that our stuff wasn't up to snuff.

Well all of the complaining made me go through the guides again. I went through more of them, thinking that I looked in the wrong area. Then I noticed the wedding category, and being recently married I thought that was a really interesting idea so I took a look, and guess what.

Well laa-dee-frickin'-da. Of all the things, we're a part of the wedding list? Wow, to think that someone liked our curtains enough to suggest they be given as a wedding present is pretty cool. I would write more but I'm really bored and I have some work to do so I had better get it done.

Oh snap!

I took a new approach on the Promotion forum today. My post asked for people to post items that were better than my own. I went for the whole playground style teasing, like when you used to challenge the slowest girl in school to races all the time because deep down you really liked her. The one person who did post any items posted their own items, which I think voids their entry. My favorite response so far was most certainly this:


No one has ever said that to me. And I never realized how much I wanted someone to say that to me until just now.