Another busy week has gone by in our house. After last week being so positive and having gotten so much done, I created a very long list to do this week. Let’s just say that it didn’t go as well as I had hoped…but I think I also gave myself about 60 hours worth of work to accomplish in a week when I also have a full time job outside of this.
So here is what I DID get done:
- Ordered and received more paper – managed to cut about 2,400 petals for flowers (and my hands HURT!)
- Create Etsy listings for 9 different dozen rose bouquets – I only had 5 dozen bouquets which were a mix of 2 colors, now you can also buy a dozen of each solid color. Once I have all these new flowers done, I’ll also be creating some new mixed color bouquets.
- Create pew clip, photograph, Photoshop, create Etsy listing, blog about it
- Write at least 4 blog posts
- Post on Etsy forums at least 3 times
- Paint petals for 3 dozen roses – I decided to do 16 of each color instead of 12 so I can have 4 small roses and 12 long stem (while I could have reused roses for photos, this now gives me 12 long stem roses that are ready to ship right away, which I wouldn’t have been able to do if I had to chop 3 of them for the smaller vase photos). This equated to about 1,500 petals of painting which took up most of my week.
- Not on the list this week – but I also assembled and curled 2 colors, so I have 32 completely done roses right now. Only…112 to go….uuuuggghhhh. This is also attributing to very sore hands putting all these roses together.
- Write this blog post – hey it counts!
There are about 6 other things on my list that I didn’t get to, but I think this was pretty good for the week. Painting and assembling roses eats up a TON of time and while it prevents me from getting other things done, it’s the #1 priority right now so I can have all new photos on Etsy and on the new website I’m working on.
I bought this large piece of Styrofoam yesterday as a temporary solution to my space issue with almost 150 roses I’m creating. We have this shelf/cabinet area in our downstairs hallway that usually has lots of framed photos and some extra flowers. Now this is going to be where I keep all my flowers before I photograph them. It allows them to stand up (if they lie flat it causes the flowers to flatten on one side) and it looks like it will hold all of my flowers. Let’s just home the trouble maker cat leaves them alone…
I also bought these adorable little glass bud vases from Crate and Barrel which arrived this week. I’m going to start selling single roses in my shop. I hope that doing this will first, give me something cheaper in my shop that more people can afford and second, give people a way to purchase something cheap and small to see if they like them before spending the money on a dozen, or spending hundreds for their wedding. They’re also cute to set on a bookshelf or in a small bathroom. I’m going to leave them like this so people can leave them as is, fill them with sand or pebbles or whatever they want. This is just a quick crappy photo of the vase and a new Tiffany rose in my work area, just had to share how cute these vases are!
I really want to get the new website up by this time next week, but that means that I have to cut, paint, assemble, and curl 112 roses this week. Plus photograph them all, Photoshop them all, change out the photos on Etsy and on the website. Plus finish a few pages on the site that need more info (sealant test results, contact page, proofread, etc). Plus I have more than just those things that I wanted to accomplish next week…sooooo we’ll see how it goes. 
As always thanks for reading! Lots of great progress going on here and lots more to come. I have ideas of Christmas just stewing in my head right now but one thing at a time. Until next time!
25.07.2010
Perfectly Paper, Week in Review
People have asked me what happens to my roses when they get wet. My gut response has always been, “They’re made of paper, don’t get them wet!”. But I’m finding that might not be a good response. What if a bride is getting married outside? While she doesn’t plan for it to rain, there is the possibility it will start to sprinkle during the ceremony. The last thing you want on your wedding day is for your flowers to disintegrate before all your photos are taken. So, that has gotten my brain pumping to figure out a solution. One of the things on my to-do list for this week was to experiment with water and sealant. Today is the day. Results aren’t conclusive yet as some overnight drying is needed, but I thought I’d share the preliminary results.
Truth #1 – when paper gets wet it gets flimsy. Seems like rocket science right? Who hasn’t gotten paper wet? Yeah, so this is a given. But, with the paper I use, it does not tear and fall apart easily. So yay! The flowers won’t fall to pieces if they get wet! They will get flimsy though. The petals may fall with the weight of the water and droop until they dry out again. And, they uncurl. Just like if you curl your hair and then go out in the rain, the curl will fall out. Now this is with a LOT of water. Not like a few drops, this would be if there was a sudden downpour. I thought I should test with worst case scenarios.
Truth #2 – the color will NOT bleed. This was a huge happy dance for me. The last thing a bride wants is for her bright pink roses to turn her nice white wedding dress pink. The colors don’t bleed. I dunked petals and a whole rose and placed them on white paper towel. No discoloration. And as much as I rub it on my skin, no color left behind.
Truth #2.5 – the colors stay put on the rose. I was worried that getting them wet could make the paint on the rose itself move and create water lines. No such thing happened. Another plus!
I have a rose that I sprayed with sealant that is holding up well. It has a bit of a crunchy texture now, a little stiff, but it is not glossy which was my main concern. I don’t want my flowers to be shiny. So far so good. It’s dry now and looks exactly the same as before I sealed it which is good. Right now it reeks of a spray paint type smell though. I’m going to let it sit overnight to see if that goes away (I also don’t want them to smell terrible!), and then I’m going to dunk this one and see how water affects the rose once sealed.
All in all, tests are going very well! Hope to have more to report in the next couple days! This could be a huge selling point if I can say that they are sealed as to prevent any water damage. Fingers crossed it works out well!
25.07.2010
Perfectly Paper
Still working hard creating over 150 new roses to photograph to revamp the Etsy store and new website. Time for a break. We love LOLcats in our house, also known as Icanhascheezburger. I could spend all day on this site! Here are a few that I just found that made me chuckle today:
23.07.2010
Random-ness
I’ve been working hard to get everything up and running for my new website design. Part of the new site is having a shop section that has beautiful photos and descriptions that link out to my Etsy shop to purchase. As I’ve been photoshopping and creating pop-up windows in Dreamweaver, I’ve started to hate my photos. Not just my photos but the roses as well. I feel like what I create now is much better than what I was doing 8 months ago. So, one of my many tasks on my to-do list is to create new roses, new photos and replace everything on the site and Etsy with the goods. That means that I need to create a ton of roses (144 to be exact), and each rose contains about 30 petals, so that’s 4,320 petals I have to cut, paint, assemble and curl before I can even think about taking pictures.
I’m trying a new approach this time around and I’m painting individual petals as opposed to the way I normally do it, painting after a rose is assembled. This allows me to throw away a bad petal when I screw up instead of wasting an entire rose when something goes wrong. It also means that I have hundreds of petals that need to dry without touching one another. Soooo, I needed to improvise. And here is my solution. I’m hanging fishing line across my office and hanging paper clips along it with brads along the way to keep the paper clips spaced out (otherwise the weight pulls them all to the middle). Then I punch a tiny hole in the petal and hang it up to dry. A bit time consuming, but they are out of the way and being closer to the ceiling where the air conditioner vent is helps them dry much faster. Thought I’d share what I’m working on!
22.07.2010
Perfectly Paper
It’s Monday – the worst day of the week – and I haven’t had a lot of energy to do much today. Work was really busy today, I had a sick kitty throwing up all over my apartment to clean up after and a virus infected PC that has had me worried. Through all that, the hubby and I had decided yesterday that we would be good and do business productive things each night this week. So, after watching our 25 minute Entourage while we ate dinner, it was to the office to be good. If we stay that way through the night, we treat ourselves to watching True Blood at the end of the night (fingers crossed cause I LOVE that show!).
One item on this week’s long to-do list? Pew clip. Back in JANUARY I bought a bunch of wedding supplies from a floral supplier in the hopes that I could create all sorts of new items specifically for weddings or special events. I took the pew clip out right away but found that I didn’t have enough flowers to fill it and so it sat in the closet ever since. Now that I have a bunch of flowers from creating the Pomander I thought I might finally have enough.
The clip is much like the pomander except flat on the backside. The clear clip is long and wide which allows for easy hanging from just about anywhere. I think it turned out great! Check out the photos below and see it listed on Etsy.
19.07.2010
Perfectly Paper
It has been a very busy and long week here in SoCal. My husband had his gallbladder out last week which meant he was home this past week relaxing and healing. Something popped this week and made me really focus on Perfectly Paper. We’ve both been slacking the past 5 or 6 months on our new businesses just not doing what we needed to do. This week, nothing but productivity. I made a to-do list on Monday of everything I wanted to get done and it kept growing as the week went on. I managed to work on the flower business every day this week, and mostly that’s all I did. Work during the day, work on the business at night and so far this entire weekend has been filled with productivity. I’m tired and a bit exhausted, but I think it was well worth it! I’ve decided to continue on this path of making smaller, achievable to-do lists each week and I’ll post on Sunday as to what I got done throughout the week. One, to keep my fellow readers informed on what I’m working on, and two, to try and force me to continue being productive knowing that others are watching over me.
So, here was this week’s list (which started out as only the first 5 items and grew along the way):
- Write at least 2 random blog posts – I managed to write 3!
- Write at least 2 blog posts concerning Perfectly Paper – including this one, I did 4
- Corsage – create, photograph, replace photos on Etsy
- Pomander – create, photograph, add Etsy listing
- Send in business paperwork
- Post on Etsy forums at least twice – I did this three times this week, but say in chat rooms twice and attended a virtual lab
- Set up TweetDeck and start using Twitter more – done and done!
- Create and ship new order for Poms
- Redesign Twitter background
- Redesign product tags
- Set up Paypal survey – this I found on the Etsy forums. You can set up a survey so that your buyers can answer a question. I chose to ask how people found me so I can get a better idea where my shoppers are coming from.
- Set up shop tracking – this is something I’ll blog more about this next week, but I am tracking my shop hearts, views, unique users as I do more marketing, etc to see what methods seem to create more views for me.
- Create Facebook Ad
- Design Shop page for new web design – this accounted for 15 hours of my weekend – Photoshopped 120 imagines, created 60 pop up windows and 8 gallery pages – lots and lots of work but it’s going to look so great!
- Cut petals – this is what I’ll be doing the rest of the day. I’ve decided I need a new set of photos for a lot of my roses (they get better looking each time I do them so my photos to reflect that), so I need to make 108 new roses. It’s going to take a few weeks and a LOT of hours, but I gotta start somewhere!
Whew! That’s what I’ve been up to this week. Time to erase the board and make a new to-do list for next week. I hope I have a ton to report again next Sunday. I’m expecting some cute little glass bud vases to arrive in the mail this week as I’m going to create listings for single roses in my shop (which means new roses, new photos and new Etsy listings are in my future) and I have a couple new product ideas I want to work on, along with a ton of other great stuff!
Thanks to everyone for reading! Hope I’m able to keep you intrigued and entertained throughout your week!
And now, a kitty picture:
18.07.2010
Perfectly Paper, Week in Review
My husband is working on my new website design. I’m trying to tone down the “OMG that is PINK!” and make it look more classy and elegant. Along with that I’m redoing all the other little things. I already did my banner on Etsy and my Avatar. Today I redid my Twitter background, which is much better since last time I apparently didn’t have it wide enough, so there was a stripe of Twitter blue on the right if you had a widescreen monitor. I also had a bunch of info on the right side which a lot of people couldn’t see. Hopefully this is better and simpler.
I also just finished redesigning my product tags. Again, trying to get away from the overwhelming pink and pulling in gray which is part of my new website color pallet. Let me know your thoughts!
OLD:
NEW:
14.07.2010
Perfectly Paper
And the motivation train keeps on going! After many attempts, I’ve finally gotten my rose pomander finished. I created a new listing you can check out on Etsy and here are some photos. This 2.5 inch ball turned into an 8 inch pomander containing 20 rose heads. I think it turned out great and would be amazing for parties and weddings. I’m not sure if people will be willing to pay the high price for them (20 roses is about 11 hours of work to create), but here it is!
13.07.2010
Perfectly Paper
