It has been a super long week.  I was very ambitious in my to-do list this week with the intention of creating all new roses, re-doing my Etsy shop and finishing and launching my new website.  Let’s just say….that didn’t happen.  One of the tires on our car has a lovely screw in it, so I lost 3 hours this morning going to get it patched and ordering new tires that should be in next week.  Then another couple hours went to a trip to Target, grocery shopping and separating the large containers from Costco.  Another couple hours cleaning and cooking and preparing food for the next week and I lost 90% of my day today!

Friday I worked all day, took a couple hour break for dinner and a bit of LEGO Harry Potter (SO much fun!) and then went back to work on flowers…until 5:30am.  Went to bed, got up at 9am to start all over.

This week I managed to paint 98 roses, assemble 114, and curl 66.  That was all I did this week!!  I’ve been working non stop to try and get this done, and I’m not quite there.  I have 32 roses assembled that need to be curled, and another 16 that are painted but still need to be assembled and curled.

This is what my hall looks like right now.  They look really cool all together…although I’m out of room and still have 48 roses that need a home!  Hmmm…

Yesterday in a mad dash to try and get everything done, I managed to take some pictures.  I thought I would take some pictures Saturday and then finish up roses this morning and take the remaining photos today.  After taking over 400 photos of the 6 colors I had complete, I just wasn’t happy with the results.  If I’m going through all this effort to create new products, I want insanely good photos of them, and while I have a much better camera now than what I used for most of my current photos, my location is still not great.  I ordered an Ott-lite lamp last week, which should be here sometime in the middle of this next week.  These new pictures are tons better than my old ones, but I find I have way too much light on the front on my roses and nothing but darkness and shadows int he back.  I only have 1 window which I can take photos near, it makes it hard to get the items in the right lighting to look good.  I think I’m going to wait for that to arrive and experiment with it.  As my husband pointed out, no point shooting another 600 photos just to re-do it in a few days.  So, that caused me to push everything else back a week as it is a domino effect.  Need new photos before I can replace current ones on Etsy, then I can replace photos on website and launch website.

Tonight, while multi-tasking in front of The Empire Strikes Back, I managed to re-do 39 Etsy listings – now I feel like the descriptions are better, I included bullets for an easy way to get the facts of each product quickly and I redid my tags (I still had Valentine’s Day tags – yikes!).  I still need to do the tissue items I have in my shop, but that can wait until this next week.

And now, it’s back to work.  I haven’t gotten much sleep this weekend and I definitely didn’t get to relax more than a couple hours the entire weekend.  I hope that I won’t be too burnt out to accomplish everything that I wanted this past week, keep your fingers crossed!  I have the coffee pot all prepared to brew me some energy in the morning and I hope to get a ton done this next week.

Hope everyone had a great weekend and have a great start to your week!

My Moose looks just as tired as I am!

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: