This day has gotten off to an unusually good start. I had tidied the kitchen counters and set the icky pans to soak.  I was on my way to the livingroom to stitch on a project when I caught my skirt on something and ripped six inches of the hem out of it.  So my first stitching task was to sit myself down and mend the hem of the dress I had on. This required a sufficiently immodest sitting position to make me glad there were not "people" here. 

    It is two days past the official calendar Thanksgiving and one day until our family come to feast here in the forest valley. The Manimal is off to town to get the 'last minute' things and I am here in my ivory tower, cleaning the kitchen (again), sharing a banana with Fearless Puppy, and bemoaning my lack of bloggery skills.  I have received a nice welcoming comment from my first and only reader, and I've tried fifteen times to reply but to no avail. I have not yet figured out whether the problem is blogger, moi or the laptop computer I'm working with. Le sigh, le big french sigh....

     On a more positive note I've been making postcards so that I can support our beloved USPO by sending pretty snail mail to my Far and Dear Ones.  There's something romantic about real handwritten mail arriving in the box.  I can hike up our half-mile of steep hill to the paved road  (accompanied by Fearless Puppy and Silly Dog) and put postcards or letters in my artfully decorated rural mailbox and in a few days my Far and Dear ones can toddle out to their porches in their various far off cities and find a surprise note to make them smile.
      Being an artful family they will likely smile anyway, and feel "Yay-Art and Love from Mum" rather than "Oh. Why didn't she text, it's faster."  A text is a quick and lovely thing, and I text like a house afire, but no one ever reaches for a magnet to display a text on the door of the fridge. Postcards have a nice semi-permanence about them.
    Upon receiving her first handmade postcard Middle Child announced "You've spent too much on stamps" and promptly wrote back sending me some lovely postcard stamps. Henceforth I will properly stamp my postcards 29c rather than 44c.  In my own defense I must point out that those 44c postcard stampings were an act of circumstantial thrift on my part. I had plenty of 44c stamps in my desk, and it would have taken an hour of time and $10 worth of gas to get in the truck, drive all the way to town and buy a 29c stamp. It profiteth not a woman to handmake a postcard from thrifty items she has around the house it it costeth her $9.71 to send the thing.

     My most fun task today is stitching. Actually I like stitching so much it hardly qualifies as a task.  I'm embroidering jeans for Big S. He's quite tall, so there is a lot of leg to cover.  Embroidering denim is tres hard on the fingers, particularly the middle left one that the thimble keeps falling off of. I've got thimbles in several sizes, but no matter how good a thimble seems to fit when I put it on, after I've been sewing awhile it comes off.  Either that or I take it off to get a better grip on the needle and forget to put it back on again.

     My solution for this ongoing dilemma is to work on the jeans until my finger hurts, then switch to easier sewing. The last couple of days I've been working on little projects for my future Etsy shop.  I've been studying Etsy, and it looks like a great "job" for someone who lives in an ivory tower in a forest, as most of the doing can be done here at home whilst keeping the fire in the hearth and watching over the flocks and critters.
      I've seen a lot of little online shops, Etsy and elsewhere, that have nothing in them most of the time which is disheartening.  I do understand that online selling is an occasional thing for most sellers. I also understand it can take three hours, fifty hours, two hundred hours, to make a thing and fifteen seconds for someone to clickety-click and purchase that thing. Which makes it hard if not impossible for the artisan to keep up.

   Against all logic I'm hoping to be able to "always" have something available in my shop, which means I need to get a good running head start. Toward that end  I'm trying to stitch up a nice assortment of things before the shop "opens". Creating inventory.  I'm thinking if I don't open the shop until after the New Year it will be easier to calculate my business taxes when the time comes.  That gives me a bit more than a month to get my cupboard up in the loft filled with quirky handmade things for selling and to get flattering photos of them taken and descriptions written to post in my shop " window".

   Snow is expected soon, or so I am told. "They" who tell the weather here are most often wrongish. Just the same I think I'll be a happier girl next spring if I sweep away the two feet of fallen leaves on the porches before the snow comes and covers everything. Dry leaves are easier to sweep than leaves that have been rotting in situ all winter long.  Best to do the composting in the compost bins.

   Off now to whisk my broom around for a bit, then back to stitching...
   Looking forward to tomorrow, and an ivory tower full of family

   <3
   Rapunzel