New Daily Challenge

Okay, so I’ve got my mitts in the knitty jar, and the decoupaging as of late. But if I’m running an online craft store, I’ve got to be able to fill the shelves, and frankly knitting takes a lot of time. I can knit on the subway, but when I’m at home, I like to keep my hands busy with super productivity. Lo and behold, I wander in to jewelery and find my niche.

The scarves will keep coming, cause I can’t arrange beads on the commute to work and I just seriously can’t stop buying yarn, but now you can expect all kinds of fun additions. Peep these, yo:

How fab! And raspberrykoala.com is coming along super well, so they’ll be available pretty soon. May is working as we speak! Paypal even sends out invoices for you. My super anal retentive side is looooving the free organization.

Anyways, the new goal is to make a pair a day and post a pic! Or maybe not a pair of earrings everyday, but maybe a bracelet here and there, or a pic of the decorative bowls i’m making or whatever I’m knitting that day. But daily progress! It’ll keep me motivated 😀

Somebody stop me!!! But no, not really.

Oh God, I just spent $300 on yarn and other crafty things. Why? Because I just remembered that my grandmother taught me how to mod podge and surely there are more fun things to make than plastic swans covered with ugly fabric. Decorative bowls anyone? Yes please! Also, the fuzzy green waffle pattern scarf seen in the last post will now be available in a deep orange (think ING direct without the accent) and a smokey grey. I am high on creativity! And cookies.

In other news, while I am still going to learn HTML, I have decided to get my nerdy friend May to build my website for me. I figured, since the applications to build a website cost a few hundred anyways, and this is what May does for a living, why don’t I just go pro? So she’s all on board, and I’m hoping that raspberrykoala.com will be up and running within a couple of weeks, but that all depends on a number of variables of course.

Wait, what, raspberrykoala? What the dealio?

Okay, so about two years ago I stumbled across a picture on the intermanets of a koala sticking out its tongue in raspberry fashion. And the name Raspberry Koala came into my head, and I immediately thought it would be a fab name for a line of handbags or something. Lo and behold! Here I am crafting things, and so Raspberry Koala will be my line. Go me!

Until the website is up, since I’m churning stuff out fairly quickly at this point, I might put a sale page on this here site so y’all can take a look at what I’ve made and let me know if you’re interested in anything.

Internet pimping!

*shakes booty*

Fun Developments!

Okay, so the plan is back on to move my ass to the States at some point. This whole college idea for getting Josh up here is not going to work out very well considering the bastards who run the American Judicial System haven’t even handed down his sentence yet, never mind the probationary aftermath, nevermind the drawn out process that is getting ones record pardoned and cleared and blah blah blah, nevermind the following brouhaha of actually getting the college part in gear. You remember the end of highschool, the college bit alone is a confusing and frustrating pain in the ass.

Plus, I’m in the mood for a change of scenery, and for someone with a crazy hectic brain like mine, I think the slower pace could actually be very good for me. That and even if Josh is away by the time I end up down there, just being closer makes me feel better.

There’s just one problem with that. Actually, there are a ton of issues that will have to be traversed, but let’s focus on one thing at a time. Josh is the patient one, who understands the frequent necessity of just sitting back and letting things take their course. No point in spending extraneous amounts of energy on something you can’t control. I however, do not function like that, and it’s the recognition of these differences in thought process that contributes to a succesful relationship (among other things, like our general awesomeness and a healthy abundance of sex appeal). If I’m on the subway and it shuts down, I know there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. I’m going to be late, and that’s that. But this is different, because I feel like I *can* do something. And it’s driving me literally crazy. Crazier. Whatever.

So I want to move. But because I am the impatient one, it’s understood that this is something I am doing of my own perogative. Josh is stuck in limbo, and you can’t make rent money while you’re in jail. It would be unfair of me to decide that I don’t feel like waiting, up and move my ass, and then expect him to cover for me. If I move down there, I need to be able to support myself. Obviously, Josh will and does help out where he can, but I can’t tie someone down to a decision that I made.

That’s not a problem. The problem is my Canadian citizenship. I hope I’m not alerting myself to the FBI here or anything, but from what I can gather, taking up physical space in the U.S. is not so much a problem as it is taking up a job. Understandably, the U.S. government is not keen on the idea of handing out jobs to foreigners while there are able bodied Americans who could be employed in that capacity instead. I’ve explored a fuckton of avenues, and it doesn’t look good. I don’t have any kind of special degree, or a lot of money. And while I’m fantastic at my job, the fact of the matter is that being a highly organized, functional, multitasking administrative assistant is not the most specialized field out there. And Josh and I are not about to get married for the sake of a Green Card. That’s retarded.

What the hell do I do then? Save up a whack of dough, first of all, but what about income beyond that? I figure I need to save up at least a couple grand to live off of for the first couple of months while I get myself settled, but I need to have an income. After being told “no, you suck” by a number of agencies, I went bawling to my friend May. Talea is plenty smart and inventive, but May is smart in different ways, and is all about me moving for the sake of love. Talea, while supportive, is less thrilled by the idea of her best friend moving 800 miles south for a couple of years, while May is used to her friends moving far and wide to chase their dreams. So May sits me down with a coffee and essentially says “Hellooooo? The internet! That’s what we do!” May and her husband are the most incredible, best-geeky-friends style, super nerd awesome couple you can imagine, and they are good at what they do. Think Tron, seriously.

And one of the best things about May is her “You can do it!” attitude. So the fun development: I am building a website! It’s solely for the purpose of making money, but I’m not a complete sell-out. It’s still going to be an awesome project that I’ve seriously contemplated for some time. But now the gears are in motion. I don’t know the first thing about computers, but with the right amount of drive, self-learning, and a little coaxing from my geek-chic friend, I should be able to make something fly.

Here’s the plan! I like to think I’m pretty awesome, and I know how to do awesome stuff. I’d like to share that awesome know-how with my buddies, blog-buddies, and the world at large. The basic premise of the site with thusly be weekly tutorial videos on how to do awesome things. How to make awesome lemon squares, how to make awesome knitting patterns, how to do an awesome hair style, makeup style, crafty project, anything! In fact, I think I’ll title it “How To Be Awesome”. And it will include a bloggy type area, and links where you can buy the fun crafty things I make (I specialize in awesome scarves and have been wanting to sell them for a while), as well as ads for stuff that I genuinely do love and endorse in the hopes that they will pay me for hawking their wares.

So that’s the big news, an official website is on the way! I’ll very likely throw a quick little something together with Google pages while I mire through the technical aspects of HTML and Dreamweaver, but I hope at few of you will come on over and check it out once it goes live.

I shall keep you posted!