Owlicious

Last Tuesday, as usual, I was waiting for #3 to wake up from his nap, while cooking dinner and working on some things on the computer. I was putting the finishing touches on an owl illustration, when all the sudden I was compelled to stop what I was doing and design a calendar for Spoonflower's Tea Towel calendar contest.


It was so weird. I had absolutely no intention of entering. But it was almost like the owl made me do it.

Good thing I did, I guess, because the calendar made it into the top 10, and my email notifications from Spoonflower sales (mostly of the owl calendar) have been going absolutely nuts! It's also a "hot seller" on Spoonflower's site... yay, me!

After a trying week of still not feeling well (three weeks of probably-bronchitis?), sick kids, angry clients, and exhaustion, it was really lovely to have something nice happen.

Now I'm thinking of designing a collection that includes the owl... but are owls a waning trend, like those "Keep Cool and Whatever" posters?

Blog neglect and hard drives in plastic baggies

I was driving home this morning after dropping off the eldest at school, thinking how the past six years somehow simultaneously feels like it's gone by in about an hour but also like it's taken an eternity.

It was an extraordinarily hot summer, and now that it's suddenly cool enough to kill off my sad little tomato plant with the one solitary tomato clinging to its branches, it feels like summer was only a week long. Yet while we were in the midst of it, it lasted about three hundred years.

Between breaking up kid fights, taking the knives away from the toddler or getting him down off the counter / table / chair / stairs / the geriatric cats, I've been neglecting a lot this year. Client work... getting really super serious about my fabric designs... vacuuming... keeping up with this blog... backing up my files.

A few weeks ago, my computer started making weird noises. One morning it just wouldn't turn on. Turns out the hard drive was dead. So dead even my in-house IT dept (my husband) couldn't get any data off it. Which means two years of stuff was gone, too, since I hadn't done a full backup since just before the youngest was born. Really big, giant oops.

Since then, I've been sitting around thinking of random stuff I want to use / read / look up / send to people, and then I remember it was all on the dead drive. Ugh. So much stuff.

The good news:

• I just did my first Spoonflower design since HDD day and I have about a million more super exciting ideas in my head for new fabrics
• I have an old computer with a new fancy giant hard drive
• I'm almost over this cold
• I get to draw dinosaurs
• It's not 105 degrees outside
• Nor is it snowing
• I've discovered I'm an optimist
• It's the season for Halloween / Dia de los Muertos and all the awesomely cool and creepy decorations that go with it
• I get to design a pincushion and write up a tutorial for Riley Blake <-- (possibly the most exciting recent development of all)

So not all is lost (no pun intended.)