MousePants Art Meets Holiday Crafts

I am so pleased to announce that MousePants has been selected to participate in the 2013 issue of Better Homes and Gardens Holiday Crafts, on newsstands August 13, 2013.  I recreated one of my most popular and requested pieces, Farah the Fawn, with a bit of a Victorian Christmas touch for the magazine.  I want to thank the editorial staff of Holiday Crafts for reaching out to me and commissioning the piece as well as everyone who supported me during the hectic time of meeting the tight deadlines for the piece and the accompanying tutorial.  There will be a large photo of Farah along with step-by-step directions so readers can recreate her at home.  One of the best parts of being an artist is sharing my skill and passion for my craft with others, and I hope that this piece inspires a few people to take up felting needles or to aspire to more complicated felt pieces.  I would be honored if you, my friends, family, customers, and blog readers, would buy a copy of the magazine and check it out.  I will eventually reveal photos of the finished piece, but for now, I am keeping it under wraps.  Thank you all again for your support during the difficult and exciting transitions over the past year and look for many new felties in my Etsy shop to celebrate this occasion.  As always, please feel free to message me on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/MousePants and on Etsy at https://www.etsy.com/shop/MousePants . xoxoxo, MJ 

the long and winding road

It has been a long year with some triumphs and some catastrophes.  In just a couple weeks, MousePants is moving to the mountains of southern New Mexico to start a new adventure.  I'm still spinning yarn and have found renewed inspiration in making felties.  I am looking forward to long days in the forest and hoping to meet many animal friends that will agree to model for new felty ideas.  I am eagerly awaiting a Christmas with heaps of glistening snow and even looking forward to the biting cold weather, having been busy knitting new scarves and hats to keep me toasty.  

The moving process itself has been arduous, and I am ready to get settled in at my new home (which will probably be a couple of months down the line).  I am hoping in the coming year to get a better handle on maintaining the blog, as I have some exciting news to share (in addition to my new home and relocation).  I would be honored if you took this journey with me as I revisit my roots, spend a lot more time with family, and make crafting and teaching art and knitting classes my full time focus.  You can look forward to new felted friends and some killer corespun.  I might even share a few tutorials since the first one I wrote was successfully received (I'll post about this as soon as possible!).  If you are interested in keeping up with MousePants in the meantime, please visit my Facebook page, which I update on a regular basis http://www.facebook.com/MousePants.  Best wishes and happy holiday crafting!   

Death of a Salesman

I am an introvert.  I always have been, but as I have gotten older and spent most of my career working from home, this is even more the case.  If I don't make a concerted effort, I can go days without having a face to face conversation with anyone but my pets.  Sometimes, this means that when I have a living, breathing person in front of me I spill my guts like the Exxon Valdez (or a mental patient), revealing way too much about my inner thoughts and overwhelming the poor, unsuspecting subject of my rant.  I think I have scared off a date or two.  My good friends have come to expect this, and, if we haven't spoken in a while, I think they just expect the deluge.  I am working on finding a healthy balance.  

I love making yarn.  Love, love, love it.  I even like designing my labels and wrapping up orders and making receipts.  I enjoy the whole process.  On the other hand, I do not enjoy selling things, particularly approaching people unsolicited and trying to sell them things.  Add to this my nervous rambling, and I just don't think I am very good at selling my yarn in person.  I have found that approaching prospective buyers online is much easier, so the last few days I have been writing emails, with detailed photographs and a little bio about myself and what makes my yarn unique.  I have sent them out to area yarn shops.  I have also approached some well known pattern designers and asked them to have a look at my yarn and share their opinions with me.  

Here is the first response that I got from one designer whose patterns I have been particularly addicted to lately:  

Now I realize she probably gets a ton of fan mail and emails asking her to try new yarns and products all the time.  I am really trying not to take it personally.  I just hoped for a little more of a constructive response from someone I have admired for such a long while.  Does it mean my yarns are not very impressive?  Nothing special?  I think it probably just means she has more important things to do, and that is the way I am trying to take it.  

ADDENDUM:  I contacted a Santa Fe yarn shop a couple days ago and just got a great response.  They are definitely interested in carrying MousePants Woolens and would like me to deliver their order at the beginning of July.  I got this email about 30 minutes ago, and I am on top of the moon!  I guess it's not all that bad after all.  The internet makes it a lot easier to approach people despite my tendency toward being an introverted, somewhat shy person and my yarn speaks for itself.  Now I am off to do some spinning.  Gotta get that order ready by the beginning of July! 

MousePants Returns!  Now With 50% More Fiber! 

How MousePants Woolens Was Born or How I Fell Hopelessly in Love With Corespinning

MousePants never really went away, but I did take a rather long sabbatical from art over the last year.  My deteriorating physical health (I have rheumatoid arthritis and migraines) and an unstable work situation made art less of a priority in my life.  As much as I love it, I just didn't make my art a part of my daily life, despite the fact that it probably would have been cathartic for me and good for my mental health.  This is a story of evolution.  How life constantly propels us forward despite us clawing to stay in the past.  It is a story of my passion for fiber and how that love has changed and been reincarnated over the years.  There is one thing that has never changed and that is my absolute love of yarn and wool.  Almost ten years ago I bought my first skein of yarn at Hobby Lobby.  I am so grateful to have discovered my true love.  It's not a person.  It can't leave me or judge me or fall for someone else.  My love affair with fiber will only continue to deepen. 

  

Last March, as a birthday present to myself I bought a little spinning wheel.  It is nothing fancy.  It is a secondhand travel wheel that spent most of its life in a garage gathering dust.  The lacquer finish is a bit crackled from our dry New Mexico climate, but it gets the job done.  See, even before I learned to spin, I was always drawn to vibrant fiber batts and raw fleeces.  I like to know where my yarn comes from (I'm a hopeless knitting addict).  The thought of controlling the process from start to finish really appealed to my artistic side (and inner control freak).  Around the same time, a flurry of books on spinning art yarn were released and my imagination ran wild.   

I took one spinning class, during which I had a migraine and had to excuse myself hurriedly to throw up twice, and then did a lot of studying my books and back issues of Spin Off magazine.  I came across  a technique called corespinning that really appealed to me.  You take a commercially spun core yarn and basically use your wheel to wrap the yarn with fiber, creating a strong, easily manipulated finished product.  One thing I didn't like was that most of the corespun art yarns I found for sale on Etsy and similar sites are very thick (think pinky to forefinger thick) and offer little yardage.  This is because corespinning eats up a lot of fiber if you do it the traditional way.  It's just not cost effective to produce hundreds of yards when it takes 4 oz of fleece to make 40 or 50 yards of yarn (and that's a generous estimate).

I started thinking of what I would want to buy first as a knitter.  If I were shopping, I would want fine fibers, a workable gauge yarn, and enough yardage in a skein to actually complete a project.  I understand that weavers and other fiber artists can use 30 yards of these crazy art yarns and actually make something wonderful, but for a knitter, there's not a whole lot you can do with that little yardage.  

While I was working on this, I stumbled on a fiber supplier who had the batts I had been dreaming of.  Exotic and fine fibers and all so soft.  Vibrant colors and interesting add-ins like sequins, twine, and ribbon for texture.  It was a match destined to happen.  This was just the fiber I was looking for.  

I began spinning, unsure at first.  Thick and a little uncontrolled (which I knit up into bulky cowls and scarves for family and friends and myself), but gradually more refined and thinner.  I can get a solid worsted weight corespun now, something I haven't seen anywhere while shopping.  The advantage to this is that it is easily worked up with readily available commercial patterns and I can spin 4-5 oz of fiber into up to 180 yards of yarn.  MousePants Woolens was born! 

Because I love the MousePants name and brand so much, I decided to sell my woolens right alongside my felties.  I haven't been spending much time on my felties since the Heartsy deal, and, in all honesty, the Heartsy deal really snowed me under.  I got way too many custom orders, many of them intricate and complicated, and made way too little money to make it worth it.  I didn't get the repeat orders I expected out of it.  I even had one person who ordered one piece with the Heartsy deal and then one other custom who just never returned to pay (and it's a strange piece I probably won't sell to someone else).  Heartsy recently went out of business.  I don't know the reasons, but I wonder if other businesses had similar experiences and they started having a hard time finding people willing to take the big cut you had to take to be a featured seller.    

In my Etsy shop now, you will find my usual assortment of felties (and a few strange ones from a gallery that closed) and my handspun yarn in two weights, regular and Phat.  I have started working with local shops to get my yarn out there and am now at the Yarn Store at Nob Hill.  This fall I hope to be in Village Wools.  I am not at the point of spinning for production.  I spin because I love it.  I spin because it calms my nerves and gives my anxious hands something to do.  But I have big plans for MousePants Woolens.  Look for me on Ravelry as a legit yarn brand and if you are interested in purchasing some of my yarn but a little unsure, contact me and I might have a few yards lying around that I can send you.  I have truly found my passion and I feel so blessed.  It can only get better from here.  

Heartsy- The Good, The Bad, The Narwhal

So I did it. I jumped on the Heartsy bandwagon. In the middle of a new year slump, working part time, and looking for more ways to promote the shop Heartsy just seemed like something I ought to try.
For those of you who do not know what Heartsy it, it's a Groupon-type site for Etsy. Crafters offer vouchers for their shops for deep discounts to a limited number of customers. If you are a member of the site you get first pick of the daily deals. You can find Heartsy at www.heartsy.me
It was easy to get approved for a deal and get the whole thing set up. I was mildly worried that my deals might languish on the Heartsy store shelves like day old bread. But I was in for a big shock! All 15 of my vouchers were snatched up in four minutes! My little shop was hardly ready for the traffic I received, either. I had over 700 visitors to the shop that day (according to Google Analytics). I was thrilled at the response, and got many kind emails from people saying they had been waiting and watching for my shop to show up on Heartsy.
So the downside? Aside from the fact that I was selling $49 felties for $17- a cut I was willing to make in exchange for the advertising and exposure on the site- most of the people with vouchers didn't want things I already had in stock. They wanted custom orders. I ended up with 12 custom orders for everything from an squid to a honey badger. Most were completely understanding that my custom orders take time and I was taking them in the order in which they were received, but a couple didn't seem to grasp the concept and had to be moved to the front of the line as they were writing me multiple harassing emails asking how soon they would be getting their such and such.
Already feeling a bit overwhelmed, I got pneumonia. Raging, antibiotic resistant, debilitating pneumonia. I was out for over three weeks. Again, most of my customers were wonderful and understanding, but there were a couple who just didn't understand. Plus, it wasn't like they were asking for a fox, which I could felt out in my sleep, all these orders were for new and strange things. Especially that squid. Let me tell you, that squid was difficult.
So all in all, would I do another Heartsy deal? Yes. But I would build up my shop stock first and limit my orders to what I had on hand. That way it wouldn't end up being an albatross around my neck for months. I am just now finishing up my last two Heartsy orders, a narwhal and a honey badger, for a lovely lady who was very sweet about being last on the list. I met some great people, got some great exposure for the shop, got woefully overwhelmed, pulled it together at last, and made the whole thing into a success. And nothing feels so great as to watch those vouchers disappear when the Heartsy shop opens in the morning. So, if you're willing to take the plunge, and ready to be overrun with orders for a while, and work really hard, and take a cut in your profits in exchange for some great advertising give Heartsy a second look.

Heartsy- Shopper's Heaven Crafter

I got a great custom order for a wedding cake topper with two little birds in a nest for a lovely customer in Australia. Every order (especially custom orders) is special to me, but to be asked to be a little part of such an important day in someone's life is really special! I think I will start working on some more cake toppers to be listed in the shop soon. How great that something I made is going to be remembered for the rest of these peoples' lives!
For this piece I used two needle felted birds made of very fine merino wool, a grapevine nest, some natural moss, and a few sweet vintage forget me not millinery flowers.