What can you make with Upholstery Remnants?

A couple of friends of mine called the other day to tell me they had some fabric to give me. Woo Hoo! I love free fabric. However when they showed up they were carrying in bags of upholstery samples. I was kinda disappointed since I'd had visions of brightly colored cottons in my head but I didn't tell them that since I want them to call anytime they have free fabric-you never know.

Anyhoo here I am with all of these squares of mostly brown textured fabrics not even as big as a quilter's fat quarter so I started googling what to do with upholstery fabric remnants. Not much, your usual purses, wallets eyeglass cases interesting but not creative enough.

I turned to my beloved Etsy in search of some inspiration and found some really lovely fabric journal covers-I had my idea! Off to Wally World where I knew they still had school supplies on sale and scooped up a whole pile of composition books at a mere quarter a piece. The fabric makes the covers super durable and the neutral colors lend themselves well to endless ideas for journal covers. The neatest thing about these fabric journal covers is that when you finish writing on all the pages you simply insert a new composition book into your fabric journal cover.

Here is a couple of the fabric journal covers I made and another pic of the owl journal I listed @ HotDoggies. You can order a custom cover while you are there too. They make great gifts and you can have them monogrammed, instead of notes how about a journal cover with Sisters or Friends?

Etsy Shop Banner

As I mentioned before I recently opened a new Etsy shop- Hot Doggies. For those of you that don't know Etsy is all about handmade things both buying and selling. I think it's a million times better than Ebay because it is targeting an audience specifically shopping for handmade items. It's a lot of work, I love the crafting part, no problem there but one thing I found out is I am horrible at making an Etsy Banner. Here's what mine looked like after a whole day's work:

It's an Etsy Banner all right, right size , cute baby, name of shop but it looks like my three year old drew it. I needed some help with a professional looking Etsy banner so I turned to this really cool section of Etsy called Alchemy. Alchemy is a part of Etsy where anyone can put in a request for an item they want made and recieve bids on it. So in the interest of having an Etsy banner that people weren't going to laugh at, that's what I did and I immediately started recieving bids and samples from some really talented artists. It was hard to choose but I went with a lady from a business called Kaiyo Design. She did a wonderful job, even with my picky revisions. Kaiyo Designs worked with me until I had exactly what I wanted. Here is my new Etsy Banner for my new shop:

I love it! To see more of Kaiyo Design and get your own Etsy Banner go here, you won't be disappointed.