Pillow talk

Over the last few weeks I have found new fire to start a new product line. I am making pillows.

For a couple of years now, I've had boxes of Karlstad sofa covers from Ikea sitting around my office. They were on sale for like, $1 each, and I bought a couple on spec. I assumed I would make monsters from them at some point, but the fabric is sort of upholstery-grade, tricky business on the 6-12 inch scale I usually work in.

I made a round back pillow out of a t-shirt for a show a few weeks back, and it set my mind to thinking about pillows. Then I went to Shanghai to visit a friend, and saw some cool pillow/monsters with a certain shape. I sketched it in my notebook and brought the idea home.

After modifications and trials with fabric and various shapes, I hit upon this design, which I'm pretty happy with. We've had a prototype on our sofa for a few weeks now, and we both really enjoy it. It's not just weird looking, it's comfortable. I'm leaning on it now as I write this.

The production units are going up on Etsy as I get them done and photographed. Check 'em out while they last!

I also have vague plans to try to advertise this batch around crafty places the Web. That's new territory for me, but last time I put up a bunch of stuff on Etsy, nothing moved for 3 months. I also barely told anyone it was there, so I have to consider that I could be partly responsible.

Consignment

Every once in a while, someone sees something you got and wants to talk to you about combining your thing with their thing. Maybe they want to hire you, or perform with you. In college, the student ministries director thought I'd be perfect to preach in Guam for a summer.

These propositions are a little magical. They mean someone looked at you and saw merit and wanted to risk a little something on you.*

Historically, I stumble all over these offers. I get self-conscious and either back away thinking I can't live up to it (cf. Guam) or freeze up when called to produce (cf. lots of other things).

But this year, I told myself the next time one of these offers came I would grab it with both hands.

At Art Shop this year, a consignment shop owner, Square Peg Artery near Rittenhouse Square, was cruising the aisles looking for talent. We talked, we traded business cards, and she followed up.

It's not a big opportunity, but it's big enough to start with. I'm learning marketing with my bare hands, and this is another round of class. Get the product out there. Make money if you can, lose it if you must, but get eyeballs on your goods.

I'll try real hard not to fumble this one. And if I do, I damn well mean to learn something from it.

The picture, by the way, is of a monster available at the Artery. Swing by their store at 108 S. 20th St and take a look around while you're out xmas shopping.


*Precluding scammers and the deluded. Those types are usually easy to spot if you're doing due diligence. I'm talking about the genuine article here.

Art Shop 2009 Post-Mortem

Art Shop is over, and I did pretty well! I'm about to go into a long review, mainly for my own benefit, so feel free to drop out any time this gets boring.

I have only two data points: last year and this year. So I'm not sure how meaningful my conclusions are. But I'm trying to draw some anyway.

The overarching lesson this year is from my neighbor Liz, who was selling smart-looking hand-knitted sweaters. The lesson: "Business is fickle." You do your homework, and you hedge your bets, and then you show up and hope. You don't know when it's going to go well or go badly. You go anyway.

More specific observations:

• This year's commercial breakthrough was diversification. I had a few normal monsters (fewer than last year), a bunch of pattern monsters, some tetris magnet sets, and random stuff I glued googly eyes onto. This provided a nice price spread from $40 down to $1 for the Things With Eyes. (I also sold coasters for my sister-in-law, Alison).

• The ratio of "Cool!" to "Sold!" is about 10:1.

• I didn't bring some things I wanted to. I wanted to make hats, but I never did the R&D to be able to churn out a bunch, and I didn't want to show up with only one or two. I also had meant to make pillows out of t-shirts, but the dog ate my homework there (literally), and I was already staying up late finishing monsters and freelance as it was. So I let it go. It's probably just as well -- the table was full enough. But I coulda sold the headlice out of hats, I think.

• Got lots of compliments, and someone said to me, "Everyone is talking about your stuff!" Meredith pointed out that it must feel good to hear people say nice things about my work. And it should. I've tried to figure out why it doesn't.
  
  My guess is that I have a subcutaneous cynicism that distrusts inert talk. Telling me you like my work is swell, but like it with your wallet, and I'm more inclined to believe you.
  
  I mean, regardless of origin or intent, a compliment is a compliment, and kindness is not so abundant that I'm willing to wave it away. But there's still a stark line in my heart between "talk" and "walk."
  
  Cynicism is low on my list of favorite character traits. But it's often coupled with a constructive shrewdness. I haven't discerned how to gerrymander my feelings to properly segregate "good judgment" and "bad faith." But at least I'm happy I've discovered it's important to do that.

• Everybody DOES love monsters, but everybody also loves utility. Based on some half-verbalized semi-criticisms, I got the impression that many people think stuffed monsters are only for children. Items that look fun and cool are ok for children, but not adults. Had I ingrained some sort of usefulness into the product (here's where a hat would have come in handy) I would have had more admirers and customers.

• I can't tell whether low-pressure sales is better for business in dollar terms, but I can tell I feel icky about applying pressure. I only want to sell to people who already want to buy. I get no joy from persuasion.
  

• Some of last years' monsters didn't sell, and I brought them home thinking that they must have been defective in some way. They were unbeloved, and therefore I had failed. I took them back this year anyway, to fill out the ranks. To my surprise, they sold, to people who seemed happy to have them.
  
  So the new conclusion is that some products hit certain people a certain way, and you don't know who or when. There might be some genuine stinkers in the bunch, and you hope to weed those out as soon as possible. But sometimes a creation's buyer just hasn't come along yet.

• Last year I sold a bunch of stuff on Friday, and Saturday was dead. Low point: Some woman spent most of an hour letting her daughter amuse herself at my booth while she talked, and then bought nada. However, my goal had been to make enough to cover my new sewing machine, and I did that, so mission accomplished.
  
  This year, I did only so-so on Friday, and going into Saturday I did a lot of hand-wringing about how bad I feared business would be, especially after a quiet first hour. I heard people say "Friday is more social; Saturday is the day more people buy." But that hadn't been my experience.
  
  Turns out, people were right. Saturday mysteriously picked up around 1:00, and I did decently thereafter. When I tallied up sales, I made a significantly larger amount of money this year compared to last year.

• I dropped my prices a little on magnets and big monsters on Saturday after disappointing Friday night sales. Both sold better on Saturday. I don't know whether it was because of the price drop or the motivated Saturday shoppers. For monsters anyway, my hunch is $40 is a breaking point for a lot of people. They'll bite at $35, but $40 is too much.

• When I say I did "decently", we're still not talking a lot of money. I probably did a little better than break even on the hobby this year. Which is cool with me. I'm interested to turn this into more of an income stream, but a self-funding hobby is sufficient gratification.

• An artsy consignment shop downtown wants to sell my monsters. Sweet! I'll probably have more to say about that in a couple weeks.
  

• I've set a goal to attend at least one more art/craft show in 2010 as a vendor. I need more data points.

If you came out to Art Shop this year, whether or not you bought a monster, then my sincere thanks. If you DID buy something, then I hope it brings you joy and amusement. See all y'all next year.

Why does the future still suck?

Spent two hours working on a Web site tonight, and nothing to show for it so far. But perseverance is key in these sorts of things, I hear. Must... have... operative... site... before... Art Shop....

Further adventures in junk

Ever since I found the box of cameras, I've been more conscious of finding stuff on Wednesday walks. And I haven't had any great finds since. I have noticed other people on the job though.

Reflections:

1) There are pros out here. Other people have been at it longer, are better at it, and plain care more than I do. I see beat-up trucks cruising the streets piled with scrap metal and random stuff in the back. I see beat-down looking older people with roly carts looking for cans and bottles to turn in. This is what these people DO. I'm amazed I find anything at all with them on the circuit.

2) One man's trash does not automatically make another man's treasure. Seeing value is a matter of experience and opportunity -- that goes for garbage or stocks. Today I found a bunch of ball Christmas ornaments someone was throwing out. That's not going to be very interesting to professional scrappers, but it's just the sort of thing I plan to glue eyes to and try to sell in a couple of weeks.

3) Stay easy. I've been looking for more big, sexy scores like the vintage Apple computers I found. If I had been focused on that, I'd have missed the fun I picked up today. Not every day will be great, but the wider your definition of "great" is, the more likely you are to have one.

One trick at a time

I don't like repeating. That's one reason why I fear I'll never make much money off monsters -- once I've made one, I don't want to make another one like it. I'll never be an Ugly Doll maker, because Ugly Dolls, while wonderful, are basic, repetitive. I want to keep trying new things.

Here's a picture of some pattern monsters I've been making. (Most of them still need mouths.) Unlike my regular monsters, I have a pattern, I cut it out, I sew all the pieces together. This was supposed to make monsters faster so I could charge less, and theoretically make it up on volume.

Two competing conclusions come from this:

1) They all have the same basic shape, but they come out looking different anyway, so the differentness is good.
2) They same-basic-shapeness is still sort of boring, so I wind up trying to do different things to keep myself interested, which takes longer, which is bad.

Ultimately, they are faster than one-at-a-time monsters. If I focus, I can bang them out. I'm pleased that I natively prefer craftsmanship to commerce, but seriously brain, let's value commerce a little more highly, ok?

Adult anxiety dream

You know that one dream where you show up for the final exam, and realize you haven't gone to class all semester and you're freaked out?

I had one of those a couple days ago, only with Art Shop. I dreamed I was setting up my booth, and I had almost nothing to sell.

As of now, at t-minus one month I've got:

• 7 big monsters done, 2 without faces.
• 2 mini monsters mostly done, with another 1 in process.
• 0 hats done, with 1 in process.
• 0 tetris magnet sets done, but all of them in process.
• 1 pillow done, 1 in process, raw materials for 2 more.
• probably 6 or 7 googly-eyed items done, with an unknown number coming. Depends on how many interesting objects I find in the trash in the next month.
  

The goal this year is to diversify offerings, both in product and price spread. Informal polling reveals that hats will likely be the big seller.

I'm not sure what conclusions I'll be able to draw. Realistically, I'm on schedule to have enough stuff done. I'm usually only comfortable though if I'm ahead of schedule. Tonight: magnets!

Art Shop 2009!

Hey speaking of hats and entrepreneurship, Art Shop is coming up in five or six weeks.



I'll be selling monsters and hats and tetris magnets and some weirdo stocking stuffers. Stop by for FREE high fives!

Monster hats

A few weeks ago, as a prototype, I made a monster hat. It eats your head.

In a seemingly unrelated incident, we went to Linvilla Orchards last week (I should be getting ad revenue from these people) and Meredith wore it around. Here is a picture of Meredith wearing the hat, holding an adorable child we picked at the farm.



A dude working there saw Meredith, and admired the hat. M said, "My husband made it."

Dude said his head was too big for most hats, and I said, "That's no problem, I can make you one."

Here is the hat I'm about to send to him.


In the past, I've said that I was more interested in the making than the selling of stuff. That's still true. But this year I've become more interested in the selling bit. How does one get one's product assembled and sold in these United States of America, I wonder?

I'm going to look into that some more. I never wanted to be a businessman; I wanted to be a creative. I'm becoming more willing to entertain the idea of mixing them though.

Bulette in plush, in process

Here's a bulette I started on a couple of nights ago. I copied the body pattern from a triceratops plush toy -- disassembled it and started reverse engineering a bulette from there.


I'm impressed by my copying! Like tracing comics when you're a kid, this is the beginning of how you learn to put these things together for yourself.

Next time, I'll try to figure out a way to get the tail up a little more. However, the triceratops provides no guidance on a bulette head, so piecing that together is much more trial and error.


Art Shop is next weekend, so I'll probably spend more time on monsters that use less experimental methods until then. Besides, this works like most of my projects do, I'm due to put it down and not touch it again until late December.

Otyugh in plush

Been working on non-cute, D&D-esque monsters lately too. Here's my first one.


I finished this otyugh a while back, but it took me a long time to get pictures and transfer them to where I could post them. It's a prototype, but full of valuable lessons for the next round. I hope to post these at otyugh.com in the near future.





Lessons learned:

• Long, skinny tentacles/eyestalks/what-have-you with a big bulbous thing on the end are an absolute bitch to invert. Make limbs shorter, wider.
• I needed to insert an armature to make the eyestalk stand up, and the limbs less floppy. This guy's eyestalk doesn't stand up without external support.
  
• I didn't take pix of it (the above was taken before I closed it), but the back of this thing is an ugly mess of visible stitches. I meant to close it on the bottom, but the legs took up all the bottom space. Then all I had left to close was the back. I think the lesson here is to change the proportions next time; make the body bigger, and space the legs farther apart.
• The mouth turned out great! Pretty happy with the mouth. More consistent stitching will improve the look up close. Maybe using the machine will improve that.

One gamer I played Living Forgotten Realms with a few weeks ago told me sight unseen that he would buy a handmade plush otyugh. I hope there's more like him.


Tomorrow: A bulette in process.

Monster making

Since last year, I've alluded to my continuing hobby of plush monster making, but haven't said much.

The link in the sidebar, Monsters for the Home, leads to my sparsely stocked Etsy store, for which I have more stock, but not more gumption to list the stock. With Art Shop coming up in a month, I'm more inclined to save my stuff for direct sales anyway.

Monster making uses an all-different part of my brain, one I don't use much. I'm an abstract thinker; I like fiddling with ideas and symbols, and have little facility with stuff.

But making monsters is all about assembling stuff. For some reason, it's not strange and boggling when I sew, it's just strange.

I have a few patterns, but I get bored with the same thing after one try. So I launch into new things all the time, which takes thought. I used to doodle geometric shapes in work meetings where I didn't have much involvement (all of them). Now, I draw crude 3D models of whatever cotton problem I'm trying to work out. I imagine this is what it's like to be an artist.

Saturday I made my favorite monster yet: Cycloptopus. It's not actually that tricky, but it does embody the sudden, unexpected confluence of a lot of things I've learned about plush, and I'm proud of it.

Very little of my output is unusable -- it's hard to screw up something that's meant to look monstrous. But I see more blemish than finish in most of my production. This guy is different. I might not sell him yet. Might keep him around as a trophy.

Art Shop 2008, Dec. 5 & 6

This is happening soon, so you'll want to make plans to attend.

ALSO NEWS FLASH: I, Jeff Quick, will be showing and selling plush monsters at this event. Come and be entranced.



In these frightening economic times, you'll want to support local artists for your Xmas shopping. And if you are not local, then you'll want to support ME.

Furthermore, the underappreciated capitaltruism of Unda Water will be on sale both days.

COMMENCE EXULTATION.

Monsters, Class of 2007

It might seem as though I stopped working on monsters after Grouphug last year. Really, I just went underground. I was making monsters as Xmas gifts, and some of the intended recipients read this blog, and I didn't want to spoil the surprise.

With Groundhog Day fast approaching, and monsters sent only barely late, the surprise achieved its Best Before date. Thus, pictures.

(l to r) They are [unnamed], Gumption, and ZOMG.

[unnamed]: I sort of forgot to name the guy on the far left, so his new owner, Stan!, has the joy and burden to name him properly. What you can't see very well on [unnamed] is his red tail that matches his red head spikes and red tongue. He's also got three other head spikes that you kind of lose in the Christmas tree in this photo.

The tongue is cute and it works up close, but I forgot one of my lessons from Ulorg, i.e., when you're going to try something, try big. Next monster with a tongue gets a big ol' freakin' tongue.

Gumption: Turned out well, and I understand is doing wonderfully out of corgi range in the home of Monte and Sue.

I dig the nightvision-green buttons I used for his eyes, but they're a little expensive at retail, and I can't find them online anywhere. I also learned about color working on Gumption. He is named truly.

ZOMG: Again, hard to see in the photo, but ZOMG has four legs and a long sticking-up tail. He's probably the friendliest-looking of the trio, and went to Scott.

In addition to quadruped life, ZOMG has the radical difference of TWO buttons on each eye, a black button stacked on top of a white one, if you can even believe. The wide-eyed look contributes to his friendly appearance, I think.


Also, you can see a tag attached to each of them. They say, "Monster by Jeff Quick" and were made by my crafty, crafty, sister-in-law, Alison. Since she took the Handmade Pledge, she got a monster too, but I didn't have it done in time to make the yearbook photo. Here's the after-Christmas phonecam shot:

Might be hard to see here, but Alison's monster has baby blue irises in its gold eyes. One of the color secrets I learned from Gumption is that you can make things more girl-oriented by making them with lighter colors. ALERT THE MEDIA.

The lips were a wild success on this monster. I got good color contrast, and they're awesome-fat so I'm pretty pleased about that.

I forgot to name Alison's monster too. Oops.


I've started a new monster this month, and I have a bunch of pieces cut out for another one that is so experimental, it might be an awful failure. So I guess I'm doing this now.

Between running a nonprofit organization, managing the for-profit freelance aspect of my life, running D&D games, taking on an increasing leadership gig at church, and hanging out with Meredith, I didn't know I had time for a new hobby.

But I guess I do. So the next step is to scrape together money to buy a decent sewing machine, because doing all these by hand takes a freaking long time!

Second Monster

After some experimentation and a respectable amount of putting-off, early this morning I finished Grouphug (grau-FUG).

Grouphug was a scattershot of experiments. Methodical me was all like, "Let's only make one change at a time, and see how that's different." Cliff-diver me was just interested in trying new things. Ultimately, cliff diving took the gold, while "planning ahead" barely qualified.

New lessons:

• Stuff limbs better to keep them from having little creases.
• This furry fabric looks like it'd be cool, but it's actually a bitch.
  
• I thought attaching a band of satiny purple to orange fur would be a neat color and texture contrast. It is, but it's unraveling in a few places, and the stitching in the back is coming apart. It's just a suboptimal fabric.
  
• Also, I wanted it to be a random stripe, not a belt. Must consider monster anatomy more before beginning.
• Soft cotton will be the main event from here on in.
• Horns: I was trying for curved horns. I got cones. Must cut horns in the final shape first.
• Eyes: Can't tell if I like the googly eyes. Can't tell if it matters whether I like them.
  
• Mouth: I drew it on paper before I cut it out of cloth, and I like the drawing better. I was going for jagged fangs, from someone whose primary experience with expressions was reading the Wikipedia entry on "smiles." The smile is sufficiently hideous, but not endearingly inept as I was hoping for. I don't really know how to get what I'm going for here.
  
• Eyebrows: Hell if I know.
• Stitching facial features on was too hard with the fur. So I used super glue. WTF? I guess it worked, but the method is imprecise and my fingers all have glue warts now.

Next monster will be an offshoot of lessons learned from Grouphug, but I have invented all new dumbfounding challenges so the process can safely continue to be unpredictable.

Gender Blender

Started work on another monster tonight, and I felt really girly sitting on the couch sewing. But then I also noted that I was watching Tony Jaa smash the living crap out of some mook in Ong-Bak, which was totally, like, DUDE.

I've Created a Monster

Most of yesterday evening involved putting together this little dude by hand. I have named him Ulorg. Behold Ulorg!


I've been interested in plush lil' monsters for a while. A few months ago I got a bag of fleece scraps from a friend, and now I'm starting to play with it.

Meanwhile, Dylan, our Welsh Corgi, leaves a grisly trail of fluff as he maims his toys. Sometimes I re-stuff it for 5 more minutes of dog fun. Or just throw it away.

But I hate throwing things away when I think I could USE them. So like a Doctor Frankenstein hellbent on homemade kawaii, I inserted spare fluff into Ulorg here.

I'm happy enough with how he looks, but he's definitely a starter monster. I know what I'll do differently next time.

Ideally I'd like to get some identifiable, standard monster shapes and styles together and sell them on Etsy. We'll see.

Lessons learned:

• I used hot glue to put the face on. If I do that again, I'll do it after I stuff the thing.
• I'll make it bigger next time. He's 4" tall. It's hard to get the details I want at this size.
• Subtlety isn't as cool as large strokes. If I'm going for an effect, make it big and weird.
• I have a lot to learn about sewing -- e.g., different stitches, how to achieve points vs. curves, how to knot the thread so it doesn't slip off the needle.
  
• I read somewhere to leave the last bit that you sew inside an indention... an armpit or something, to help cover your finishing strokes. I left Ulorg's crotch open. The reverse enema was cognitively ooky.
  
• Finishing well is difficult.

If I make any more, I'll post pictures, maybe offer them for sale to the half dozen people who read this blog.