How to Get Thousands of Business Cards for Under $20

First off, I'd like to welcome my newest follower, GurlNextDoor, who blogs here and here.  Thanks for following me!

This is way too good not to share, especially since I know that some of my readers also run their own small businesses.  Groupon.com has an amazing deal going on right now where you pay $17 for $70 worth of Vistaprint printing services.  You have to redeem it all in one visit, but that's not a problem for me.  I did make over 100 handmade business cards for my Etsy shop, but it never hurts to have a ton more for when I run out of those.  To give you an idea, you can order 250 premium business cards on the Vistaprint site for $10, so I hope you can do the math.  You can also get an additional 250 free business cards, in a limited design selection.  I'll do the math for you: You can get 2000 business cards for $17! That's unheard of!  Vistaprint offers much more than just business cards.  They also sell: postcards, banners, holiday cards, stickers (order them with your business name and url and seal envelopes if you sell small things), loyalty cards (for example buy 4 items get one for 20% off), websites, magnets, pens, logo design services, apparel, and much more.  So I hope that someone else can take advantage of this fantastic offer too.

And if you have a budget of basically $0, they also have some free options.  You can get 250 free business cards with a limited selection of designs with free shipping if you click this: Redeem your 250 Premium Business Cards for $10 here .  You can also have them design a logo for you that is free to use on things you print from them.  Here's an example of their free logos:

Most of them are awful clip art but some are actually okay.

Creativity Unleashed

First off, I would like to welcome my 3 new followers. I am getting so many new followers lately and I love it. You guys are all awesome : )  So hello to Stavroula who blogs here and to Copyboy who blogs here and to Jesy who blogs here.  Thanks so much for following me, you two.

The rest of you may have realized by now that I am an artist.  I just can't help but see beauty nearly everywhere I look.  And I am constantly having ideas for things that would look really cool.  One of my goals that I have been neglecting, which is on my bucket list page, is to doodle at least once a week.  I plan to start doing that this week.  When I was in college, I doodled all the time in an (often futile) attempt to stay awake during lectures, especially the ones with really comfortable chairs and a professor with a monotous voice.  So I was doodling five times a week, and I just felt really creative constantly.  Sidenote-ish: I plan to scan and upload the doodles from my lecture notes in the following weeks, just for fun.  The one thing that I have never really been good at, besides drawing realistically, is painting.  I am pretty good at doodling abstractly, and semi-realistically (meaning monsters, stylized people, etc.), but I never thought about painting in the same style.  I don't know why, but the thought just never occured to me.  Until yesterday.  You see, I joined the site that I am sure is actually crack, but it disguises itself as Pinterest, and I am now hopelessly addicted.  And it has made me so insanely creative.  And one of the things that I have taken from it, aside from hundreds of really cool jewelry ideas, is that I would really like to start painting.  The idea has been growing in my brain ever since I began watching the show Switched at Birth on ABC Family.  One of the main characters is a teenage girl named Bay and she is insanely creative and talented.  But I could totally do that: things like painting over tape and painting cool patterns and designs.  I just need to doodle with paint.  And my hope is that people will like my work and buy it from my Etsy shop.  So that's another thing I would like to do with my life.  Well it's basically an extension of what I already knew I wanted to do, create things that make people happy.  And thanks to my wonderful family, I have a bit of birthday money, not much, but enough to make this possible.  I can certainly afford a couple of canvasses to start out on and some paintbrushes and paint.  So I just wanted to share that with you.  Also, completely unrelated: I can hear my neighbors watching porn while I'm typing this: distracting.  And I will leave you with various sketches I've done over my lifetime.

I thought it would be cool to buy some white shoes at Goodwill and doodle on them with sharpies.
It was, but I wish I had doodled the shoes to match, and I also have outgrown them now.

the other side of that shoe; the other shoe is doodled with
random designs in color and I like it much less, one day if I feel ambitious, I might paint over them

a doodle I did while watching The Lovely Bones; I hate the butterfly

a sketch I made in one of my many high school art classes

Disclosed Location

Okay, guys, are you ready for a giant change on my blog? I'm disclosing my location. I live in Seattle. Yep, so now I'm not so mysterious.  But I'm still not telling you my name, or G's.  Living in Seattle means that I take pictures like this.

Yep, I took this photo, but I've never actually been to the top of the Space Needle.
I will someday, but I'm afraid of heights, so not for a while.

And now I need your help.  Since I have now disclosed my location, I need to rename my blog.  I would like to keep the Happenings part but add an adjective before it.  Any suggestions?  Also, I am not naming my blog Seattle Happenings. No way.  Hopefully this will also shorten my blog name a bit.

DIY: T-shirt to Pillow

First off: I would like to welcome my 32nd follower, Ryan Adair, who blogs here.

Now let's get down to business.  First off, I did this project last month and thought that I already wrote a post about it, but it appears that I forgot to write the post.  One of my goals is to face my fear of my sewing machine.  You see, I have had some experiences with sewing, though not many.  Most of them involve a sewing and a quilting class which I took in middle school.  I managed to make a tote bag and a bajillion cross-stitches in the sewing class.  And then came the quilting class.  The quilting class is when I learned that sewing machines want to make my life as difficult as possible.  Somehow I managed to complete a quilt.  I still don't know how.  Every single day, I had to combat the sewing machine and its crazy desire to unthread its needle, or just stop working altogether, or even worse stop working and make a loud annoying noise like it's commiting suicide whenever I pushed on the foot pedal.  So somehow I made it through it.  And recently I was like, "Oh hey, my mom was nice enough to buy me a sewing machine 5 or more years ago and I've never even used it."  So then I started my first project, which was trying to make a shirt that I outgrew but loved the design too much to part with it, into something that I could still wear.  And from that attempt, I learned that if you try to sew with really thin fabric, it will become mind-bogglingly entrapped in your feed dogs and your boyfriend will have to dismantle your sewing machine and remove it for you.  Luckily I didn't ruin the shirt, since I was sewing on a scrap piece I had removed from it.  And then the weather got cold and the shirt got neglected since it has short sleeves, so I wouldn't be wearing it anytime soon anyway.  And then my sewing machine sat all alone and sad for a few months.  And then I thought, I should make a pillow out of a T-shirt that I don't wear anymore.  You see, I have a lot of guy T-shirts that have cool designs on them, but I have been making an effort to dress like an actual girl for about a year now, so they have been alone and sad and unworn.  So I picked the shirt I used to love the most and decided to make it into a pillow.  The reason behind my need for a pillow is that I like to sit on my bed to work during the day, so I prop a few pillows behind my back for comfort.  One of the pillows I use for that purpose was sort of falling to pieces, so I wanted to replace it with something that looked nicer and wasn't falling apart.  It was surprisingly easily and my sewing machine didn't try to kill itself or me, not even once.  Keep in mind that while I have made a pillow once or twice before (Twice!), I have never been properly taught how.  I have actually learned two things from the crack that is Pinterest since making this that would have been good to know, so I will pass that knowledge on to you.  Lastly, before we begin, I would just like to say that if you are making this pillow to replace another one, you could just sew it over the top of the other pillow, or make a sort of removable pillow case so you can take it off and wash it, by using velcro or a zipper.  The first option would make you have to handstitch an entire side, and the last option is probably not a good idea for beginners.  If you're going to make this pillow, be sure to read through to the end before you start because I link how to handstitch the pillow shut when you're finishing it up.

Step One: Wrap your T-shirt over your pillow to see what
size you want it to be, as well as where you want the design to be.

Step 2: Remember why you are making the pillow:
The other pillow's best days are behind it.

Step 3: Look at the old pillow and have a moment of silence.

Step 4: Turn the shirt inside out and then pin the bottom of the shirt even with the
bottom of the pillow, leaving a small seam allowance, which you do not measure.

Step 5: Realize that you should have actually pinned a straight line along the top
instead, so now you have to cut across the top of the shirt to remove it from the pillow. 

Step 6: Sew along the actual seam on your shirt because that is
easier than measuring and you don't have to remove pins as you go.
Sidenote: Isn't my sewing machine pretty?

Step 7: Admire your pretty seam.

Step 8: Remove pins.

Step 9: Pin a straight line across the top portion of the shirt where it will make a square or rectangle.  This
means that your line will probably be just below the sleeves if you are trying to get the biggest pillow possible.

Step 10: Sew along your line of pins but make sure you leave an opening to turn it right side out and then stuff it. 
I probably should have left a bigger opening, but it worked with a smallish one.  It was just more time-consuming.

Step 11: Be surprised by how well this is going and admire your work.

Step 12: Turn your shirt right side out through the opening you left at the top.

Step 13: If you are working with another pillow, remove its stuffing and then put it in your new pillow. 
Otherwise, you should have bought some stuffing and then put that in your pillow.

Step 14: Remove big handfuls of stuffing.

Step 15: Struggle to put big handfuls of stuffing into the too small hole in your pillow.

Step 16: Stuff until you're happy with it, then smooth out the lumps and handstitch the opening closed.

Step 17: Have some of your stitches still visible, but rather than take it out, google
"how to handstitch", and then redo it, decide that it's good enough.

Step 18: Admire your work! You're all done : )

Sidenote: You should probably iron your shirt before you start, but I don't own an iron, so I didn't.  Click here to learn how to handstitch the pillow shut for Step 17.  And that's it: now you can use your lovely new pillow.  And if you did it the way I did, more or less, you can use the fabric from the dying pillow for something else later, because that's how I roll. I am frugal.