New in the Etsy Shop

I haven't talked much about the shop lately, so I thought it might be time to give you an update on how things have been in the office over the last year or so.

In a word- fantastic. I love it. I love the designs, I love the clients, I love creating new pretty things. I'm the luckiest girl ever. I spend my days doing what I love in my slippers with my puppy sleeping in my lap. I try not to talk about it, honestly, because I don't want to rub it in. It has exceeded every expectation I ever had about running my own business.

Not that there aren't trying things about it. My designs get ripped off. My text gets ripped off. Sometimes that weighs on me, probably more than it should. The principle of the issue is what really gets me. I understand that there are going to be common threads, because wedding trends are what drive my designs as well as the designs of my competitors. What I don't understand is a fellow designer thinking that it would ever be ok to exactly replicate something of my creation to the best of their ability, and then sell it. We all got into the business of creating things so that we could create things, didn't we?

In order to combat my frustration with that, I have taken to creating one new item every time I start feeling blue about the fact other creative people think that its ok for me to do the legwork for them. This might seem counter-intuitive... but I like to remind myself that I have yet to plumb the depths of my creativity. Its a good challenge for me, and it helps me understand the market trends better for the upcoming year.

Here are a couple of fun things that have hit the shop over the last year (there are at least 10-15 more here if you are feeling particularly peckish)