My Super Duper Superstore

Looking back on last year's lack of updates to this blog, you'd be forgiven for thinking I've been idle for the last 12 months. Well you'd be wrong. In between looking after Mum and keeping the house in a reasonably hygienic condition (I will NEVER be houseproud) I've been plotting.

It's been a big plot and it's taken most of 2012 to get it into a shape where it's presentable enough to unveil to the world. It's still not perfect but it's now in a good enough state to let you have a look at it.

Well my big news is... I've opened a brand new megastore over at Café Press!

When I first joined the site, if I wanted a shop that would accommodate more than one design I had to pay for it. Obviously that didn't sound like a good idea so I stuck to the basic shops, which were free to use but limited to a single graphic. So each time I wanted to offer a new design I had to open a new shop, each with its own individual name and URL. Having them all so disconnected made them difficult to manage and didn't offer a very easy shopping experience to my customers.

Now, thankfully, Café Press have removed the up-front charges for their premium shops so I've taken advantage and brought all my designs together under one new site.

The shop's called Val's Electric Octopus And Friends and here's my handy guide on how to find your way around it, starting with the home page:

1) This is a big shop with lots of sections, so never get lost thanks to this handy navigation bar allowing you to jump easily between designs and products. This is available to use on every page in the store.

2) The octopus logo on the home page and the blue title in the navigation bar take you to my Facebook page Val Woodhouse Art and Design. Give me a Like on there to make sure you're always the first to find out about any new happenings in the shops, this blog or anything else I might be up to.

3) The old style basic shops will still be open, so feel free to use them if you just want to look at one design. Clicking "Learn More" will take you to a page with links to my basic shops.

4) All the existing designs are in the new store, grouped together by themes:

Electric Animals

Christmas

More Designs

5) The new premium shop makes it so much easier to add new designs, so I'm launching mine with 3 band new Scribbly Rainbows. You'll currently find these in the "~NEW & Exclusive~" section - keep an eye on this for more new designs as the time goes by.

The Scribbly Rainbows are my lively, vibrant take on one of the world's favourite natural wonders. Many causes have adopted a rainbow as their symbol, including Christian groups, LGBT Pride and Autism awareness. These products are perfect for any of those or, of course, anyone who just wants something happy and colourful to brighten up their day.

The full Scribbly Rainbow on a women's long sleeved T shirt.

Matching pairs, such as these decorative steins, make a beautiful gift idea for a favourite couple - "the other half of my rainbow".

When you click on the design you like, you'll be taken to a list of departments - Menswear, Womenswear, etc. This is similar to the layout in the basic shops but I've changed some things around to make locating products as logical as possible.

Clicking on a department then allows you to see everything in that category displaying the chosen design, eg. this is a sample from the Menswear section featuring the new full Scribbly Rainbow.

One of the advantages of the new premium shop is that I can include more than one copy of a product. I loved how the half rainbows fill the small goods like these jewellery items, so I've given you both the zoomed in and zoomed out versions to choose from.

6) What if you know the sort of item you want but you're not sure on the design? Well now I've created a brand new section that allows you, for the first time, to compare products side by side featuring all the different graphics. For this you click on the "Browse By Product" link.

All the departments are laid out in a similar format to those used in the other sections.

This time, larger sections such as Menswear are divided into subsections, in this case based on styles of shirt.

Within each section, all the similar products are grouped together so you can compare the designs side by side.

Clicking on the product you're interested in takes you to a new-look ordering page.

So there you have it! There are still plenty more tweaks to be made and lots of new products I can add but my new megastore Val's Electric Octopus And Friends is now officially open for business. (Truth be told, that hasn't stopped a couple of people already finding it by accident and I was hardly going to turn down their trade!) Come on in, have a good explore round and - better still - treat yourself or a loved one to some of the goodies on offer. It's been a year's worth of work so I hope you like it!

Sometimes Life Hands You A Bucket Of Piss

Hello dear readers, welcome to another blog post firmly under the label of Rants.

A month ago tonight, The Accident That Was Waiting To Happen finally happened. Mum slipped over in the kitchen and fractured her hip. It was a straightforward, clean break (resulting in 2 pins and a thigh-length scar) but it's totally thrown our lives up in the air.

I'm a creature of habit and for almost 30 years our front room has been my little world - my office, my living room, my dossing space. Now, with 48 hours' notice, 30 years of clutter had to be bagged up and shifted upstairs into Mum's tiny box bedroom so she could have her bed downstairs. At least we've been able to come to a room-share agreement so I can still use it as my office (with there being absolutely no more room for furniture upstairs) but now I have to get booted out at 10.30-ish so she can go to bed. The arrangement sometimes works the other way round. Some nights I'm really shattered and would love to turn in early but I can't because I need to be available to help her get into bed. When you're middle aged it rankles a bit when your Mum goes back to dictating your bedtime!

The living room that is now a bedroom.

The clutter that used to be in the living room that is now a bedroom and is now in the box bedroom that is too small and too cold to be any use whatsoever. Yes, I know it's a tip. I'll tidy it up when I find that elusive 25th hour in the day.

Thankfully she's fairly mobile now, she can get to the downstairs toilet and back unassisted, using a walking frame. Often she's up before me and can get dressed and washed on her own. But mostly my day consists of making sure she's OK getting in and out of bed; brewing endless cups of tea; not letting her starve (because she insists that if I do her so much as a slice of toast she's being a burden); struggling with fitting her compression stockings (so tight they almost wrench my thumbs out of their sockets); putting up with her moaning as I make her take her tablets and do her exercises; tackling the housework (it's amazing how little you can get away with and still not look like a pigsty); reassuring her that, no, she HADN'T been stupid in falling over and it could have happened to anybody; overseeing the nurses (thankfully no more visits after yesterday) and emptying the overnight doings in the commode.

Ah yes. The commode.

If a seat that conceals a piss bucket could talk, it would greet me every day with a loud, camp "goooooood moooooorrrrrrrniiiiiing!" It certainly commands the attention. So it's on with the lid, trudge up to the bathroom, dilute, empty, rinse, empty, bleach, dilute, slosh, empty, rinse, empty, flush, trudge downstairs, disinfect. It's not dignified but neither is cleaning up after a dog. I'm also the only person available to do it so a piss bucket kind of sums up my life now. That's why I decided to work from home, because I knew the day would come when I would be called upon to flush my mother's piss.

But the bucket is the least of my worries. I don't begrudge doing that or anything else to help Mum get along. She's done plenty for me over the years, time to pay the debt back. No, Jean-Paul Sartre is the man who summed up my problem perfectly - Hell is other people. By other people I of course mean my brother and sister trudging in and out of our day thinking they know best. So, for the record: I really can't be arsed to grab every penny you think we're entitled to, even given your bizarre logic that if [RACIST INSULT DELETED] the government would fall over themselves to give us millions. I haven't done that string of worthy but non urgent chores you're suggesting because I haven't found a 25th hour in the day. Getting your mother to do leg exercises does not make you homosexual. I, unlike you, am not going to second-guess how Mum will recover and start ranting about scenarios that may never happen. The physiotherapist has years of medical training, you do NOT know more about the workings of the human body than she does. Crutches are a sign of progress, not a stigma. We have our house the way it is and not the way you think it ought to be because it's OUR house and you don't frikkin' well live here.

Honestly, if anything ever happens to me I DO NOT want Negative Nancies like that hovering over me telling me I ought to know my place and not push myself to get better. Too many opinions, no consideration for the person actually trying to recover or the one who sees what really goes on all day.

So that's been my month. Absolutely no time for anything else, never mind work-

"To remain entitled to New Enterprise Allowance, you must provide evidence of continuing self-employment when we ask you... Please send your evidence to reach us by 03/02/12. If we do not have the evidence by this date, your payment will be suspended."

AAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHH! NOT NOW! CAN'T YOU SEE I'M BUSY WITH A BUCKET OF PISS?

Whither Fiddle-Farting?

Welcome back, I hope 2012's kicked off to a great start for you all.

Well Christmas was as crummy as I expected it to be in a house full of boredom, depression and short tempers. For once I'm not talking about myself! I've decided to put a bit of money away each week by hook or by crook and go somewhere - anywhere - else next Christmas. I don't care if it's just the hotel on the other side of town!

With the mood miraculously lightening as soon as the decorations came down, I really needed a break to get over the holiday stress. So I wrote off last week as a warm-up session to get back into gear. Some decluttering to make the most of the extra Christmas recycling collections (always a foolproof way of getting into a good frame of mind) and a bit of light creative work.

Fun with patterns...

From Patterns For Colouring

...cack-handed attempts at bead-sewing...

...and helping my friends over at Colin's Chicks redesign their forum.

If, like me, you're a massive fan of ITV1 show Dancing On Ice, this is a fun and friendly website dedicated to the 2011 runner-up professional skater Colin Ratushniak. As he's had to miss this year due to other commitments, the Chicks are working on keeping his fans informed of the projects he's working on these days, as well as letting the Powers That Be know that there's a big demand for him to come back in the next series.

Also over the new year, I learned a brilliant new verb.

Fiddle-farting

Used in a sentence:

RESOLVE to stop fiddle-farting around on the Internet or with the TV remote control and start dedicating myself 100% to my life’s work.

Taken from the list of 12 artists' resolutions posted on ArtBizBlog, the website of art business coach Alyson Stanfield. Feel free to study the list for yourself and download the poster. Plenty of food for thought on it, whether you're an artist or not.

Which of us is never guilty of fiddle-farting at least a couple of times a day? It's very likely you got alerted to this blog post during a fiddle-farting session. In fact you probably only clicked on the link because it had the word "farting" in it!

For someone like me, working from home, it's an occupational hazard. There's no start and end time, no one to tell me what to do. Home life and work life get blurred into one. I can work whenever I feel inspired and take downtime whenever I feel tired.

My business depends on a bit of constructive fiddle-farting. If I'm not on Twitter I might miss a link to a really useful website. If I don't check Facebook I could lose the chance to leave useful advice for a fellow freelancer who would then, in turn, give me feedback on my own work. Doodling my pencils over a colouring pattern is an exercise in creative problem solving and colour experimentation. It isn't just me desperately avoiding growing up, honest! In fact, let's be brutal, I write this blog not because I'm obsessed with sharing my innermost thoughts but because I hope someone takes pity on me and buys a T shirt.

So when you're your own boss, success or failure hangs on knowing when to be disciplined and when to indulge in a few minutes' fiddle-farting.

Time to take my own advice then and get prepared for a brand new year. What have I got planned? Well getting the ideas is always the easy part! I'm working on improvements to the online shops which will make it much easier for you to buy my art from me, so look out for some surprises on that front very soon. I'm also going to put together some previews of all the projects I want to work on over the year and hopefully this will help me with fundraising. There's also the big challenge of trying to branch out into getting clients from local printers and small businesses (that's really scary when you're pretty much housebound and out of practice in dealing with actual real human beings!)

The rest of the time can be spent sniffing around for new networking opportunities, showcases for my work and any other chance to flex my creative muscles. All of which, you might guess, will come from a productive session of fiddle-farting.

One Week On - The Adventures Of Frosty The Snowperve

So there ends my first week officially trading. Not that my bank balance would know it. I've still got to master that tricky little job of getting people to part with their money.

It's strange not having to go to the Job Centre, the Chamber of Commerce or anywhere else they might want to shunt me. It feels like I've forgotten something and I'm going to be punished. But no, I really am getting the New Enterprise Allowance, it's gone into my bank at the first time of asking which is a rarity! It's creepy how institutionalised those couple of years of being unemployed has made me, without even realising it. It's a big leap in the mindset to get used to being totally responsible for my own fate from now on.

I'm progressing with updating the Café Press shops, I need a big push to get those finished in the next couple of days. That would still give me time to get a Christmas project started although I think I'll have to scale it back and do the full release next Christmas instead.

My priority for now is just to get people aware that I've got lots of great Christmas gifts for sale, so that means daily promotion on Twitter and Facebook plus trying to find places to promote this blog. I can't stress enough, I really need YOU to help me by sending my links to anyone who might want to buy from me. My Enterprise Allowance is just a little safety cushion and already it's been gobbled up by a sort-of unexpected £140 bill. (Sort-of in that they've had 6 months to chase me up for it but of course the obvious time to do it is 3 weeks before Christmas!)

So over on Café Press I've achieved my main aim of getting my 4 Christmas shops updated. This has been a massive job because nobody's going to look at them before November so they're not worth doing earlier in the year. Last Christmas, as you may recall if you've been following my story, I was totally without a computer so I couldn't have done it anyway. So that's 2 years' catching up I've had to do. It happens to have been the busiest year I've known on that site in terms of them adding new products, so I've had over 300 of them to install, then individually tweak the print sizes and retail prices.

I've also had a bit of a problem with one of my designs in particular. This guy...

Cheery and cuddly he may be but he was giving me a headache. You see, the Café Press graphics tool doesn't give you the option to scroll your image around the product. It's automatically centred. Which meant that on the women's shirts his twiggy hands ended up in a rather unfortunate position. Let's just say I ended up calling him Frosty The Snowperve. So I've had to tweak the old fella and now the women's tees have him with his hands firmly by his sides and out of trouble! (Click on the illustrations to see them in more detail.)

The category that's had the biggest overhaul this season has been the bags. You'll find a lovely range of 13 new bags, wallets and purses, including gadget sleeves for Kindles, iPads and Nooks. These bags are perfect for getting you in the mood for Christmas shopping, so much so that 4 of them...

...come with a little extra surprise...

This bonus image, printed on the reverse side, is ONLY available on these 4 products in the 4 Christmas shops and is bound to put a smile on everyone's face on a busy, cold December High Street.

The hundreds of little snowflakes in this design inspired the other 2 shops, which are variations on a theme depending on whether you'd prefer a British or American date format. Here they are on some more winter must-haves.

The best-dressed way to open presents, in special Christmas nightclothes.

When it's cold on the outside, keep warm on the inside with a range of Thermos products.

Also exclusive to the 4 Christmas shops are these special gift stockings. The one on the left is also available in green.

To shop for any of these products, which aren't available anywhere else, look to the left of this page and click on the design you like.

I'm currently in the process of getting the latest products into the other Café Press shops. Watch this space for more news and my pick of the goodies on offer. Better still, follow me on Twitter or send a Facebook friend request (mention that you found me via this blog) and you'll be the first to know.

Have a great week and happy shopping!

Happy Mega Monday!

It's the last Monday in November, the day that some bright spark with a marketing degree has dubbed "Mega Monday" (also known as "Cyber Monday"). The trend over the last few years is for this day to be the busiest of the year for internet retailers, marking the start of a 2 week online shopping spree. Being the first Monday after the November payday, everyone knows exactly how much they've got to spend on the festivities. In America, it's the first Monday after Thanksgiving, which is when the nation's psyche switches towards thinking about Christmas. Ordering now also gives plenty of time for goods to be delivered in time to be wrapped without a last minute panic.

Visa are predicting 4.8 million British people will buy online today, spending around £303 million on their credit and debit cards. It's also expected to be the first year when Christmas shopping on smartphones becomes mainstream, with an estimated 12.2% of purchases made on mobile devices.

So if you're one of those browsing the web for gifts, this is a good time to remind you to shop around and don't just go to the obvious sites. The world is full of small independent traders who depend on your purchases much more than the major companies do. You'll end up with very unique arts, crafts, clothing, food, furniture, etc which your loved ones will treasure a lot more than all the mass-produced stuff you'll find in the big retailers.

So, in the hope you'll want to spread a bit of Christmas cheer my way, here's my handy guide to everything you can currently buy from me. Just click the pictures to take you to the appropriate stores:

Café Press:
13 individual stores, each one containing around 200 clothes, gifts, homeware and more. All the products shown here are available in each of the stores.

There are 4 special shops for Christmas. Here you can stock up on unique Christmas cards and decorations...

...winter warmers...

...essentials to get you through the festivities...

...and mementoes of baby's first Christmas.

•Note: Prices shown in GB£ are converted from US$ are may therefore vary due to international exchange rates.

Zazzle:
My Zazzle store currently stocks 3 product ranges.

Font Islands: Stunningly detailed and realistic 3D graphics available on mugs (which can be customised with the recipient's name), mouse mats and shopping bags.

Flags: Grungy flags on a variety of background colours can be bought on badges, magnets, keyrings and an assortment of T-shirts. Currently available for the UK; USA; France; Germany; Ireland; Italy; South Africa; Japan; Canada; Australia and New Zealand.

Animal T-shirts: Illustrations based on a salmon, peacock and stag.

DeviantArt:

A lot of the work in my DeviantArt portfolio is also available for purchase. This can be bought on wall art; greetings cards; coasters; magnets; mouse mats; mugs; postcards and puzzles. Look for the little bag symbol to see what's for sale, here are a few samples to whet your appetite.

Happy shopping!

• "Mega Monday To Kick Off Christmas Sale Season" - The Guardian