A Film Screening, Some Frustrations & a Need to Re-focus

This post was originally titled "Stella's Debut at the Handmade Nation Screening." I was planning to post it yesterday. I had all of the copy written and I was all excited to show pics of Stella, our recently renovated Airstream, when I realized I had unintentionally deleted all 81 photos I took over the past week! That will sure ruin your day. Man, I was so angry about it. I had photos of The WonderCraft's first Mix & Make happy hour event, pics of the aforementioned Austin premier of Handmade Nation, amazing photos of teeny-tiny baby toads from our pond sitting in Patrick's hand (worthy of a post all to themselves) and some really cute pics of our cat sitting on the laundry hamper. I mean, really cute.

The discovery of this horrendous error on my part sent me into a swift nosedive of self-pity and creative paralysis. Ok, it wasn't really the loss of the photos that did me in; they were just the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak. I've been in kind of a creative funk for weeks now, brought on by my new need to juggle 2 businesses. Don't get me wrong, I love The WonderCraft & I'm super-excited about its potential and having such a blast with it all. It's just been hard to figure out where to go with The Snuggle Herd in the meantime. I've been making some decisions about which products to keep, which to chuck, new things I want to add and a slightly new look & such. And I'm also trying to find ways to become less dependent on my {awesome} husband, Patrick, for getting the technical stuff done. It makes it really hard on both of us when I'm relying on him to take photographs of new products, make changes to my website and code my email blasts. He is now the default website administrator for The WonderCraft, plus he has his own creative projects he'd like to work on and I often feel like I'm keeping him from them. So change is a-comin' to The Snuggle Herd... I'll keep you posted. Fortunately I was able to pull out of that nosedive and ended the day by doing some inspired art-making that made me very happy and led to all kinds of new ideas for stuff to make and ways to handle my biz. Yay!

Anyhoo, without further ado, here is what I had intended to post yesterday, along with photos I'm borrowing from my fellow WonderCrafter, Jen Bryan, & her pal, Stephanie Nance {thanks, ladies!}:

Handmade Nation, a super-cool documentary by Faith Levine, was screened last Sunday at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema and there was a mini craft fair outside the theater. The WonderCraft was invited to participate (thanks, Sublime Stitching gals!) so we worked around the clock to get Stella, our Airstream trailer, ready. Sunday was to be her big debut, the first time the trailer was opened to the public, so we wanted her to be beautiful inside & out!

We painted, had flooring installed, Beth A & her husband built bench seating that doubles as storage, and I made curtains. It was a mad scramble to get everything done (and of course there is still a lot more that we want to do), but Stella looks radiant! Everyone seemed to be pretty impressed with her & we had a blast showing her off. We did a fun make & take project creating accessory bags from old t-shirts (shown below). The craft fair and film screenings drew a wonderful crowd - we met tons of lovely people and were inspired by all of the creativity in the air. It was a beautiful day filled with craftacular fun! [Photo at very top of post is the brilliant work of Houstonian Magda Sayeg, a.k.a. KnittaPlease, who was in attendance at the premier.]