Who doesn't love Etsy.com? I'm infatuated with scanning the various creations made by crafty stay at home moms and men who like to whip out a chain saw and sander thingy and make pretty stuff out of wood. I so wish I were crafty and patient like Santa's little elves who disguise themselves as sellers on etsy.

I've said this many times and I'll say it again. I am creative but not crafty. I can design like it's nobody's business but I cannot sit down with a glue gun and yarn and make something to be proud of. I attribute this crafty issue to my lack of patience and the often used, yet horrifying, media called cotton balls. BAHHH COTTON BALLS! I blame kindergarten. That's when this all began. I vividly remember sitting at my desk, chewing the eraser off my pencil - because erasers taste delish - and watching the teacher pass around construction paper, glitter, glue, and cotton balls.

The assignment that day was to make a house out of paper covered in snow; a winter wonderland if you will. I immediately got started by smudging glue all over the bottom of the construction paper. I used elmers, the white stuff. You can put that stuff all over your arms for fun and let it dry and then rub it off into little balls like boogers. It was never as fun as rubber cement though. That stuff smelled like heaven mixed with gasoline. The perfect combo. You could put that on the tip of your nose and smell its goodness for minutes upon minutes. But when it dried and you needed to roll it off your skin, you were in for a World of hurt.

Back to the story, so, after bathing in glue, it was time to separate the cotton balls and spread them over my gluey canvas. This is when my World changed as I knew it. The feeling of those cotton balls between my fingers made me want to drop to the ground, grab my ears, and scream in terror. So that you can understand, imagine the sound of nails on a chalkboard, or a fork screeching across a glass, or your mom nagging you to clean your room as a kid. Just like that, that's how I feel about touching cotton balls. I'm grinding my teeth as a type this right now. Needless to say, I refused to complete most projects in school from then on that involved creating 'snow' or 'texture' on any canvases. Maybe this is why I almost failed kindergarten? Or maybe that was because I couldn't tell the difference between a dime and a nickel? Who knows.


As you can see, crafting was never meant to be in my life. However, as I mentioned, I'm quite creative and enjoy the arts. I have a career in graphic and print design so I must be doing something right. Now this gets me to thinking about what I could create that I could sell on etsy. I can't sew pillows or make beaded jewelry but I can make printable art! There are many people on etsy that sell printables like nursery or basic/custom home decor art. They sell it for a bit of a steep price and get this, people actually purchase this stuff. I think I've stumbled upon something! Perhaps I can create my own store doing the same but for a fraction lower of a cost so that I can stay competitive.
Thus, my etsy journey begins.

In order to get a store up and running I need a portfolio and items to display of 'previous work'. If you, my beautiful readers (well, some of you are kind of not beautiful but maybe you are on the inside), would like to pass on ideas for me to recreate and put into production, please pass them on. This could be my fun new hobby. Owen will be pleased that I'll no longer say "Let's go shopping!" on the weekends and interrupt his national championship game on NCAA on the Xbox, where he's up for the Heisman as a freshman wide receiver. Men...