Oakland, Craft Month, Stash Books, and other reasons for my absence

I haven’t posted in a very long time, but I have a really good excuse: I moved to Oakland (yay! finally!), and once we finally got the place somewhat organized and livable, my work at C&T Publishing just blew up and I’ve not had but a minute to write a blog post here.

I still don’t have time to talk about everything I want to talk about because I’m hoping on a plane to Indianapolis for the National Art Materials Trade Association (NAMTA) trade show at 6am on Tuesday morning and haven’t even finished making some project samples I want to take. Aaaahhhh!

But I am going to talk about the reasons I have been so busy at work.

#1 three trade shows in April & May. enough said.

#2 Craft Month on the C&T Publishing blog

I had this great idea in our Sales & Marketing Department meeting one Tuesday in February that we should celebrate National Craft Month (March) by doing one free project a day every day in March on the C&T blog. The idea was well-received and I was happy in thinking it wouldn’t be that much work because I’d mostly just be pulling projects from our books.

Well, writing 31 additional blog posts in a month, is a little more work than I realized. Sure, all the projects were downloads, but each post had to include at least one image of the project, an image of the book, a blurb about the book it came from, a blurb about why it was a cool project, and a blurb about craft month.

It still doesn’t sound like all that much work as I’m sitting here writing this, but my workload was already intense when I took this project on, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I was slammed all month long.

The fantastic news is that the Craft Month blog project DOUBLED the traffic to our blog in March! Which sounds like a great accomplishment to me   Good thing too, because I had no idea that April was going to bring the opposite of relief…

#3 The launch of C&T Publishing’s new imprint, Stash Books. Super exciting! I LOVE, the books under this new imprint and am so excited about everything to do with Stash Books. Just check out these book covers:

If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that City Quilts was written just for me (see the blog post I wrote about it on the C&T Blog) and that hamster on the cover of Socks Appeal is…very addictive to look at, I must say. I’ve been lucky enough to hold this softie-made-from-a-sock in person, and he’s a real heartbreaker. BeWARE of this book, I tell ya.

The Stash Books blog was launched last Friday 4/2, so as soon as Craft Month ended, I found myself in another scramble to assist with getting the blog ready for publication, including editing posts and pages, starting a Twitter account for the new imprint, etc, etc.

Although things have been really hectic, I am happy to say I have been asked to be both a blogger at StashBooks.com and the blog editor as well! I am in dire need of a better photo of me, but check out me on the blog team page.

So with all this writing and editing I’ve been doing at the C&T Blog, the Stash Blog, and the OOAK Barbies Blog (which I realize I haven’t mentioned yet until now), does it make some sense that I haven’t posted here on my own blog in a while? I think it does. But I have so much to explain, I must move my own blog up on my priorities list.

You know what I did do though? I started a posterous account and was blogging for myself there for a little while. I was wooed by how easy it sounded to post just by writing an email, etc, so tested the site out as a possible alternative to this one. But apparently I am really particular about how my posts look, because I wasn’t really happy with how things looked when I posted via email. And it didn’t save time to be going in and editing these posts from the posterous interface.

So that’s my story for the past couple of months. When I return from NAMTA I can’t wait to write a blog post here about my budding freelance business.  Sit tight.