janis

Did you know?

  Did you know that when a brown/black duck feather catches a breeze and scoots across the floor it looks amazingly similar to a cockroach? 

A Nod from Craftrends Magazine

So I was lying in bed the other night, reading the March issue of Craftrends magazine, trying to lull myself to sleep.  (That's no reflection on the magazine content; it just seems that that's the only time I really have to review the myriad of magazines I receive.)  The cover had really intrigued me:  no pictures, just “Scrapping & Knitting” splashed across it, followed by “Meet retailers who are doing both”.  In spite of my long time love of needle arts, I’ve never learned how to knit.  My mom always crocheted so that’s what I learned to do as a young girl and knitting was always an enigma to me. 

I turned to the article, which I found very interesting, and went on to the other articles.  The emphasis in this issue is on needle arts and the feature story is titled “Embroidery”.  I’ve always enjoyed needle arts, was an avid sewer prior to my discovery of scrapbooking and stamping, and this is the main reason we’ve taken Timeless Touches in the direction you see today. 

I flipped to the embroidery article and was further intrigued by the sub-title:  “Simple stitching is popping up all over the place”.  Well, yes, it is, I thought to myself.    I read on:

The desire for personalization is a driving force behind embroidery’s growth as a craft, says Jaime Guthals at Interweave Press.  “We have a new generation of creative freehand embroiderers,” she says.  “These crafters see stitching and embroidery as a way to make their finished pieces more personal.  They’re tired of mass retail.  They’re willing to be a little more creative and experiment with merging techniques.”

Embroidery is showing up in fashion, knitwear, home décor, scrapbooking, and quilting.  Craft retailers across the board need to take a look at adding or increasing embroidery supplies in their retail mix.

I was so excited to read this as it conveys so perfectly what we’re all about:  personalization & creativity.  There are an increasing number of products on the market today to achieve the stitched look on paper crafts:  machine stitched cardstock, stitched embellishments, rub-ons, and a wide variety of rubber stamps.  But none of those truly achieves the personalization, creativity and texture that can be accomplished with actually stitching on the project.  Yes, our templates have some standard designs, but there are so many things you can do with those basic patterns to achieve true customization.  We have kept the designs rather simple for that very reason.  Every hole in every template is placed there for a specific reason and that is to gain the most variety and use from the base pattern.

I kept reading, wishing I had known this article was in the works so I could have told the author about our product line.  Then I saw the Scrapbooking paragraph:

Along with using loose fibers to embellish tags or accents on their layouts, dedicated scrapbookers like to add actual embroidery to their scrapbook pages.  Many embroider freehand, but products are available to help the less confident achieve the perfect page.  For example, a company called Timeless Touches produces design and alphabet templates made for embroidering on cardstock.  The crafter pokes a needle through precut holes in the plastic template into the paper, removes the template, then stitches the design with floss or fiber.

Again, she succinctly summarized our company focus.  Not everyone feels confident doing it on their own, so we provide the tools for instant success.   I’ve taught quite a few classes and demonstrated our product line at conventions across the country over the last few years, and I hear over and over again that scrappers love the stitched look but don’t feel like they can achieve the results they desire.  That’s why we’re here, folks!  We make it easy.  And when it’s easy, we enjoy doing it.  It’s that simple. 

Thank you, Craftrends!

Nightly Routine

I’ve mentioned before that our ducks love tomatoes.  This is their absolute favorite treat, though Huey is becoming a real fan of Cheerios too.  Each night when they come in from their outdoor pen, they get a chopped up Roma tomato and almost always get a fresh bath in our tub.  They love being clean just about as much as they love chomping down those tomatoes.  So here are a few pictures from Saturday night. 

Here they are stretching up to grab the tomatoes from Todd’s hand.  Louie (the only male) is at the left, closest to Todd. I point this out because he looks a lot like a female right now.  They are nearing the end of their molt.  The girls lost all of their flight feathers and Louie lost his pale grey feathers and green head (well, just the green feathers…the head stayed attached).  They were replaced by the more typically female camouflage brown/black feathers.  We say he’s a ducky in drag.  J    You can see our dog, Jake, at the left of the picture.  He was used to being the only pet for awhile and gets a little jealous of the attention the ducks get.   So…..

Jake gets tomato treats sometimes too!   Who would have ever thought that dogs like tomatoes?  Certainly not us!  We have to be sure to give him lots of cuddles when the ducks are around.  He doesn’t snap at them or anything, but he just acts totally bummed and depressed.  He’s a very affectionate dog and wants all of our attention all of the time.

After their treats, it was bath time.  Since it was so cold outside (about 40 degrees, which is very cold for March here), we made the water a little warmer.  Ducks’ normal internal body temp is 107 so they are able to stay warm pretty well themselves.  However, since we have spoiled indoor/outdoor ducks, we thought they might like to warm up a bit in the ducky hot tub.  J    No, it’s not really that hot…that would be bad for them.  It was actually just slightly warmer than lukewarm.

As you can see by the wave action, they really got into it!  One of these days I’ll do a short film of them splashing.  They dunk their heads repeatedly, making the water roll down their backs.  Then they’ll stretch and flap their wings.   When they’re done with that, they’ll do a little mating dance (the three of them swimming in a circle, chattering the entire time) or start all over again.   During the molt, they don’t have much interest in mating.  However, the girls have their flight feathers back again and Louie was making advances on them in the tub, so we’re thinking the molt is about done.  Since this is their first full molt, we don’t know when Louie will change back to his boy colors or when Huey and Dewey will start laying eggs again, but it looks like it could be soon!

It's raining!

I woke up at 5:00 this morning (yeah, I know, 5:00 am on a Saturday) to the sound of rain.  Yes, RAIN!  Now, those of you in soggier climates might not understand how perfectly thrilling this was for me today but here in the Phoenix area we’ve been in a drought.  We’ve gone a record-setting 143 days without measurable rain.  That’s nearly 5 months with hardly a drop from the sky.   Needless to say, the whole city is rejoicing because not only is it raining, but we’re actually supposed to get about a half inch of the wet stuff today. 

As is their usual routine, Todd opened the back door to let the ducks out but today they heard a strange sound, peered out, saw the drops coming down, and stepped back into the kitchen!   They didn’t know what to think of it and were a little leery.  Can you imagine?  Ducks afraid of rain?  It took them a few minutes, but soon they were out paddling in the puddles, waddling over to their pen.  They’re pretty happy out there now, doodling in the mud, hunting for bugs & worms and nibbling on their lettuce.  What a carefree life they lead! 

genetics & accounting

This has been a major accounting week for me (and with more to come).  I’ll be the first to admit that I have a mental block in this area.  Well, perhaps it’s more of an emotional block.  I’m perfectly capable of doing basic bookkeeping.  Given a little instruction and guidance, I can enter the appropriate figures into the computer program with the best of them. 

It doesn’t mean I like it.  Or ever will.

Because of this, I tend to procrastinate and get myself into a hole.  This is followed by a major spurt of motivation and drive to accomplish what I should have been doing all along.  Fortunately, I have a good CPA to make sure I’m always on the right path.  And a side benefit is that she’s a good friend whom I’ve known for about 25 years. 

So if I have adequate resources (my CPA friend and the computer program), sufficient intelligence (I was a stock broker for 10 years so I’d like to think I have a little financial know-how), and (obviously) the need to do it, why does it come so hard for me?  Ah, the emotional block!

You see, my father was an accountant.  A very good one, at that.  And his specialty was keeping the books for small businesses.  I have many personality traits of my father, so I should have the accounting gene too, right?

However, my childhood is full of memories of my dad working long hours during tax season, planning family vacations around his month-end reports, etc.  He was self-employed for many of his working years, working out of a home office during my teens and twenties.  I saw how hard he worked and I think part of me rebelled against that.  I was determined (consciously or not) to take a different path. 

But here I am, self-employed, working long hours, running a small business, planning vacations around trade shows…   Is my life so different from my father’s?    It’s remarkably similar in some ways.   I just wish my desk was as clean as his always was.  Here’s hoping that gene will pop up one of these days too!

the unthinkable

It was a Sunday morning.  Father’s Day, in fact.  The ducks were 7 weeks old.  They were spending the night in their pen in the kitchen, a converted dog crate left over from when Jake was a puppy.  We awoke at 6:00 to the sound of loud, panicked quacking, squawking, and wings flapping.  We didn’t know what to think.  I ran out to their pen and everything seemed okay, and Louie, especially, was subdued.  Whatever it was, it was over.

Or so we thought.

It came time to take them out to their pool for the day.  Huey & Dewey ran (okay, waddled) out of the pen.  Louie limped, as in ‘take one step and fall down’.  Uh oh.  That’s not good.  Todd carried him outside and placed him in the water to see if he would be able to swim and to take the pressure off of his leg.  Really not good.

There’s a young woman in our neighborhood that we met while walking our dog, Jake.  If you ever want to get to know your neighbors, get a dog.  Jake lives for his walks and is totally bummed if he doesn’t get as many as he thinks are necessary.  Anyway, Robyn is a wonderful person, a scrapbooker, and it turns out she’s a vet who works for PetSmart.  So what do you do when you think your duck has a broken leg on a Sunday morning, Father’s Day even?   You walk over to the neighbors and ask for a favor! 

Robyn came over right away, agreed that it was broken, and set about splinting the leg.  For the first few days, she only wrapped it in gauze and tape.  She was concerned about swelling and that a more sturdy splint would cut off his circulation.  She came back on Tuesday night, said the swelling had gone down, and proceeded to give him a stronger splint.  In preparation, Todd had cut down a couple of craft sticks (see, those craft supplies come in handy!), sanded off all the rough edges, and made two each of several sizes.  Robyn wrapped up Louie’s leg again, which she did every Tuesday night for 3 weeks. She never accepted payment, but I made sure she was loaded up with Timeless Touches products.  J  And Louie, well, he was a trooper!   He never struggled or complained about Todd holding him tightly or Robyn messing with his sore leg. It’s like he knew that they were trying to help him get better.

During this time, we had to keep Louie completely out of the water.  And he also had to be kept separate from the other ducks. This is sort of like telling a person to stop breathing.  Ducks are very social creatures and they love to swim.   How could we make his life a little easier during his time of rest & healing?

For starters, we kept him in a small cage outside on the ledge of the pool so the girls could be with him.  By noon, it was too hot for him to be out there without being able to cool off in the pool.  Remember, we’re in AZ, it gets HOT here, especially in June.  So about lunch time, we’d bring him in and set his cage on Todd’s desk.  He would alternate between sleeping and watching Todd work.  As he healed, Todd started bringing him out of his cage and setting him on his knee.  Louie loved this and it became his special spot to be.  Sometimes he’d sit on my lap instead.  Watching him, feeling him snuggle into my lap, learning where he liked to have his neck rubbed, seeing his eyes shut and his head bob in near-sleep…well, it was therapeutic for me too!  I totally understand why having a pet can lower one’s blood pressure.  There were times he would lull me to sleep too.  Of course, Murphy’s Law and all, it would be about that time that the phone would ring and I’d be startled out of my slumber and have to act alert.

After 3+ weeks of life in a splint, with just a few opportunities to walk around, Robyn pronounced him healed. Ducks have a very high metabolism and because of that, they heal quickly.  He has a small enlargement on that leg now, the calcification from the healed break, but he doesn’t walk any more pigeon-toed than the girls do.  Robyn did an excellent job!  Louie was her very first duck patient, but she was a pro! Thank you, Robyn!