Crafty Thursday: Dress in progress

Promo for the week:
Handmade Spark recently posted a nice Holiday Gift Guide featuring the Natural Kids Team. Unlike Bede and Lucia, I'm not a bowling fan, but even I was drawn to the Mushroom Bowling set by MuddyFeet.

[/End Promo]

Currently, I have a number of custom orders in the works, plus I am working on a simple version of Dorothy Gale's blue and white gingham dress from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. I was in a hurry when I bought the pattern for the custume, and did not realize that this pattern had the pinafore sewed to the white shirt with a zipper up the back. If Dorothy Gale had been a real person, her shirt would be separate from the pinafore and there would be no zipper. The book was written in 1900, after all. My genius niece/master seamstress says someday she will send me a tutorial on how to make a buttonhole insert for patterns that require zippers.

In the meantime, I'm making do with what I have, which is a modification of the same dress Lucia's had for years, only with a square neck. I'll post a photo when I'm done. Lucia plans to wear this dress with silver-toned shoes as depicted in the book. To represent Toto, Lucia will carry Bede's favorite stuffed animal from childhood, a blue and white dog named "Princess." Princess was named after Princess Leia.

Reticence

Author Sarah Prineas wrote a guest blog-post I appreciated on Shrinking Violet Promotions. It's called I Will Be Your Friend But I Will Not Be Your Fan: A Rant About How Authors Use Social Media Promotion. I took time to read through the comments as well as the post, as they provided some good counterpoints to the rant. Prineas follows up that post with Solutions: One Way to Deal With the Self-Marketing Frenzy, Plus a Shout-Out to Publishers.

I am reticent to do self-promotion for my online shop because I am easily overstimulated, and operate from the assumption that you are easily overstimulated as well. Still, I would like for people to find my shop easily through internet searches when what I offer is what they want. I've considered a paid ad, but as one who doesn't often click on ads, I wonder how prudent the expense would be.

Enough about promotion! I am happy that I now have a childhood favorite book called Little Witch, by Anna Elizabeth Bennett. I plan to read it to my daughter after slogging through the rest of The Road to Oz. I enjoyed rereading the first few books as an adult, but despite the presence of Polychrome, the Rainbow's Daughter,I realized I was Done With Oz when we came to the chapters with the head-throwing Scoodlers.