Shealynn's Faerie Shoppe

A Plan for Joy

I'm very excited to announce that a very big project I have been working on is completed and published!

A Plan for Joy in the Home: A Workbook on Organizing Your Day for Homeschooling Mothers is a wonderful workbook written by Laura Dominick that does exactly what the title says-- it gives awesome tips for homeschool parents. It's available for sale here.

A few months ago, Mrs. Dominick asked if I could do layout for a book that she wrote. I'd met her briefly this summer at the ReginaoCon and had a blast with her daughters.

Of course I said yes!

However, I had no idea how to go about doing graphic design for a book. I've worked on the online magazine Ink and Fairydust, but that is a little different. A book provides a whole new world of publication requirements. For instance, I had no idea how to do chapter pagination or how to add correct page numbering.

Mrs. Dominick was very gracious and understanding as I researched and learned about this brand-new world. Very understanding-- not only was I trying to do this from scratch and make it professional, but I was also plauged with major computer problems that put me behind schedule!

I was so excited to recieve the email with her draft. As I mentioned before, the workbook is really helpful (although I think that I don't really appreciate it fully-- I'm only a homeschool student, after all! And yet it seemed really wonderful to me.) Mrs. Dominick shares various plans for organizing the day, and provides plenty of real-life ideas that her family uses.

In addition to the graphic layout, I also did illustrations for each chapter. The image below is from the last chapter.

She also asked me to do the front cover illustration. It was a challenging and invigorating artistic challenge, and I'm very happy that she was pleased with it! The drawing was loosly based off a photo of her family. I changed some details, added lots of warm coloring, and made the family more cartoony to fit in with the style of the illustrations.

(For those of you who, like me, appreciate these sorts of details, it was done with black pen and Prismacolor colored pencils on Bristol board. I burnished the prismacolors with a wax pencil finish... which made the second layer of pen lines hard to apply! The title was added with InDesign).

This has been a wonderful experience for me... I've learned so much, so many skills that will be useful in the future. And my work is being published... Yup, pretty excited about that. I'd love to take this chance to say THANK YOU to Mrs. Dominick for allowing me to be a part of this project!

A Plan for Joy in the Home is available both as a PDF download and as a printed book from HERE. Please visit the website!

Mrs. Dominick talks more about the workbook on her blog: HERE. And you can read her far-too-kind comments about working on it here.

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Shoppe

A Pretty Package in the Mail-- Shipping Tips

I always love getting mail. Letters are the best, of course-- loving letters from friends and family-- and so are handmade cards and lovely magazines. There is always such a thrill in recieving something just for you. It's magical.

This is one of the reasons why I love to make all my packages be pretty. These are a few of my favorite things... I don't use much brown paper, but I do use lots of string!

I recently had several orders from the Shoppe and photographed my "shipping process." I've had several queries from fellow handmade artists concerning shipping... I certainly don't have all the answers, and since my Shoppe is small and I don't have a lot of money, I haven't done several things that are good ideas for business shipping (someday I would love to get gift boxes and stylized packaging!).

However, every order is shipped with love and care, and hopefully makes the reciever smile. So, for what it's worth, this is the way that I've been shipping items lately!

The first and most time-consuming step is making little jewelry bags. I use scrap fabric from old sewing projects (thank you to several friends who gave me their scraps!) and some beautiful fat quarters I found on sale.

Each one is cut to size to fit my plastic baggies (see below). This batch that I sewed up in November used several "Christmas-y" fabrics.

Sometimes if I'm in a hurry I don't fold over a hem on the top of the bags. It's still pretty that way.

Tip for anyone wanting to use this idea: Sew the bags in batches. It's much faster and less stressful.

I don't always use fabric baggies. Sometimes I use brown paper tied up with pretty ribbon, or peices of a wedding tablecloth (also tied up with pretty ribbon!).

The jewelry goes onto cards (printed on cardstock with holepunches for earrings and slits for necklaces). These cards are then slid into the fabric bags.

I have two sizes of cards, baggies, and bags to accomodate most peices of jewelry.

Isn't it pretty?

Each item gets its own baggie, and I usually put up to three baggies in each fabric bag (or brown paper package).

My business card also goes into the bag. Right now I'm printing them on cardstock and cutting it out with a paper slicer, but someday I intend to get some professionally printed.

The reciept and fabric bag slide into a padded envelope.

Right now I have some lovely brown envelopes that I quickly stamp on.

Unfortunately I'm running out of the pretty envelopes and will soon have to go back to the boring manilla ones.

I ship everything via USPS First Class mail with delivery confirmation (unless I'm asked to ship with other specifications). I print postage from Paypal, which is really nice because I never have to drive out to the post office.