New Year, new focus…. I’m not exactly sure that this is a good idea, but the fact that it scares me to death and makes me wish I had never thought of it makes me think maybe it is. I’m thinking I would like to try and get a book published…and no, not a staggeringly brilliant work of fiction so eloquent and insightful that it reshapes the hearts and minds of the world… (Can you just see me, swearing on Oprah?) No, I just want to try and get a book of patterns published.

You all might not know, but the majority of the purses that I make and sell for Made with Luv are things that I have designed. When I first started making bags, it was with a How-To book that I bought at Barnes and Noble. (The Everything bag that we sell is adapted from said book: No Rules Sewing.) I always felt slightly stupid making money off of something that was someone else’s work, so I started trying to design my own bags.

Inconveniently, my creative process seems to work the best when I am ridiculously busy doing the most mundane but relentlessly important work. It’s sort of like shopping; you always find tons of cute shit when you are broke, but let your tax return come and all you see are granny panties and Naturalizers. While trying to build inventory of the old stand-bys for Stef and I to sell at our Christmas craft shows, I got a lot of ideas for new bags. Now that the Christmas rush is over, I am turning my attention to transforming a collection of ideas into workable patterns, and from there, hopefully accumulating enough successes (30 successes, to be exact) to get a book proposal together. Scary, but exciting.

Over the next few months, I would like to have your help in choosing what ideas you think are interesting, and which are clunkers. I will post a description and pics of the new bags as they are born, and invite you to bring on the brutal honesty. If you are nice, and a book deal comes from this, I will credit you in the acknowledgements and bestow my undying gratitude upon you ever after. If you are naughty, you may become the evil villain in a staggeringly brilliant work of fiction so eloquent and insightful that it reshapes the hearts and minds of the world.