Here Comes the Flood

Title courtesy of Peter Gabriel and last week's Grey's Anatomy episode. I totally love the fact they name their episodes after song lyrics too. I think it means we're meant to be together :)

And speaking of meant to be together, my fabulous husband finally convinced me to learn how to use a Dremel (excuse me, I mean a rotary tool) for the finishing steps on my dog tags. He couldn't find his, so we took a late night trip to Sears yesterday and bought their last one. OH MY GOD this thing is amazing. What used to take me 15 min or so *per tag*, for filing and polishing, now takes just a few minutes!

I made about 6 tags yesterday and didn't cut myself once. When I was filing by hand, I cut myself nearly once per tag-making sessions. I'm all for suffering for your art (sort of) but actual injury seems a bit excessive, right?

Summary: I LOVE my new Craftsman rotary tool.

Tool excitement aside, something REALLY BIG AND EXCITING happened to me yesterday. I was minding my own business at work, trying to actually get some work done, when I noticed the email notification that I had a new Etsy 'conversation', which is the internal messaging system on Etsy.

So I clicked over to see what it was - I've gotten a couple of interesting potential customer requests lately about custom made orders, and the Etsy system does not think highly of spam, so the signal to noise ratio is pretty high.

And ZOMG, the message I got was from CityDog magazine, asking if I could send them some sample tags for a photo shoot they're doing for their holiday gift issue. Holy zoiks!

Now even if it had been "Granny's Cross Stitch Quarterly Newsletter" with a circulation of 3, I would have been stoked for the free promotional opportunity. But this is a magazine I've actually paid money for. More than once! It's available in most swanky pet stores in the area.

So of course, I fired off an email saying I'd be happy to make them some sample tags with fake info on them. And that's what I was doing until 1am to make sure they'd get into today's mail. Behold the sample tags for Peanut, Spike, Ginger, and Frank.

Frank is the longhaired mini dachschund I don't have yet. Right now he lives with a family in a Belltown condo, but once they have a baby and decide to get rid of him, he'll be all mine. (Note: Frank is purely fictional, but someday I will have a dachschund. And he will be named Frank. I just thought I should have a good story to go along with the tag I made for him.)

So I guess before I start counting unhatched chickens, I should temper that with the fact that they probably requested products from lots of different people, and I might not make it into the issue. So I'm trying to be cautiously optimistic here.

But I am still secretly very excited. And of course, will post here if I do make it!

And even better, for the instant gratification, the editor of CityDog also writes an online column for the Seattle Times called Pet Dish (cute, I know!). So yesterday she also told me she was going to feature me there too. Yippee!

Check out the article and leave a comment there so I'm not the only one, please :)

Thanks everyone for your support and reading my blathering about crafty subjects.