Branding (Labels)

After the hiccups, stalls and other delays I have started moving forward with my directional plan. At this stage I am way behind where I was to be at this stage, as I ended up doing a lot of different thing than what I had written down in my directional and business plan at the starting of the year.

In order to brand my creations in the right way I did get a logo designed in February, but after that nothing really happened to the design. My plan was to have the logo developed on various other formats (business card, labels, hang tags, banner on my blog, etc. etc.) which could be used to brand leftover in the right way.

Labeling is one of the most effective and affordable ways to reinforce my brand into customers and prospects minds, and it is not very expensive to do. One great article that gives some insight into labeling by Rosana Levesque (who is an expert in online marketing) is Brand Your Business With Custom Labels. It is fairly concise and shows why it is import to brand and how custom labels will help you achieve that.

This week I did get some labels made with my logo, and I am extremely happy with how they turned out. I am in the process of doing a few new patterns, but my summer teaching gig and the smart students there are keeping me occupied right through the week.

Here are some pictures.

Help me GOD

When I was thinking about inner tyre tubes I had no clue that cleaning them up would be such a big challenge. Once I bought a few I realized how heavy they are and it is not like a pair of jeans that you can wash with some effort. I did try to wash one tube, but I was not very successful at it. The main reason being that even a single tube is heavy and fairly tough to repeatedly pull it out of the water tub I had soaked it in for rinsing.

Soaked in water

It also takes most of the volume of the water bucket and not much room is left to use your hands to work on the tube surface. I was also worried about my wrist and I did not want to push it any further.

One tube takes up all the space

Now I am waiting for the gods to help me complete the cleaning. I know the gods can not just walk down and do it, but my plan is to open the sack of tubes on my roof top terrace on a rainy day and work on cleaning them while it is pouring.

Not much room to scrub the tube

Sharpening my skills

Lately I have been teaching pattern making and construction for the summer classes at a local polytechnic. I decided to do it because of a few combined reasons all together.

It will help me focus on getting ready for something and completing it. I have to be in front of about 30 students and teach them, everything that has to be done has to be completed in that three hour window. I have to prepare well in advance what I am going to do on a particular day or I will make a fool out of myself in front of all the students. Students these days are much sharper and some of them do know a lot more than what can be expected of someone at that level.

My understanding for the smarter and knowledgeable students is that they use the resources available to them and everything is available just as it happens. During my time all we had was the knowledge of someone who had done it in the past, few old European books and some old VHS tapes. The scope of your understanding and inspiration was limited to what you had around you, now students know what is happening in any part of the world in real time.

The students have got me to think of technology as a big classroom without any barriers or walls. They have also helped me focus more on preparing in advance, and if I take this to my daily routine I will definitely fare much better and do more than what I have done in the past few months.

My other reason for taking up the assignment was to get my worsening financial situation into something a little better. When I started out I thought I had enough money to see me through this starting up period, but now I realize that money just slips through and you do not even realize it. I also have to restrict myself on what all materials I buy and how much do I get, I have gone a little overboard in the past few months and am fully aware of it now.

Two words that will see me through this somewhat turbulent time is being; Disciplined and Frugal.

Where am I now

I have not done much lately on any new designs, except for a few new sketches and a couple of rough patterns. My plan just went a little haywire because of the injury to my wrist which set me back by about a month in terms of time but a more than a month in financial terms as a lot of my budget was eaten up by the medical costs.

When I started out a few months ago I had sat down and made a fairly elaborate business plan. At that stage I was thinking that making the plan is the biggest challenge and the rest would be easy as you just have to follow it, but following it is way tougher than it sounds. I know I should have stuck with it to the hilt but life interrupted in between and there were deviations.

I am now working on short term plans, I know it might not be the right thing to do but it seems the most logical to me at this time considering my situation and goals for the year. I just hope that I am somewhere close to where I had envisioned myself to be at the end of the year; it seems hard but it is not impossible.

Rediscovering Inner Tyre Tubes

Delhi is a fascinating place to look for anything that you think of. I had been thinking of using bike inner tubes for some of my designs as I have seen some folks in the west successfully incorporate them in there creations. I did get a few tubes from my neighbourhood cycle repair shop and tried to cut them into flat sheets, as soon as I cut them I realized that I need something much broader and bigger as joining so many pieces will require a lot of time and the round curvature of the tube does not make it very easy to make a fairly flat piece of rubber.

Space is at a premium here, so rooftops are the storage area

I started hunting for bigger tubes so that I could get fairly straight square pieces; and after running about for a bit I was able to find a few folks who just deal in old tyres and inner tubes that they source from city and state transport fleets.

Stacks of used truck tyres

Here are some more pictures from my inner tube discovery odyssey.

This experienced fellow listened to my needs and showed me the right sizes

Checking for thickness (some were amazingly thick)

The ones I selected on the top of the stash

Crafts Fair 24/7 - 365

Sell Crafts Online has been a valuable resource for me, It was the first Ebook I ever purchased. One thing I did realize after I started going through it is; Old habits die hard. Reading it on the monitor was a little challenging for me, maybe I was out of my comfort zone as I have always read from a physical book  or sheets of paper in my hand. In order to grasp the information more precisely and be able to highlight and scribble notes, I ended up printing it.

The book pointed at a number of different venues where one could sell there work, but after some research and visiting the different sites I zeroed down to three of them, and the three that made the cut were Etsy, Artfire and Dawanda. All there seem pretty organised and well laid out and have there pros and cons (I do not use any so that is not from my experience, but when you google Artfire v/s Etsy or Artfire v/s Dawanda or Etsy v/s Dawanda) you can get a pretty detailed inside look at each from users who have been using them for years.

I had a fairly decent idea after reading everything but in order to pick one up I posted a question Which is a better venue to sell my creations, ETSY, ARTFIRE or DAWANDA? on Fluther and Etsy was what folks recommended the most.

Twisted and sick of it

It's been almost a month and a half since I've blogged - I think that's the longest since I started this thing...

I had not been doing great for the last about four weeks. Last month I sprained my wrist and it was diagnosed as a stress fracture. It is the very first time I had to undergo something like this; where you have so much time that you can actually even listen to the few birds that are left in this metropolis.

My wrist had been all wrapped up in a cast and the doctor advised me to keep it like that for two weeks, the two weeks went by quietly and I had the cast removed and an x-ray done and when everything was looking better I had to re-do the cast again as my wrist had not properly healed and was hurting bad.

Healing has been a long and slow road. As of May 24, the joint has fused sufficiently to allow for weight bearing/low to medium impact activity, and I have been cleared to start working a few hours at a time.

Being temporarily disabled has given me plenty of time to reflect on my life and everything I want to do—and how much time I have wasted NOT doing what I should be doing.