The last 6-7 months of my life.....

It is kinda funny that I'm trying to sum up what has been going on with me over the last half+ year of my existence in one blog entry. Time really does fly when you are bizzy! Let's see, how shall I do this?  I'm always a fan of a nice set of bullet points, or a timeline...hmmm....I wish I could do it in pie charts! Heh. Well, after Renegade Brooklyn in June, I started preparing for my booth at the Austin City Limits festival in September. ACL was great....I sold a ton of headbands and got to see some awesome bands. After that I had to do major planning & designing for the Stitch fashion show in November. Stitch was amazing this year. We sold out AGAIN, but this time it was at the huge Austin Music Hall. Check out that picture of the crowd! We had over 2000 people come to see the show, which BTW, was the best yet! We had 20 AMAZING designers show their work on the runway and nearly 80 booths in the craft fair. Next year will be year 5 for us, so we are going to try to make it 5 times as fabulous! I had a lot of fun designing my pieces for the runway. As Stephen Moser from the Austin Chronicle put it, my designs were "..youthful, with bold, vintage styling with a modern edge." Here are some of my favorite designer pics from the runway show including Machine Ballerina, Identity Crisis Clothing, Louise Black and Tina Sparkles (me!).

So after Stitch I had to jump right into the holiday season which meant filling gobs of Sparkle Craft web orders as well as keeping my booth stocked at the Blue Genie Art Bizaare. My life was all about guitar straps, guitar straps and more guitar straps for over a month straight! It was pretty crazy. So here I am now already a couple weeks into 2007!  OMG, speaking of 2007, the Austin Craft Mafia was asked to be in this really cute calendar called Starlets of Craft and we are the January calendar girls! The calendar was compiled by those clever Atlanta ICE gals and contains lots of hot crafty ladies including  SuperMaggie, Portland SuperCrafty, Crafty Chica & lots more.

Wow! I am really excited about the new year....I have lots of secret plans up my sleeve so I guess you'll just have to keep checking back to see what is new with me. For now though, I do have one bit of news to share....are you ready?......I'm having a Sparkle Craft SALE! Yay! Out with the old and in with the new! This year I am going to be phasing out all accessories on my website so that I can start focusing my Sparkle Craft efforts solely on guitar straps. I'm going to start discontinuing accessories starting in February, so if you have ever wanted any of my belts, wristbands, scarves or headbands, you better get them now.....and its the perfect time with the sale and all. To get a 20% discount on your entire Sparkle Craft order, just enter 'love' in the voucher section during checkout. The sale will end at the end of this month, so don't delay! Hmmmm....I guess the last thing that I want to mention is that I've been getting a bit of press buzz lately. In the last couple of months Sparkle Craft guitar straps & belts have been featured in Nylon, Alternative Press, and Austin Music Magazine. Sparkle Craft was also voted #5 in the Venus Zine Hott List for best DIY Business (I tied with those lovely boys over at Fred Flare!). The Austin Craft Mafia had a fashion spread in Jewell magazine and Stitch had ship loads of press pre & post show. Oh, and the funniest thing of all...the Onion included me on their Austin A-list. Hilarious!

 

 

Posted by TinaSparkles at January 20, 2007 11:57 AM