The feeling of completion

Ahhhh….I love the feeling of completion. I finally finished switching the website over. I'd say it looks pretty good. There are still a few things that need work, but only our "website guy" can fix. He works on our website only part-time so it may be awhile till we actually get it truly finished. Here is the website link for a quick look if your interested, experiencethevillage.com/store

We have received some copies of the catalog and it looks sooooo good! I mean not to toot my own horn (toot, toot), but it looks great. It's a piece of work that I actually feel incredibly proud of. We've been talking about doing this catalog from day one and the fact that it is already completed, with hard copies in hand, kind of makes it almost indescribable. I can't wait to show all my friends!

On another note, a few of Anne's friends have flown in from New York City for her wedding on Saturday. Tomorrow they are coming by the store to look at the catalog and are actually going to take a few samples back to the their buyers. This could possible be our first account….cross your fingers for us that the buyers will like our products and want to place an order!! I'm keeping the company name private for right now. Although, I'll keep you posted if anything happens:)

Maybe now I'll be able to sleep better that all this is finished………mmmmm no, probably not. That's just wishful thinking haha

Peace friends-

Movies

Sooo…..I never thought I would actually EVER do this, but somehow I managed to find the courage to go to the movies by myself. Come to find out and beautifully stated by my b.f.f. B Brittanie, "It's liberating." I went to see "Dinner with Schmucks." Absolutely hyyysstterrriicaall. I laughed throughout the entire movie. I did find it strange to be laughing by myself with no one around me. Fortunately, that strange feeling did not last that long. Since I typically have Tuesdays off from TVE, I decided that I'm going to go to the movies again. I really have nothing else to do and you can hardly beat it when it's only $5 for the matinee. So friends I am going to go see, Charlie St. Cloud. I heard it is a bit of a tear jerker. To be honest, I don't mind a nice cry once in awhile=)

Enjoy your Tuesday!

Hand Blown Glass

Last Saturday Kelly flew back home from Kenya. She brought several things back with her. These mugs and wine glasses were definitely my favorite! They are all made out of recycled glass and hand blown. Customers seem to really like them as well!

Website Madness

Now that the catalog is done, I am starting to work on the back end of the website. The back end is turning the "store website" into solely a "wholesale ordering website". Does that make sense? Essentially, when we start wholesaling to other retailers, the buyers of the stores will be able to login in to the website and order. Regular customers will not be able to order from the website. It is common for wholesale distributors to only allow buyers to order from the website.

Anne has taught me how to work the back end of the website. Let me tell you….it is NOT easy by any means! I am taking down all of the old pictures and products and putting up the items we are going to wholesale i.e., beach bags, pearls, wine totes, dresses, etc… I have to enlarge the pictures, upload them to the website, upload all of the fabric swatches, label all pictures, put the color swatches in alphabetically order, input all the details about the products, and so on. It takes forever to upload anything and every time you change something you have to hit the "save" button. It's incredibly time consuming and repetitive, but for some reason I like it. I was going to try and take some screen shots, except I forgot the command to do so. If you would like to see what I have done so far, you can visit the website at http://www.experiencethevillage.com/store/! That's all for now. I have a special visitor arriving soon=) Have a great weekend everyone!

F.L.I.G.H.T

Exciting news here……..I bought my plane ticket to Thailand!!! This past Tuesday I decided that I will be leaving in almost a month, so I probably should buy my ticket. I found a plane ticket for just over $1200, leaving from Detroit. I have a layover in Tokyo, where I will actually meet up with Kelly. Kind of strange that were meeting in Tokyo, but somehow we are!

Fundraising update!

I have raised over $1500. Soooooo close to my goal!! I know of a few donations that are going to trickle in. All upcoming donations will help pay for my plane ticket. Thanks again to all that have donated. I genuinely appreciate all of the support and donations I have received. I am incredibly blessed to have such amazing people in my life.

Pages

Opening letter

Back cover of catalog

Recycled Paper Necklace (from Kenya) layout

African Print Dress (from Kenya) layout

Beach Bag (from Kenya) layout

Bottle Openers from Kenya

Freshwater Pearl Necklaces from Thailand

Large Raffia Hat from Kenya

Front cover of catalog

Here are some examples of the pages from the catalog! I was responsible for designing the catalog cover and the overall design layout. Molly Longest was responsible for editing all of the photos. Anne and Emily supervised and edited the catalog. If you look close to the fabric swatches, you can see the color names that Kelsie and I came up with---they're cute! I created all the pages in Photoshop, then saved them as a JPG and placed them into InDesign. The entire catalog is 26 pages from front to back. The catalogs will be ready to be picked up on Monday the 9th. I can hardly wait. Being held responsible for such a huge project at TVE has truly been an amazing experience.

It's official….

It's official….I am absolutely terrible at keeping up with my blog. It has been 15 days since my last blog. It's been extremely difficult juggling both jobs, having friends come visit and planning my trip to Thailand. Meanwhile, trying to keep myself sane so I can make it through each week. I've heard the best way to keep up with blogging is to set a time aside each day to blog. However, with my schedule always changing and having the worst sleep patterns, I find it hard to set the same time aside each day to blog. I've actually started to take Melatonin to help with my irregular sleep patterns. This week I've actually started to notice a difference. Not sure if it is the medicine or the fact that I haven't slept in 2 weeks….

Anyways, enough of my complaining. Work at TVE has been incredible busy. Ever since the photo shoot, I have been working on the catalog. Literally, I have not done anything else besides work on the catalog. As a result of my focus, I've managed to finish the catalog. I copied all the Photoshop files and the InDesign file to a hard drive, Anne then took it to Triangle printing this past Monday. We actually received a sample copy yesterday! The color was off because I made all the files in RGB instead of CMYK. There was also some spelling errors. Besides some minor corrections the catalog is set and ready to go!

(I actually started this post yesterday and didn't have time to finish it…..gaaawwwddd, I'm terrible!!!)