Happy Winter Solstice!

It's now too late for apparel orders if you need them by xmas, and you have until the 18th to place button/sticker orders if you need them by xmas. After that please don't even think about asking me to get you something by xmas! ^__^

Choosing Priority Mail is a good idea BTW. Also, you can always get Gift Certificates.

Here's something we can do - get out your local phone book and call the pharmacies in your area. Ask them if they will fill a prescription for Plan B emergency contraception. You can say that you have a prescription if you like. Try to get a definitive answer, not a wishy-washy one. If they say no, ask them why. Then write me with the pharmacy names, town/state/zip and their replies. I'll collect everything and create a page to post all the information, maybe map it out on google maps.

Hopefully it'll be useful for knowing where you can go when you do need a prescription filled, where you should/shouldn't be giving your business, and for spotting trends in store policies and locales.

Can I first tell you how good fresh ravioli is? Especially when you make it with a friend and a little hand-cranked ravioli machine? The filling is butternut squash plus whatever was in the fridge (IMO only baking requires recipies).

Anyway, Hi! I added a 'miscellaneous' page to the site, to sell, well, miscellaneous things I don't want anymore! So take a look, if you like. Right now there's a bunch of guitar pedals, microphones, glasses, and some other stuff.

If you are looking to buy things for the Big Consumer Holidays that are coming up please do it soon! Remember that apparel orders take me up to four weeks to ship (two weeks for most everything else), so plan accordingly. If you wait too long Santa (who works at my post office) will skip your house!

It's been raining extremely hard here since last Friday and it's supposed to keep on raining through the weekend. I have no idea how many inches it's been, but just over the weekend alone there was eight inches. Since I live on a mountain all of the water flows down in streams. This is a picture of the water at the edge of the property (it doesn't go onto mine, thankfully):

Did I mention it's all dirt roads up here? fun.

I hope no one is celebrating Columbus day, 'discovering' an area that is already populated and then killing and enslaving the native people is nothing to celebrate.

The hoodies are now available, as are a bunch of new shirt designs, and also some new colors for the ringer shirts. You can find everything in the shirt section of the site.

I will be updating other sections of the site soon!

And as always, if you have any problems using the site please email me and let me know!

All of you sweet people keep me going, thank you.

A lot of you liked the hoodies picture I posted in my last entry, they're not on the site yet, but I'm going to try to get them up by the end of this week. Autumn is my favorite season, it's the brisk air and that bit of melancholy, and snuggly hoodies go quite well with that.

As you may know, I'm always looking for good sweatshop-free, US-made shirt suppliers. Many years ago I looked at A.S. Tees in South Carolina but they were only doing private-label runs then. Now they are building their own brand so it was time for another look. I wrote them asking about their labor force, if they were offered healthcare and benefits, and if they were paid a living wage. I received a reply pretty quickly from the founder, which was nice, unfortunately, I was told their workers are 'on production' (contract workers if I'm not mistaken), the company only contributes 25% towards the cost of healthcare, and I was not given an answer as to their wages, which is a bad sign. Also, I asked if they were planning to incorporate organic cotton into their line and the answer was basically a flat 'no'.

To me, all that sucks and I'm not going to use them. It's depressing though.

I've added a new section on treadle sewing machines to my wiki. There's info on how I converted a serger and a modern electic machine to run via a treadle, plus how to make a vegan treadle drive belt! Oh, and also a section on eco-friendly alternative materials.

When I'm making shirts I occasionally mess up and print on the wrong color shirt, or the wrong style. I've just been putting them away, but now I have a bunch so I'm selling them for cheap. There's nothing wrong with them, I just like to make up each order especially for the person who ordered, and these shirts are in some sort of idealistic limbo.

Please make sure you look at the style/sizing page so you know what you're getting, and if you aren't familiar with the designs you can look at the shirt page.

These shirts are $12 each and it's first-come, first-served! I'll cross them out here when someone orders them, so refresh this page to see what's left.

I've added new colors to the AA Girly-T and Unisex-T shirts! Yummy colors like Raspberry and Sangria and Mint. They are terribly lovely. Oh, and now both of those shirt styles also come in a 'natural' color which is made out of sustainable organic cotton!

You may wonder why I offer so many shirt styles and colors. I could just offer one or two shirt styles in one or two colors, but I think that would be incredibly boring. Traditional stores do that as a way of increasing profits because they can get greater volume discounts if they limit their selection. I don't care about that sort of thing, I just want you to be able to choose the shirt you want in the color you want it.

Lisa from Sweden sent me the most amazing little gift! Every tiny stitch is perfect and it makes my head explode!

Thank you Lisa!!!

I've made the checkout process secure now (SSL server and all that). On the shopping cart page you'll see one of those verifiable secure seals, and for the whole rest of the checkout you'll be on a secure server (you'll see the little secure lock in your browser).

Also, you don't need a paypal account to pay with a credit card via paypal (I use paypal for all my credit card transactions).

• The gallery is now more of a proper gallery and less of exercise in randomness.
• There are now little icons for designs that you can also get in other forms. Like, if you can get a certain button design on a shirt, there's an a little shirt under the button that will take you right to the shirt page, and vice versa.
• I've streamlined the shirt pages a bit, there are cute little icons to take you to the various shirt styles and there are no longer preset color combinations. You can just pick the shirt color you want to go with a design.
• I've added a new shirt supplier, The Union Jean Company. I'm still in the process of working everything out with them, but the shirts are nice, a more basic unisex T that comes in more sizes. They're union-made in the US.
• oh and I've added a ringer-style shirt from AA.
• I've updated the shirt sizing page a bit and got more informative with the care and washing instructions...
• I added information on sweatshops to my politics page. It's quite a rant, but I think too many people were forgetting what a sweatshop really is.
• There's an updated 'about mushycat' page.
• I've added a wiki, I'll be writing there a fair bit. Right now it's a bit thin because as always, I've been busy. (wikis are great. I've been using one on my laptop to organize all my ideas.)

A lot of you have been asking when the next proper update is going to be. I have this problem, I've never been content to sit still, and I've been working on a million things. Being only one person, I don't always manage to get everything done in a timely manner, and I'm always off pursuing new things as well. I've started drinking coffee though, so hopefully that will help. : ) Seriously, now that I have the web site cleaned up and moved, new stuff will be coming soon. I equated the old site to a messy desk, and I just can't get anything done on messy desk. Now that it's clean...

Some of the things I've been working on:

• vegan guitar straps using organic cotton and hemp plus recycled materials.
• embroidered patches
• a cute little tofu press using sustainably-grown wood
• custom shirts and other things and so far it's looking good, I just have to do more testing.
• bags
• vegan cold process soap (no melt-and-pour laziness).

I'm not saying these things will be making it on to the site right away, but new buttons and shirts and other things will be added soon.

If you find any problems with the updated site please email me and let me know! I've done as much as I can to check things out but things always slip by. You'll have my undying love if you help me out!