MetalSmitten - Jess makes gorgeous silver jewelry. My favorites are the sprouting seeding pendants and the wee rings. AND what makes Jess especially awesome is that she made a video on how she makes the wee rings. It's not only totally cute, she really goes into detail and shows off her skills. She's also friendly to the environment, pitbulls, and kitties. What's not to be smitten by?

talk2thetrees - Rachael sells her paintings, jewelry, and knitted hats, wonderful knitted hats that make me pine for colder weather so that I can wear one (it's been rather hot here in NYC lately!). Her modeling and photography is amazing as well, she has this wonderful style that perfectly presents her work.

I've still mainly been working on my own jewelry lately. I've been making lots of progress, but I still have a ways to go before I'm satisfied.

It's no big deal, I just switched my ESCO. There's no wind turbine on my roof or anything, all I did was make a decision and I'll be paying a couple dollars more a month for electricity. I think it's important though, to send a message and to help indicate a desire for renewable energy sources.

oh, I also added 3XL Unisex shirts a while back. My shirt supplier wasn't offering them in organics before, and a request prompted me to check again, so yay!

Sale over, sorry!

If you're an old mushycat customer and you ordered in the last year you may have noticed that I changed how I package things. I used to use padded envelopes, they worked well, but I realized they were less than ideal. First, they took up a ton of space just to store the big boxes of them I purchased. Those big boxes were also expensive to get shipped to me. The envelopes were recyclable, but you had to pull out the bubble wrap from the kraft outer, and I just don't think most people bothered. Also, I often had to use an envelope that was larger than I'd like for smaller orders.

I've switched to using regular kraft envelopes in various sizes, and then adding bubble wrap myself to the buttons. This uses far less materials, allows me to efficiently match order size to envelope size, and makes it much easier for you to recycle the packaging. The cost compared to the padded envelopes I used to use is actually almost exactly the same, but they end up weighing a little less, which means I can ship more buttons for the same postage.

I'm doing the same thing for shirts and other stuff of course!

Right now I'm using bubble wrap, but I'm looking into other materials as well.

Honestly, all these years I never really thought about the packaging I used much, aside from knowing that it was made from almost 100% recycled materials and was 100% recyclable. I thought that was enough, and it kept me from realizing that I could do better.

A bit of bad news concerning postal rates though (unrelated to my move or the packaging) - a few years ago the US Postal Service changed how they classify mail, and basically, I've been getting charged more for my packages than I used to. How each individual clerk classifies mail varies though, and sometimes I get lucky and sometimes I don't. It's been very stressful. I can't rely on getting lucky though, so I have to raise what I charge for shipping. : ( Sorry about that folks, I fought doing it for as long as I could, but I can't afford it anymore. It mainly just affects small orders (less than 10 buttons, say), so feel free to order more buttons at once rather than spreading out orders.

ken

You can always request old designs, or new ones. Just email me. : )

Anyhoo, let me know what you think.

BTW, if there are any button designs you'd like to see on shirts, please feel free to let me know!

The big news is that I'm printing t-shirts again, with a nifty new less-problematic supplier and the shirts are not only sweat-shop free, they're 100% organic too. The undies will be returning soon!

Pretty nifty, and her halloween cat design is adorable. I've made button earrings before by drilling a hole in the metal, but I had never thought of just using the sew-on backs.