Worktable Wednesday: Shooting Cover Photos of My New Penguin Pattern

Weeks and weeks worth of work went into this pattern. There are 2 add-on patterns that go with this pattern that I'll be revealing and launching sometime in June too.

Honestly as much as I love this pattern, I'd be happy not to see it again for a while, lol!

Being in the hospital kind of set me back a bit on this so instead of a big splashy countdown launch, I'm just going to quietly put this in my shop in the next few days. 

Here's the final cover design.

Subscribe to my newsletter and find out the exact date, plus there will be a giveaway of one of the prototypes soon. Don't miss out!

 

 If you like making fun felt things or penguins or both, I hope you'll come check it out!

Friday Finds: A Gift From Me To You!

This Friday is a little different. Instead of me finding things to show you I'm giving you a gift I made just for you!



I worked super hard for days to write and design this just for all my crafty people out there.

 Ready to get your craft on but not sure how 

to find quality patterns?

 

Then you'll want get my FREE Guide: 6 Important Things To Look For  When Purchasing A PDF Craft Pattern.

 Do you have any idea what makes a really good pattern vs a poor or mediocre one? I breakdown the 6 most important things to look for when choosing a pattern.

 Finding the right good, quality pattern makes all the difference between your confidently creating a good final piece you'd be happy to give as a gift or feeling frustrated and miserable about time and money wasted.

Come check out this guide and I hope you find it helpful!

Worktable Wednesday:Designing "The Look" Of My PDF's

I made an announcement last week that I'm going to be designing and selling PDF patterns. A lot of work goes into doing that and the Free patterns that I offer to you my blog readers and my email subscribers, so I thought I'd document the process. It's given me a whole new respect for designers who do this.

So to begin with I needed to design "the look" of my patterns. Yes that's a thing and I wanted a clean look that would work with all my patterns and be identifiable as a Sassy Packrat Studios Pattern.

I first picked the type font I'd use for my headers, which are the name of the pattern, and all titles, like Instructions, supplies etc. I chose the font I use in my logo, which I really love and made it a blue color that also come from my logo.

  All the secondary text will be in a medium gray color and the important copyright text will be in black. The red box above is where the beauty shot of the finished plush piece will go. I'm considering adding a few lines of a story about the plush character on this page. I also will add some snowflake graphics for this particular PDF.

  This second page is an introduction about making this piece and supplies/tools. I'm probably going to make this 2 pages with the supplies and tools on it's own page. There will be photos of the supplies and tools needed plus a written out list.

 The sewing instruction pages will have photos, graphics and written text explaining each step. All pages except the cover page will be numbered.

 This is an original design I used to make that was pretty popular, so I've chosen it for my first selling pattern. I'm re-designing it and it will look somewhat different than this, but it's a cute and easy to make pattern that doesn't require a lot of skill and will turn out well.

My goal is to have this pattern ready my the end of April. I'd love to have some pattern testers, is anyone interested? 

Here are the details: You get the pattern FREE to try, be willing to send me 3 photos of your finished piece and feedback on the pattern and process. After I've made tweaks I'll send you the final pattern for FREE as compensation for testing the pattern. I'll also keep you on my list for future testing. Sound good? Then email me with your interest. I'm Jennifer, sassypackrat(at)hotmail(dot)com. Thanks!

Basic Doll Design Done.

I've been working on a small felt doll that I'd sell as a PDF pattern in my etsy shop. Something simple and cute. I've spent some time watching 2 other designers doing this and just love their dolls. They each do their PDFs so well and the finished dolls are so cute that I'm not sure I can even compete but well I'm going to give it a try.

Here's the idea I've worked out so far.

I still need to work out clothes for her. But what do you all think? Is she worth putting out there?

I re-designed an old plush doll pattern that I was excited about a few years back but didn't get much response from so sort of gave up and moved on to other things. Here's what the Original design was. Cute little Kawaii plush doll. I called them "Snarky Girl Dolls"TM and they were based on my then teenage daughter. I still love these little dolls with serious attitude and may revisit this design again one day.

 Here's a larger version of that same design.

I've re-worked her to have moveable arms and legs that sit and a more happy doll face.

Here she is in comparison to my other new doll design that won't be a PDF pattern.

I'd love the hear what you think abut this doll so please do comment.