Italy & One Year Anniversary!

So I'm back from Italy. It was a lot of fun and kind of overwhelming. I'm kind of sad to be back, but it's also nice to be home at the same time. I will write more details about it and post photos later. I took a ton of photos. Since I took photography this year, I wanted to get good photos with my manual camera. I took like 30 rolls of film. I can't wait to develop them and see how they turn out! It's nice to take photos with actual film, but I think next time I do something like this, I'll try to use my digital camera more because it's really expensive to buy film, develop it, etc.

I posted a few updates on my twitter while I was over there. Italy is known for making handmade marbled paper and I found some really nice paper in Venice and Florence. I can't wait to use it on some projects.

What's also exciting is June 4th was Move the Needle's one year anniversary. There's a sale in my shop this weekend (Friday-Sunday) to celebrate it. Just enter the code "BDAY" at checkout to get 10% off any item.

I can't believe it's been a year already. I actually don't know when it was I started listing items, but I know I signed up for an etsy account on June 4th.

The first item I listed (from what I can remember) was this Brown Butterfly Journal, which was also featured in an EtsyVeg treasury. I made a variation of it for myself when I was first learning how to make journals and I made a better version when I opened my shop.



The first item that showed was the duck I Am a Little Animal Recycled Journal. It sold on July 21.



I'm so glad I decided to open up my own shop. It's been a lot of fun and etsy is such a great community to sell crafts on. It's allowed me to polish my craft (I actually learned bookbinding so I could open a shop) and see what it's like to run my own business. I also love seeing other people's shops and meeting new people. I hope to continue expanding on my shop and sales in the future. I made a goal on the site 43things.com last year to start my own business and I decided since it's been a year since I've had my shop, I decided to say I completed my goal. The next blog update will be a cross-post from that site saying how I completed my goal.