Here is where you can help me with a dilemma. I made these lacy, little flowers:

 Sweet, right?

Scrap lace, vintage jewelry and old buttons. How can you go wrong?

But what to do with them?

Sew them onto a shirt? 

Attach them to a hair clip? 

I claimed one for myself and wear it on a bobby pin.

What are your ideas? 

How to customize your blog with no technical skills or fancy software:

Every high-profile blog I know has one thing in common: a customized design. Most blogging accounts offer you the option of customizing your blog using HTML, CSS or other codes, and there are professionals who offer services in exactly this kind of graphic design. What do you do, though, if you are code-illiterate, operating on a tight (or non-existent) budget, and don't even have proper photo-editing software on your computer?

You improvise.

In my case, the programs available to me are iPhoto and Powerpoint (yes, I'm a Microsoft-Macintosh fence-sitter). After much trial and error, here is my tutorial on how to make a blog that looks customized, while working within templates and programs that anyone can use:

How to Make a Custom Background

1. Take a suitable background photo. I wanted a fairly monochromatic texture, so I laid some lace over a piece of scrapbooking paper and snapped a picture.

2. Open the image in iPhoto. Check the size of your photo by right-clicking on it and selecting "Show File." If you have to compress the file (mine was 2 MB and blogger only supports images up to 300 KB), go to File - Export. Find the bar that says "Size" and change it to "Small".

3. Set the image as your background. In Blogger this can be done by going to Design - Template Designer - Background - Choose File. You can replace the background on any of blogger's templates, but I just used the plainest of the "simple" templates to avoid any extra formatting that might not match my pictures.

How to Create a Banner (using a single picture)

1. Take a picture in the colour scheme you want. Again, I just threw some lace and buttons on a sheet of scrapbooking paper.

2. Compress the file as above.

3. Open the image in PowerPoint. Open the toolbox and crop to the desired dimensions.

4. Create a textbox on top of your picture. For a proper logo, you would want to create a font with no copyright, but for our purposes this works fine.

5. Holding the Shift button, click both the textbox and the image. Right click and select "Grouping", then "Group."

6. Right click again and select "Save as Picture."

7. If the blogging program you are using requires a specific banner size (760 pixels by 100 pixels is common), you may have to open your file in iPhoto and crop it again there. Go to "Edit," "Crop," "Custom..." and type in the dimensions. Save your banner.

8. Upload your banner. In Blogger, you can do this by going to "Design" and clicking "Edit" in the "Header" box at the top of the page. Choose the banner's file and specify if you want it behind, above, or in place of your blog title and description.

How to Create a Banner (using multiple pictures)

1. Take pictures in the colour scheme you want. I chose pictures of some of my denim quilts. Import the pictures to iPhoto and crop as desired; square is best for this design.

2. Open PowerPoint and insert your pictures. Place them side by side, resizing them as necessary. Since I only used two pictures, I made a large textbox to fill in the rest of the space. To make it prettier, I put a rectangle behind it and filled it with a standard PowerPoint texture.

3. Follow steps 5-8 from above.

Erin's advice for the week: Ask for help.

If you're like me, asking other people for help - even just advice - feels like a huge imposition. It's something I rarely do if I can help it. What if the other person is annoyed, or offended, or thinks I'm rude? It occurs to me now that by nursing those worries, I'm judging that other person pretty harshly. People like to help each other! It's one of my favourite things about us. Sometimes, though, it seems so easy to forget that I can be the one asking for help. Is that pride, or pessimism, or just a misplaced sense of being considerate? Whatever it is, it's silly, and I'm working on getting past it.

Starting a business, especially for someone who tends to be more artistically-minded than pragmatic and number-savvy, requires the acquisition of many new things. Some of them are tangible, and others not so much. Here is the list I have been working on:

A serger
A dress form
A quality digital camera
Pictures for my original pitch
Information about online marketing
Advice on pricing items and predicting sales
Information about getting products into a store
Understanding of how to manipulate photos and layouts
A vocabulary that includes phrases like "minimum order," "wholesale," "overhead," etc.

Over and over this week I have found myself working up the nerve and "putting myself out there" to get these items ticked off my list. And you know what? It's not so bad after all. The response has been wonderful.

So thank you to Alex for the camera advice. Thank you to Helen for telling me about Artfire. Thank you to Mom for taking pictures, spreading the word, and figuring out how to "follow" a blog even before I did. Thank you Nikki for your indulgence and advice. Thank you to Megan and Aunt Jean for my first encouraging feedback. And thank you to Cathy and Emilie for your generous and unsought praise.

To everyone else, thank you for indulging me in this long and rather personal post. I won't do it too often - after all, this is about Business. Big, serious Business with a capital "B."

But don't you think any enterprise is the better for all the generous hands that touch it?

Well, here goes...

I should introduce myself. My name is Erin, and I am an English major just finishing my undergraduate studies. When I'm not straining my eyes over eighteenth-century novels and sixteenth-century dramas, I'm straining my back over a sewing machine. I am at home in a world full of lace and buttons, poetry and art (but nothing too postmodern...); I am profoundly out of my element in anything that smacks of numbers, business, and self-promotion.

However. This spring/summer I have the opportunity to apply for the Ontario government's "Summer Company" student business grant, and I have decided to take the chance. Right now I am staring at an application, business plan template and cash flow statement that look extremely overwhelming and extremely blank (I cringe at the combination of an adverb with "overwhelming," but let it pass. It suits my mood). Over the next few weeks I plan to fill in those documents and turn my daydreaming, artist-poet self into a businesswoman. Over the next few months I plan to turn my artistic fantasies into a business. This blog will record the whole process, and I hope it is not too romantic of me to think that someone else might benefit from all the mistakes I am going to make.

My project at the moment: learn to use a blog and set up an online shop. And create a banner that matches my background. Oh, and finish the final few weeks of my undergrad. But that's not important, right?

I'll check in every few days to let you know how it's going. Wish me luck!