. . . The Rest of the Weekend

Thread- and wax-related messing about actually took up relatively little of the weekend, so what else did I do?

Saturday morning I packed up a pouch that was purchased via Etsy while I was off at the annual floodplain manager's conference. In the process of doing the postage, I signed up for Etsy's "Direct Checkout" program, which is a PayPal-like setup for people to pay by credit card, for a fee, of course. If you sign up for it, you can generate shipping labels from within Etsy's system, even if the purchase was not made with Direct Checkout.

Saturday afternoon I made a price list for conchos, with pictures. I had to go through the three suppliers I get conchos from and find the ones I have, and I also chose ones I might decide to carry. Get images, create spreadsheet, drop images in spreadsheet, go back and edit a bunch of images, finish spreadsheet, export to PDF, export to PDF again a different way, edit spreadsheet, export, possibly repeat edit/export cycle, until done.

Next step is to stamp letter codes by all the conchos on the display strip, and make a new hang tag that has the price for each code. One of the edit/export cycles was to put the letter codes on the spreadsheet. 

I meant to finish up the concho-pricing project on Sunday, but it didn't happen. We went do Dick Blick for black waxy stuff, did personal errands, then went to Dick's Sporting Goods, to look for a tackle box to store conchos in. 

I was looking at a Plano box that holds smaller, flat boxes, like this one, but there's a lot of not-very-useful or flat out dead space in it. I like the flat Plano boxes (I keep tools in several, and they've held up quite well, other than the time they were crushed by Thing 1 shifting in a rental trailer), so I decided to go with those and a tote bag.

But, Dick's didn't have Plano boxes in a bag, only some other brand. Nor did they have individual boxes the size I wanted. Ron wisely counseled not buying a bag with planning to replace the boxes, so we went to Cabela's. There we found boxes we like (good hinges), in the size I wanted (this style, not necessarily this size). They didn't have any in bags, but I don't want a bag with lots of extra pockets, so I'll make one myself, out of either leather or canvas. Or maybe we can fit them into Thing 2. (Ron is probably laughing right about now) Four boxes followed us home, which should be plenty.

It was wet and rainy all afternoon/evening, so I didn't ask Robin to go spelunking in the trailer in Thing 2 for conchos. If we don't get conchos into the tackle boxes before the next event, we can do it at the next event (CodCon, IIRC). I do need to measure the stack of boxes so I can make a bag. Not sure if its going to be leather or canvas. 

Because it was wet and icky not just yesterday afternoon, but all weekend, I haven't gotten cartridge box parts dyed black. I considered doing it in the basement yesterday afternoon, but lacked sufficient motivation.

After lunch yesterday I sat down at the computer, found websites for custom stamp manufacturers, and was going to come up with a design. However, finding the outline-only Illustrator file of our Otter logo turned out to be non-trivial.

That searched turned into another project, in which Ron did a search for all the Illustrator files on the computer and bank of hard drives, determined which were the latest copies, and copied all of those to one central location. Note to self, make sure that that location is being backed up regularly. After that, Ron went through and updated the set of images I use for MuseCon, so all of those are in one place (which was the original intent, but edits and additions have happened over time). 

Ron did, in the process, find the image I'd been looking for. So maybe this week I can get a maker's stamp designed. I also need to go through and clean up my MuseCon and other design directories, there is a lot of unnecessary duplication of files in them. I can also probably get rid of a lot of stuff that I did for the Graphic Design courses I took at Harper. Not that we're short of drive space, it can just be challenging to find the stuff you want in all the cruft.