A couple of years ago, when Aaron and I were first starting The Charis Project Melissa, the daughter of one of our board members, came to us and said, “I’d really like to help you guys out. I don’t have a lot of money but here are a few things I could do.”
She was in her last semester of design school and she took us on a her final project for her class on creating a branding package. She designed our logo for us and then expanded it into everything else, letter head, business cards, newsletter layout, and even web graphics. She’s the reason we look so good.
She says that having the work she did for us in her portfolio helped her to land her first job out of school. They liked that she had already done something real.
To this day, whenever I have something I want to try I can shoot her an email and she get’s back to me right away with something awesome. She even designed my business cards for blogher, which were super pretty.
At that time I remember her saying she was thinking of opening an etsy shop to sell stuff that she made and then donating half the proceeds. But for some reason for a long, long time I didn’t realize she had actually done it. I’m not sure where I thought she was getting the money she kept donating every month, but I didn’t realize that she had in fact started a very cool shop called moonscape handmade and was donating 50% of the proceeds to The Charis Project for the past few years until a couple of months ago. Yeah, I’m quick like that.
Anyway, you should check out moonfruit because her stuff is beautiful and you can get pretty, pretty things and help out orphans at the same time. Total win, win.
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Yes, I promised you a series and then failed to deliver. I’m sorry. I’ve been…. sewing. Yes, that’s right, sewing. Aaron’s brother is getting married this Saturday, all 4 kids are in the wedding, and in lieu of actually having cash to spend on such things, not to mention the 3 birthday presents we needed for this past weekend, I’ve been making stuff instead.
2 sashes
1 waistcoat
1 bow tie
three capes
2 pennants and I had to alter the pants for both the Boy and Bam Bam.
My machine died so I’ve been borrowing my MIL’s which for some reasons misses stitches at random and then the thread tears and breaks and you have to go quite slowly to keep it from happening and it’s been a very tedious process.I didn’t even get pictures of the capes, before giving them away. Bad blogger, bad.
And I’ve been single parenting for almost a full month. Aaron gets home Thursday.
But I intend to finish the rest of the sewing this evening so maybe I’ll get that series past the several versions of the same thing that I’ve typed and rejected that now languish in my drafts folder. Of course, starting in 2 days I’m making a wedding cake so… no promises.