Spring is Here-Kiwi Vine
Originally uploaded by lessherger.

I’m an amateur gardener. I love to do it, but I’m not all that good at it yet, but I’m working on it slowly.

A commenter on my flickr account said that there was something “dear” about how I’m cradling the edge of this vine, and when I think about it, I love my plants. I really do. There is something so very great about that first touch of spring and those first buds. The first buds let you know that the plant made it and can tell you how much fruit the plant will produce.

I love my plants almost as much as I love my dogs. With proper care and maintenance my plants will feed me. It’s a good relationship.

Today I’m focusing on cutting a new garden bed in my back yard. We’re going small this year, just enough room for a row of lettuces, peas, carrot, beans, squash and zucchini. I’m putting tomatoes and peppers in 2 spots around the house and a small herb bed next to the house. I’m looking forward to the payoff this summer and fall.

I’m a big fan of Guinness Stout… I think I’d rather have a glass than paint with it…

Yahooo. The giant 90 jotter order is done and shipped. I took a few pictures of what 90 jotters look like in a ziploc baggie all together. But it’s a giant ziploc baggie, something like a 2 or 3 gallon baggie, don’t think it’s a small baggie.

Al together it weighs in at about 3 or 4 pounds. I admit, because it’s priority mail I didn’t weight it.

However I’m pretty happy to say the order is DONE!

I had a lot of sewing machine issues with this one. I made enough blanks for about 150 books. Only 90 of the 150 made the cut. That means I’ve got about 60 books with various errors. In some cases, the machine skipped a stitch, or the tension is too loose, or the stitches were too close. It made me very angry… But I’ve got 60 jotters I need to get rid of. I’m offering 6 low cost mass packs (10 jotters each) on my etsy shop. This is the lowest cost you’ll ever see on my jotters.

Here are a few pictures for your viewing pleasure.

If you’re interested in them, head on over to my etsy shop.

The recent reunion of New Kids on the Block has been heating up the news websites. Since I live under a rock I just found out about this today. It made me think, because I could care less about NKOTB, I actually disliked them as a teen, and I was probably one of the few teen girls that didn’t like them.  But it made me wonder what band would I stay up for tickets all night ,wait in long lines and make repeated calls to Ticket master? What band did I first listen to as a teen that completely blew my mind, what album did I listen to over and over? What tapes did I splice together because I broke them?

For me there is only one band that I would go that distance, only one band that blew my mind like that. NKOTB it ain’t. But what is your band, Journal it.

(For the record for me its The Pixies. Wave of Mutilation was a formative CD for me. I played it over and over, put songs from it on all mix tapes I ever made, I listened to it when I was happy, sad and in teen angst mode. Even today, when I listen to that CD I love it.)

It’s been awhile since I last posted. I’m elbow deep in a bunch of household activities and orders. I’m still plugging away at the 90 jotter order. I’m at book #70 and I’m going to stitch up some books this evening.

It’s Earth month, which fits with my usual recycled books. I challenge everyone out there to come up with a recycled book idea and to make it. My 2nd challenge is to use something recycled in your art! Collage is recycling!

In addition to all this fun stuff I’ve been working on a gray water recycling and filtration system for my washing machine. I’ve got the plans laid out now I just need to pick up the pieces. We’ll be using this for watering my pear tree as well as the lawn. My plan is to use both a particle filter as well as a carbon based filter to get rid of more of the "stuff" in the water. There isn’t much, but I don’t want to put nasty water out. 

I have a rare week day off this week, so I may get some of the parts for this today, expect an instructable to come from this.

Earth month and Earth day are big things where I work and I get pumped up for it, additionally my town has a major EcoFestival this year, showing screenings of a vast assortment of Ecologically minded movies. Additionally to that there is a walking tour of the local solar energy farm near the high school.  I"m not sure how many of these Earth Month Events I’m going to get to see or be involved in but I’m excited about them anyway.

As one of my coworkers put it, it’s a fantastic way to meet like minded people. I suspect that there will be a good showing of my coworkers and people from the regional offices.

I’ve been working on a big order. 90 of my jotter notebooks for a wedding*. Luckily for me I managed to snag a massive stack of posters to recycle shortly before receiving the order. I got some good posters too, with interesting graphics.

I’ve been holding off on stitching up the second half of the books though because our dog, Ruby, HATES the sewing machine and I’ve been thinking that it might just be too traumatic for her to have the new dog and me sewing…

But I’ve been cutting and trimming like crazy the last few nights. I had stitched enough for 100 books. Thus far after trimming and cutting about 2/3rds of the stack I’ve only got 50 books. I’ve got a stack of 20 rejects- loose or bad stitching or bad cutting. I’ll be listing reject value packs on etsy when I’m all done with the order.

*I used to work in the flower business and no matter what I did I always ended up with wedding business. In flowers brides are often difficult and I always hated doing wedding flowers. The issue, I was really good at it and word got out around town that my prices were fair and that I did a great job. In the entire time of doing wedding flowers I had only 1 bride freak out, and it was determined by everyone involved that she and her crazy sister were looking for free flowers. That one instance sticks out in my mind and still bothers me. I’m so glad that I don’t work with flowers anymore. Not to mention that when you work with flowers you really ruin the romantic gestures of flowers for yourself. Getting flowers never seems to have that feeling it once did.

Suzi has you start with flowers, but don’t stop there. Ther is a lot more going on in this video than just flowers.

Let me tell you about the new addition to our family, BJ. A little 10
pound mutt we adopted from the Salem shelter. He’s ugly as hell but in
the way that makes him cute. He’s a mix of affenpincher and shitzu or
something. He’s got a naturally occurring Mohawk, funny ears and a
scratchy coat.He’s got a lovable personality, in that he’s playful when
you want him to be and wants to sleep in your lap the rest of the time.
He’s agile and can jump extraordinarily high, which means that in the
car he ends up in the back window and in the house on the back of the
couch.

He’s attentive to what’s happening outside and while on
the back of the couch he looks out the window and growls at people
walking by the house.

He and our other dog Ruby are still
sorting things out as to who is the alpha dog. Ruby isn’t very playful
and BJ is so we’ll see how things are going to go with them. Over the
next week or so we’re going to keep them separated during the day. We
still don’t trust the new guy in the whole house, he’s had a few
accidents and we’d like to avoid any on the couches.

A few
things that we know about him, he belonged to a woman who adopted him
from the same shelter we did but 2 years ago, she started to work 16
hour days and he started to be home with the boyfriend, who wanted
nothing to do with him. So the little dog started to have a lot of
accidents and the boyfriend started to stomp at him a lot. There is a
question as to whether or not the boyfriend was also kicking him. I
don’t see any signs of that, no wincing or startling at fast movements.
Loud noises do bother him a bit but not a lot.

The dog has no
training at all, for instance he doesn’t know sit. HE doesn’t walk
well, and if he’s allowed out the door without a leash he runs for, you
guessed it, the street. We worked on sit tonight and the poor little
guy is so unaccustomed to attention that he was twitchy the entire
time. It’s going to take weeks to train this dog some basic skills and
get him used to being outdoors on the run.

It’s going to be an interesting adventure.

Oh
yeah can we talk about this dog’s name? Who in their right mind names
their dog BJ? Seriously it just invites bad jokes. We’ve decided that
he looks like an ewok (starwars) and that we’re changing his name to
Wickett. It’s far less embarrassing to be labeled a StarWars geek than
to have a dog named after fellatio.

I’ve been wanting to write about this for a few days now but I wanted to make sure that I was coherent in how I wrote it. I came up with a name for my little notebooks, Jotters. I’ve considered it something like a brand name. I came up with it, it’s mine. Recently when cruising etsy looking at what other binders were making, I typed in Jotter, to see what I got, and lo and behold I didn’t get just my books, I got a ton of other books. There were 2 sellers in particular that were selling their books as jotter notebooks. Their books were in fact very similar to mine, but obviously they were not my notebooks.

My first thought was to send out an angry cease and desist letter. Then I thought a nicely worded cease and desist letter would work letter. Then I considered doing what I did when a seller on eBay started to use my exact format for selling her books, and ignore it to a point while putting into my description "The Original Jotter Notebook."

I guess I wouldn’t mind if in their description they had written "modeled after the jotter notebooks made my Leslie HErger/COnforableShoesStudio.com" or given me the credit somewhere. Instead the binders just used my hard work to come up with a "brand"name for my books and are using it to sell their notebooks.

What would you do as a bookbinder if you came up with a name for one of your books, a brand name if you will, and another artesian started to use it? Without permission and without giving you credit?

I posted this a couple of places and the response was interesting on one source, it was pointed out to me that jotter is actually in the dictionary as a word for notebook. This is true but it’s also not quite an archaic term and no one used it until I popularized it on several forums online. (just thought I’d point that out.) Another person pointed out that my notebooks are not that original and that the solution was to be more creative. While I’m aware that these particular notebooks/jotters aren’t the most creative line of my books that wasn’t the point in my question, the point being that several sellers are using the name I chose to use for my line of books.

And yes I have looked into copyright and trademark, both are very expensive so I guess unless I’m willing to shell out $350 for the trademark and more for the copyright I’m stuck. I think it’s just rude to co-opt someone else’s hard work. This goes inline with a recent discussion on the handmade book forum about infringement and how many people think if it’s online it’ must be okay to use (AKA steal). I guess a lot of these people who haven’t been online for years and working hard and just taking other people’s ideas and hard work don’t see the harm that it does. It must be okay to steal some one else’s idea if it furthers your work.(please note my bitter sarcasm.)