Looking for Mudflap Animal Decals? Go check out Caribou! Super cute and lots of different animals!

http://www.furaffinity.net/user/caribou/

mudflap decal decals sticker stickers

Now that the decals are my only income, we want to make sure we are on more than one selling platform. It would totally suck if etsy decided to randomly shut us down.

We uploaded our first item today, it's our reflective tribal dragon decal. We chose it because it is our best seller and it's the item we have the most photos and text to work with.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/18174110336.....84.m1558.l2649

Ebay has a policy that you can only sell 10 items in your first month. You can only have 10 items listed at any time in your first 45 days. Oh, and 9 color options count as 9 items. I don't know what problem they are trying to solve, but it makes it hard on someone like me who wants to use it as a business platform.

So instead of listing one item in 9 colors, we'll be listing 10 items, one color each. I have to go look a the sales spreadsheets to figure out what the other 9 items are.

Now that the decals are my full time job, I have more time to spend on social media. Or, rather, I need to beat all the bushes I can to drum up business. Is my DA acct worth reviving?

Also, I started up an instagram account. Slightly different than what I post here, since it will have the non-furry stuff too. https://instagram.com/sewardstreetstudios/

Or more correctly, I now have one job, and that is to make decals.

I gave notice a little over 2 weeks ago and last Thurs was my final day at the Day-Jobbe. Decals is my only full time income now.

Yesterday and today I was able to finally get all caught up on the list of orders. Some of them were well over a week old. Things had gotten to the point that I couldn't fill all the orders that came in during the week, over the weekend. So I'd go into Monday with some leftover orders that had to wait until the following weekend. But then I'd get more orders than I could fill during the week, and I'd go into the next week with even more unfinished. Lather, rinse, repeat.

In the meantime, home things like laundry, garbage, and dishes were stacking up because I was running as fast as I could just to keep up with the orders. And forget about any new business growth plans. No time for that either.

Now that I'm caught up on orders, I can take care of the new ones on a daily basis. The rest of the week is going to be spent excavating my life so I can function better. Next week I get to start playing around with selling on Amazon.

Now go buy some decals so I can be less freaked out about this.
https://www.etsy.com/shop/SewardStreetStudios

Often, someone just starting their business will be told to keep track of all their business expenses because they can write them off their taxes. While keeping track of your expenses is a very good thing to do, it is not likely to make much difference when it comes to your taxes.

Our company, Seward Street Studios, is a DBA, which means that our company and I share the same social security number. The company’s income is my income, the company’s expenses are my expenses. The upside is that it is the easiest, and least expensive way to register a business. Perfect if it’s just you , your dog, and your embroidery machine. The disadvantage is that is someone should sue you and win, you are personally responsible.

For as long as we have been an officially registered with the government business, I have been doing my taxes with the H&R Block Deluxe software. In addition to personal taxes, it handles all the info necessary for a small home based business like ours.

As I work my way through the software, it asks all the necessary questions. Travel expenses? Equipment purchases? Supplies, rent, insurance, fees, etc. It’s all covered. It actually takes more time to gather the numbers than it takes to fill out the software.

At the end, it asks a very important question, do I want to take the itemized deduction or the standard deduction? The standard deduction is the one we would get just for being a married couple. The itemized deduction is the one I get by itemizing all my business expenses. You have to pick one, you can’t have both.

Our business expenses last year came out to about $19,000.00. It was a very good year for us so a large part of that was the purchase of some new equipment. But it also includes all the hotel, meals, travel etc. that one would usually think of as things that you can write off as a business.

The thing is, you don’t get to write all of it off, just a percentage. So even though our expenses were $19k, the amount we can actually deduct from our taxes comes out to $887.00

The standard deduction for a married couple is $12,400.00 Obviously, I take the standard deduction every time.

I don’t know what the magic formula is. I’m not an accountant, I don’t know anything about taxes beyond the questions asked by the software. But it generally ends up that you can deduct somewhere around 5% of the actual expenses. At that rate, I would need to spend around $248,000.00 in expenses to make itemized deductions match standardized deductions.

So when that helpful friend encourages you to spend money on something because “you can write it off as a business expense” think twice. You can only write of about 5% of it, and only if your total amount exceeds your standardized deduction.

I was doing a vanity search on Google, like you do, and discovered there is a page about me on wiki Fur. Thank you to the person who created it!

http://en.wikifur.com/wiki/Deb_Kosiba

When I go to conventions, I write down all the things that people ask for that we don't have. "Do you have any giraffes?" "Huh, no we don't. I'll write that down."

We pay special attention to the ones with multiple requests. Differernt animals trend much like fashionable colors. One year it's ferrets, the next year it's otters, then it's hyenas the year after that. This past year was kangaroos for some reason.

I have compiled my notes from MFF and AC last year so I can use it as a guide for new designs for AC this year. I won't be making evrything on the list, I will stop when I filll up the 3 empty banners we have this year.

I'm posting it here partly to get your opinions, and to see if there is anything you guys would add to the list. But mostly becasue I do a lot of design doodles in meetings at my day jobbe and want the list where I can see it at work.

Also, pardon the spelling manglement. This is an internal list, so I don't really care how things get spelled, as long as I know what I meant.

Other Sizes of dice
Stick Figure Kangaroo
Lucky Poo
Stick Figure Cthulhu
More Cthu;hu
Birds
Dog Breeds
Jackal
Dingo
Hamsters
Hyena Stick Figure
Horizontal Eastern Dragon
Paw Prints with Ingress Symbols
Salt Life / Furry life
Giraffe
beaver
Mouse (not rat)
Water Buffalo
Cougar
Dinosaurs
African Wild Dog
Pangolin
Ring tail Cat
Corgie
Sheltie
Celtic Knot Paw Print
Cute Squid
More Cthulhus
Maned Wolf
T-rex stick figure
Winged Animals
Simple shapes mini reflective sets
Crane/stork
bluebird
cardinal
Egypt hyroglyph birds
FURRY
Parrots
Hummongbird
Cockateil
Bluejay
Cardinal
plesiosaur
triceratops
apatasaurus
trex
peranadon
HR Horseshoe
khonsu
thoth
Stick Figure Hyena
Small reflective star set
Small reflective dot set
small reflective gem set
collie stick figure
pibble stick figure
Reflective balloon set
tiny stars set (big and small)
tiny hearts set (big and small)
Big cats like panther
winged jackalope
FSM

Windycon was last weekend. It was a huge success, but oh man was it a lot of work. Basically for the last several months if I wasn't at my day-jobbe, I was doing something related to the convention.

I am now in the 2 weekend window between Windy and MFF.

I'm suffering the usual con-runner withdrawal, my brain doesn't know what to do with itself without 3,000 fires to handle every day. I click through all my points of contact, but there are no more convention related emergencies to deal with.

I should be getting ready for MFF.

I should also be doing post-con wrap up stuff.

I have customer communication that I've been neglecting that I should get back to.

Instead, I'm doing housecleaning here on FA, I've read weeks worth of back posts on /r/talesfromtechsupport/, all my laundry is done, the fridge has been cleared out of old restraunt leftover containers, I have thrown out bags and bags and bags of garbage.

None of this is urgent or important, but it's my way of staying buisy while my brain spins down from Windy.

My laptop borked at AC, a bad sector in on the hard drive. Thanks to a lot of amazing help from  furian and having paid for the full warranty from Dell, things are mostly back to normal, and no data was lost.

In the meantime, for the last 2 weeks, I was on an old XP laptop. Old Illustrator, wouldn't see my CS4 files properly. Didn't have all my working files onboard and it wouldn't talk to the 3T external with all the files. It wouldn't talk to the laser printer, had to dig out the old inkjet, which had it's own problems. I had to set up the old laptop on my work table, next to my desk, along with the external drive it couldn't read, so half my workspace was gone. Had all sorts of extra cables and power cords, added an additional power strip. Had to dig out an old physical network cable, and figure out where I put the network hub I haven't used in years. There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza....

I could function, but everything took 6 times as long, and every step was plagued by some form of not going smoothly. About 3 days ago I threw my hands up and said Eff it. It can all just wait until I have my current laptop back in working order.

Yesterday the Dell tech came over and swapped out the hard drive (yes, Dell makes house calls, worth every penny) and then Furian copied a clone from the old drive onto the new drive. This morning I got it all set up again, and it's like nothing ever happened. A giant load of stress has melted away.

I still have a backlog of orders to fill, including the commissions from AC. But now I can actually do them and not have it take forever, and not leave me with a giant stress headache.

As one last insult to the whole thing, I went to shut off my old laptop and it notified me that it was now installing update 1 of 155. Why???? It's an XP machine. Why is it even bothering with updates? Two hours later and it's at 124. Bleh.

The crew left with all the gear at about 6a this morning and I am really at loose ends. The shop is in vacation mode, all the orders are sent out. I can't list anything new while it is closed. I have no urgent deadlines, no immediate projects. I'm not sure what to do when I don't have emergencies and deadlines to worry about.

I guess I might actually get to work on time today.

We just finished a hard 2 day push on getting ready for AC. At this point all the decals have been cut and weeded, both for inventory and display. I still have to apply the transfer tape, cut them all apart, label them and file them. And I have 7 banners I need to apply them to in the next two weeks. A lot of work yet, but now we are that much closer. Could not do it without Phoenix & Kandi

The final count is 135 new designs since Anthrocon last year. Seems like a lot, but it comes out to about 3 per week, a nice steady pace.

Do you play Ingress? Do you wear t-shirts? Then vote for my submissions in the welovefine.com Ingress competition! Thanks!

Balance of Power
https://contest.welovefine.com/vote.....d_submit=31827

Explore the World
https://contest.welovefine.com/vote.....d_submit=32167

https://contest.welovefine.com/vote.....d_submit=32167

This is the second one. Please vote!

I love the old WPA travel poster style, and it was a perfect fit for a game that makes you get out and explore your neighborhood.

http://www.furaffinity.net/view/13392969/

There is a t-shirt company, welovefine.com, that has design competitions. This time they are having an Ingress themed contest. I play Ingress, and I do t-shirt designs. A perfect match!

This design is about the fact that we need the other team, and things are best when there is balance. Yes, it is totally awesome to smash the other team, and blanket your area with beautiful fields, but then what? Once all the portals are flipped, and all the links are made, there isn't much left to do. We need the other side to come in and tear it all down so we can have the fun of building it all up again.

If you play Ingress then you probably know about Capsules and how everyone wants one. One of the ways you could get one was by submitting, well, anything to the t-shirt design competition, and posting about it on G+ with the hashtag #ingresswear. Because of this, instead of the 300-500 submissions welovefine usually gets for a contest, they have over 1,400 submissions.

That's a lot of competition!

I am asking everyone here in the furry commmunity for a little help. Obviously I'm hoping you will vote for my design but I am also asking everyone to boost the signal if they can. If you play ingress, please pass this on, not just here on FA, but on your local team Google hangouts too.

How to vote? Please head over to
https://contest.welovefine.com/vote.....d_submit=31827
5 is the highest, 1 is the lowest. Obviously, I'd be thrilled if you picked 5!

You will have to sign in to your welovefine account to vote. If you don't have an account, getting one is easy, they just need a name and email address, so they know you are human.

Thanks!

We just got confirmation that we will be vending at The Chicago Outfit's home game on April 26.

Not sure what display banners we will bring, we only have room for 3. But we will have our binder with the printouts of all 18 banners, and we will have our whole inventory too.

http://chicagooutfitrollerderby.com/

Posted this to a Stained Glass facebook group this morning. I woke up to find someone had stolen one of my designs and posted it there. It was time for some edumacation. And since I had it all written up, I figured I'd post it here too.


I'd like to talk about copyright law.

A long time ago, I had posted a picture of a bunch of pieces I was getting ready for a show. A while later someone asked if they knew who the artist was. They asked because they had tried to trace one of the designs, but the angle was too bad to get a good pattern off of it.

Not because they wanted to ask permission to use a design. No.

They asked because the photo was too crappy for them to be able to steal the design without asking.

And no-one called them on the fact that they tried to steal someone else’s work.

Maybe I should have called them on it myself. But I was new to the group, and it seemed to me the lack of response indicated that the group as a whole thought it was ok to steal designs from other members in the group.

I stopped posting my art here immediately.

Imagine how my day started when I opened facebook this morning to find out someone had stolen one of my designs and posted it here in this group.

This time I am not going to stay quiet. I am going to use this as a teaching opportunity.

(Disclaimer, I’m not a lawyer, just a fellow artist who has spent a lot of time reading about copyright law.)

In the United States, Copyright attaches the moment a creator creates something. As soon as an author writes words, a photographer takes a picture, or an artist sketches a drawing, that item is covered under copyright. It is no longer required for an artist to file a copyright to be protected under copyright law.

Copyright FAQ

-I found the perfect design on Google/Pinterest/Etsy, can I use it?
No. Images and designs posted on the internet are not free to use. In the case of stained glass pieces, the photographer owns the right to the photo and the designer owns the right to the design.

-But it’s absolutely perfect for what I need!
You are welcome to ask the original artist for permission to use the image. If they say no, then don’t use the image. If they don’t reply, then don’t use the image.

-But I can’t figure out who the original artist is.
Then don’t use the image.

-If I use it anyway, they’ll never find out right?
The internet is not as big as you think. The same tools that let you find the original art will allow the original artist to find you.

-If I change it 10% (or 20% or 30%) it’s mine to use right?
No. That’s a myth. The rule of thumb is that if you place the original image and the new image side by side, and you can tell that one came from the other, then you are infringing on copyright.

There are plenty of articles about artists and copyright law on the internet. Please take a few moments to brush up on the basics of copyrights. As a group we need to protect each other from those would steal our work.

If you have any questions about copyrights, feel free to ask. I will do my best to answer.

Edit: The group as a whole has been supportive, and there has been a lot of copyright info taught. But there have been some comments I have no answer to that isn't snarky. These are all paraphrased from multiple comments.


-That legal stuff is too complicated, I will continue beveling what I believe.
You are an artist. If you want to sell your art, you need to learn copyright law. Yes, it seems dry and boring, but so are the rules of the road and basic tax law. Suck it up and learn.

-You should be flattered that someone liked your art enough to copy it.
Stealing is not flattery. I have no idea why anyone thinks this is ok.

-I don't want to take the time to find out if a pattern is free to use.
You say this and I hear "I don't want to take 2 seconds to check to see if I'm stealing"

-I can't make my own patterns, I rely on other people's patterns.
Then buy patterns. Or take 2 seconds to see if the pattern says it's free to use. Or ask the artist for permission first. Just because you can't make your own doesn't mean you get to steal mine.

-You can't stop it, so why bother?
A variation on this was "lots of people have made this one piece and we don't even know who designed it!" As if everyone stealing makes it ok to do.

I just set up an account. Any tips or tricks I should know about?

Just listed our 200th item in our Etsy shop!
https://www.etsy.com/listing/175858.....icker-for-car?

It's not one of my own designs, it's clipart, which is why I'm posting about it here in a journal instead of my gallery. But it's still a big deal.

Last Feb, we did the local Motorcycle Show. They had 65,000 attendees and we lost our shirts. Sold less than we do at a 2,000 person furry con. One of the side effects was that we had a massive amount of decals we had made in anticipation of sales in line with a 65k show. While the vinyl is rated for 5 years, the transfer tape gets cranky after 2 years, so we had several boxes of decals slowly marching toward their expiration dates.

So I really started pumping things up on Etsy. In the last 8 months I have listed about 170 new items. For each listed item, there are 2-3 images created to give you an idea what the decal will look like when you get it. So around 650 images. That's a huge amount of work now that I'm looking back on it.

While this was going on, our friend Kandi really stepped up and became our face at the shows. If you are talking to someone at our booth, it's most likely her, not me. I couldn't sell a bucket of water to a fish in a desert. She is awesome at the shows, and she makes us look far more professional than I ever could.

And in the last couple months, my husband Phoenix has taken on our Social Media and has really grown our FB presence. In a very short span, he took us from 23 likes to over 400, and it's snowballing. He's having some kind of contest right now, check it out! https://www.facebook.com/sewardstreetstudios

So in almost exactly one year, we have gone from a huge loss to chugging along nicely. From WTF are we going to do, to having all sorts of ideas to grow our little fledgling business. It's been a lot of hard work, and I couldn't have done it without Phoenix & Kandi.

But I also have to thank you guys. I do SF cons, motorcycle events, and Furry cons, and you guys are absolutely the best. You have so much excitement and energy, it is always a blast to go to the Furry cons. Thank you for all your kind words and great ideas! Without you guys, I don't think I would have pushed so hard and done so much.

Thanks!

While it was nice to have the super long weekend, it got really expensive.

After the first big snow storm on Thursday, we didn't get our cars moved early enough on Friday. Tow and replace fines on 2 cars $300

We also had to purchase our city stickers for the 2 cars and 2 motorcycles. $375

I blew out my left front tire. I thought it was from the cold. But when I took it off to put on the spare, I discovered my strut was broken. The spring had chewed through my tire. Mechanic says we should replace both struts, so the car doesn't ride funny. Both tires should be replaced for the same reason. He said he'd also like to replace the ball joints since he's in there anyway. $1900 (w/o ball joints $1600)

And I lost 2 days of work due to the weather, the company was closed Thurs and Mon. Last Wed was a holiday, so no work, And I lost work yesterday due to the broken strut. $400.

In one weekend we went from having some savings, and being ok paying all our bills if we were careful, to holy crap how are we going to do this.

I asked the mechanic if he can get it down to $1k. It'd be tight, but we can manage that. He said he'd call around to junkyards to see if they have a used strut. If he uses a used one, it will be a closer balance match to the non-broken one on my car, so he wouldn't have to replace both.

This is *not* an "I'm having a money crisis so buy my crap" post. I'm a grown-ass long in the tooth adult, I can figure this out. I just needed a place to post all this so I can wrap my head around it.

It's also a cautionary tale. We have some savings. We budget our money. And still one unlucky weekend has sent us scrabbling.

Ugh.

This last week totally made my previous post into an unintentionally ironic post.

Half of the traffic to our Etsy shop comes from our banner ad here on FA. It's been nice and reliable, and I still recommend it, but this last week was a wake up call to not get complacent. I once worked at a company that closed when the primary client found another company to work with, and I don't want to see that happen to our own little fledgling business.

Unfortunately Weasyl and Inkbunny don't have banner ads, so those would not be as effective for us.

After talking about it with the team, we are probably going to shift gears and give some more attention to our biker themed decals, especially the hyper-reflective decals. We are also looking at developing a line of smaller HR helmet sets we can pitch toward moms with kids who ride bicycles.

These are ideas we have been tossing around for the last year or so, as a way to increase our sales, but this caused us to move up the timetable. Instead of thinking of it as a future growth strategy, we are now looking at it as not keeping all our eggs in one basket.

Advertising on FA has probably been one of my best business investments. I just happily paid for another 6 months. Totally worth it.

Mailed 12/4
Derek
Brandon
Louisa
Justin

Mailed today (12/6)
Robert
Hilary
Nicholas

Email with options sent today to
Joshua
Ralph

Will work on this weekend
Kevin
Brice

Going out the door today are orders for:

Derek
Brandon
Louisa
Justin

In progress, and should go out in the next couple days

Robert
Hilary

I will sending out emails this weekend with progress images/proofs to

Joshua
Nicholas
Ralph
Kevin

What an amazing con! Or what I remember of it anyway. We know I had a fever on Monday, we took my temp when we got home. We are pretty sure I had one on Sun, lots of people said "you don't look good *feels forehead* I think you have a temperature." And it wouldn't be a stretch to guess I had one on Sat too.

But the energy and vibrancy of MFF buoyed me along and I mostly didn't notice if I kept moving and didn't think about it. I am bummed that I missed out on all of the socialization and suit watching in the evenings, but I crashed hard almost immediately after dinner every night.

We absolutely loved the corner they gave us in the Dealer's Den! It gave us more than twice the display space, and plenty of room to work around each other. There was even room for suiters to com into our space. We hope they let us have the same spot again next year!

No surprising outliers in sales. The top selling decals are the same ones that sell best at every show. This big surprise was how many people asked for lemurs this year. No lemur requests for years, suddenly 5 people want lemurs. I guess lemurs are the new otters. I will be sure to have lemur decals ready for AC.

I have a stack of custom orders I need to start in on, but all the gear is still packed. Today I still feel like Death warmed over, but at least I'm out of bed. Maybe tomorrow I will have enough spoons to unload the car so that I can start working on the commissions. I'll post a list when I have the stack in front of me.

Huge thanks to everyone who stopped by our booth to say hi!

I'm bringing one of my twitter accounts back from the dead. If you want to follow me, it's SewardStStudios

Let me know who you are and I'll follow you too!