Register now for the Great Crafty Business Christmas Quiz!

Last chance to enter a team for the Great Crafty Business Christmas Quiz on Monday 7 December!

Invite your friends, partner, family and workmates. If you don't have a team, register as an individual and we'll find you some friends.

If you're coming along, please do register - we need an indication of numbers by Monday 30 November.

The Great Crafty Business Christmas Quiz

Come ye one and all, old and young, ninjas and pirates to the Great Crafty Business Christmas Quiz.

Bring your friends, partners, family, co-workers or complete strangers* to Churchills Public House, 441 Colombo Street, Sydenham on December 7th by 7.30pm sharp!

The Great Crafty Business Christmas Quiz will be in traditional pub quiz style with points awarded for humour, creativity and enthusiasm. Oh, and correct answers. There will be a special round of Crafty Questions and an award for the best dressed team.

The entry fee is $20 per team (4 people) or $5 per person. Please register your team or as an individual here before Monday 30th November. Direct any questions to Millie at millie@missmillie.co.nz.

Proceeds will go toward a gift for Bevan and Andrea of Churchills who have so generously given us a free venue all year. Crafty contributions to our gift for Bevan and Andrea will also be very gratefully received - if you would like to donate a little something, please contact Lucy at lucy@felt.co.nz.

At Crafty Business #9 we mentioned that each entrant should bring along a handmade Christmas ornament or small gift to the value of $10. We've decided everyone is too busy for this type of malarkey so we're withdrawing the suggestion. Just bring your lovely self!

* Crafty Business advise against approaching complete strangers to join your quiz team. If you can't quite rustle up a team of four in time, come along anyway and we'll find you a team.

Crafty Business #9 - Ready for Action

With the Christmas season upon us we know most of you will be working extra hard fulfilling orders and readying yourself for markets and other obligations so we wanted to provide a fun, inspiring session that will leave you feeling energized and ready for more when you need it most.

Our guest speaker for this month's session will focus on how to be at your most productive and efficient over the Christmas period, how to stay motivated and decrease stress levels and what to do in January after the rush is over (other than have a few glasses of wine!).

Who is our guest speaker you ask? Well, since I live with a professional public speaker it was only a matter of time until we employed Kyle's talents and experience for a Crafty Business session. Kyle works with executives within large organisations and yet runs his own solo business from home (like many of us). This gives him a unique perspective on the challenges both large and small. Hear how you can apply what successful executives do to your crafty business.

See you at Churchills from 7pm on November 2nd.

Crafty Business #8 - The Money Stuff

For Crafty Business #8, we're very happy to have Prue McStay joining us to share her knowledge of the financial side of running a small business. Prue has more than 10 years experience working in finance across a wide range of industries, and runs her own crafty business, Citrus Daisy, on the side.

Prue’s areas of expertise include management accounting, financial accounting, system and process design and implementation, financial evaluation, business advisory, project management and general troubleshooting - in other words, she really knows her stuff!

Finance is an area of business that I find pretty daunting, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. A bit of knowledge and some reassurance that you're on the right track can make all the difference. Prue will run through the basics of keeping accounts, structuring your business and finding the right financial advice. She'll explain some of those concepts that can be confusing for the non-mathematically-minded of us, like depreciation, drawings and GST.

Plus you'll get the opportunity to ask questions - make the most of this opportunity to pick Prue's brains! If you've got a burning question on your mind already, post it as a comment below and we'll make sure we cover it on Monday.

So it's (crafty) business as usual for October - same Bat time, same Bat channel (7pm, Monday 5 October at Churchills) and remember to bring along a sample of your latest work and invite a friend or two to come along too. If you haven't been to Crafty Business before, come along and join us for a drink. Look forward to seeing you there!

Crafty Business in World Sweet World

Speaking really quickly in a high-pitched, super excited voice I get to tell you that you can find Crafty Business in this season's issue of World Sweet World.

Lucy and I wrote an article covering some of topics we discussed in the first two Crafty Business sessions, focusing on how to write yourself a business plan. Thanks to the illustrations of Greta Menzies our article looks pretty darn sharp too.

Open source image editing software

A key part of producing gorgeous images of your work is being able to edit your photographs. A little brightening, colour tweaking and cropping can make all the difference in the world to do your products justice. Unfortunately for most of us, professional image editing software is pretty pricey, but luckily there is an alternative. You can download open source software for free!

Open source means that the software has been built and maintained by a network of volunteer programmers and is available to the general public with relaxed or non-existent copyright restrictions.

One of the most popular open source image editing programmes is Gimp. This is comparable to Photoshop, and can be used to crop and scale your photos, adjust the brightness and colours, and generally tweak and tidy. You can save then your images in various formats for print and web.

You can download Gimp at www.gimp.org.

The type of images produced and edited in Gimp are called raster graphics, and are best for photographs and artistic drawings. For other graphics such as logos, diagrams or design layouts (for example, a catalogue), a useful complement to photo editing software is a vector based design programme such as Inkscape.

Inkscape is comparable to industry standards Illustrator or Freehand, and is good for creating graphics, as opposed to editing photos. Its native format is called SVG, or Scalable Vector Graphics, which essentially means that the graphics you create can be resized, edited and transformed without losing the quality of the image.

Inkscape is available for download at www.inkscape.org.

We'll be talking more about using these tools effectively at Monday's Crafty Business, so in the meantime you might like to download Gimp and Inkscape and have a go. If you have any questions you can post them here or bring them along with you on Monday evening.

Crafty Business #7 : The Optimal Optical

This month we'll be running a much less formal, more interactive presentation for our Crafty Business get together. We will be looking at photography and how to get the most from your camera and all your awesome handmade products.

Everyone will have the opportunity to participate and in order to get all you can out of the session we want you to do just a little bit of homework - nothing too painful we promise!

We want you to each come up with one thing that you'd like to improve about your photographs. Perhaps you'd like some advice on how to use props with your work? Do you wish you could crop your images using free photo editing software? Just can't figure out how to capture a shiny surface without glare?

We will have some expert photography types available to answer all your questions and to help you in small hands-on groups.

As well as your thoughtful questions make sure you bring along some of your handmade product, any props you think you might like to use, your laptop if you have one and of course your camera.

See you Monday 7 September, 7pm.