I have a friend that I have known for going on 13 years. When we met she did freelance website design. One day, just for fun, she put up a domain called websitelabels.com (linked above) which was originally designed to offer tips and tricks for, errr, web site design.
And then to make a little money on the side she started selling promotional pens off that same website. You know the pens and other knick knacks with someone’s logo, slogan and/or web address on them that many companies pass out for free.
Eventually she was making so much money selling this stuff that she stopped doing anything else. She is a one woman web-based company, operating out of her house somewhere in New Jersey that manages to undercut most, if not all, of her big brand-name competitors in price if not in the vastness of her selection. Actually if you need some promotional pens or the like you would be well served by buying from her, but I digress.
Though I moved to Austin Texas at the end of 2005 Lynne and I have remained friends, if only via email and phone. And because she runs a solo business out of her house, by herself, she needs hobbies to keep herself entertained.
Recently one of her neighbors mentioned to Lynne that she had bought one of those Cricut personal cutters from an infomercial off the TV. No actually she had bought two of them. Lynne doesn’t know why either.
So what the hell is a Cricut personal cutter, I mean other than looking like a spelling mistake? Near as I can tell it is a thing like an inkjet printer but it cuts the designs on special adhesive paper or plastic that you can then peel off stick to something (like a card or a watering can) and decorate your house with it, annoy your friends by sending them these samples of your “creativity” or selling what ever you stuck this stuff to for lots of money on Craigslist or eBay.
But being the artsy type she talked herself into buying the cheaper of the two from her neighbor. One of the reasons is that it comes with software that allows you to make your own designs.
I still remember how excited she was when she called to tell me that the software would use any TrueType font!!!!!!! Yes she was that excited. In a brave attempt to get her off the phone I asked (actually demanded) that she demonstrate the coolness of this by sending me a Christmas card using her new toy. She refused. A week later the card arrived. And actually, it was kinda nice.
Fast forward a couple of weeks and she has found a cheaper supplier of the cartridges to go in her mat cutting machine, and has found that the software will accept a standard SVG file. Basically an open source version of an Adobe Illustrator document, which Lynne works in daily.
She also discovered that many people sell these simple SVG files for the Cricut as if they were some kind of magic potion designed to cure your hair loss, help you lose fifty pound of ugly cellulite and make you a million dollars in real estate. When actually they were nothing more than bog standard vector drawing files that anyone with a little drawing skill and a vector drawing tool could make.
Lynne, seeing injustice in action and (ahem…) having a little time on her hands due to business slowing down (you know, the economy and the holidays) started churning out vector files in Illustrator for herself. And being a web designer at heart she just had to show the world. So she went and got her a web address plugged into blogspot and voila Paper Yoga was born.
Actually I like the name and if you are the artsy type and have a Cricut machine (Probably about, ummmmm… none of you) it would be a good place to go check out all the cool SVG files for free for your Cricut.
And if you do drop by please leave a blog comment, it would make Lynne very happy. And as a bonus might get her to stop her calling me every day to tell me about the cool new design she just posted to Paper Yoga. Please?