Introducing Far Far Away III

I'm so pleased to announce the impending arrival of the third installment of my line of fairy tale - inspired prints for Kokka of Japan. Kokka's US distributor, Seven Islands, is now taking wholesale orders for the line, you can reach them here.

The line includes two weights of cotton / linen fabrics, Seven islands can fill you in a bit more about that. Expect it to start arriving in quilt stores in June.

I have a related bit of news that I've been trying very hard to keep under wraps until everything has been finalized, which is oh so difficult. I have been working on a wallpaper line for some time now, and hope to be able to show it to you in a week or two. It will be a limited edition and will be available directly through me, via my online pop-up shop. We will begin taking pre-orders before stock arrives, so if you'd like to be kept abreast please join our twitter feed or check back here regularly.

 FFAIII / PINK

FFAIII / GREEN

FFAIII / YELLOW

Heather Ross for Walden Surfboards

These are arriving in stores in the US now, and in Australia in July! You can find them over at Walden's website.

You can also read more about them (and find international dealers and retailers) over at Global Surf Industries

Girls Who Love Horses

"playing horses" heather ross for Kokka, available spring 2011Its hard to reconcile, sometimes, that horses were once a part of my life, and now they are not. I still have my chaps, my helmet, my breeches, my paddock boots, and a pair of very smelly and increasingly stiff riding gloves in the bottom of my closet. I hold onto them the way my husband holds onto the motorcycle helmet and form fitting leather suit that has not been used for over a decade. My cleaning lady (I'm not rich, just a really bad housekeeper) once found these last remnants of a brazen bachelorhood tucked away into a forgotten corner , and asked where the Mr.'s motorcycle was. "There isn't one anymore, he just can't bear to let go of the accessories", I answered, to which she responded with an expression of pure pity. She looked down into the dusty visor in her hands, shook her head and softly murmured "so sad."

He's not the only one who lives in a suspended state of denial. When I was packing a bag for my appearance on The Martha Stewart Show, I seriously considered including my riding gear. "Martha and I are just going to CLICK, I just KNOW it." I explained to a husband who was already exhausted by the general theme of self promotion that came along with the book tour that I had just begun. "and when she finds out that I RIDE, and that I grew up riding Morgans and draught horses, she's GOING to invite me to Bedford and I NEED to be READY. Because I can't possibly go RIDING with MARTHA STEWART in the WRONG CLOTHES. Now it was my turn for a long, pitiful look. "Oh Sweetie," TC said softly. "get over yourself." For the record, I have not YET been invited to Bedford to go riding. Nor, I should point out, have I put my riding things into deep storage.

But the acute awareness that a stage of life has ended, and the nostalgia and the piles of boxes of things that can't possibly be gotten rid of that begins to grow in it's place is really the third stage, isn't it? Before that part of your youth began or ended you must have first been able to imagine yourself loving a horse or a motorcycle or whatever it was that consumed you, probably for hours, in that fleeting stage of life where any perfect situation is possible and can be played out with the help of carefully arranged plastic figurines on one's bedroom floor. So when I saw this beautiful post over at Soule Mama I immediately knew that even though Kokka was requesting more princesses (yawn) for my new fabric collection that I also needed to do some little drawings of little girls and their plastic horses. I also knew that perhaps I had found a new and loving home for the collection of gear in the bottom of my closet. Of course, Amanda's little girl wont be fitting into anything for a while yet, which means that I can cling to my delusional dreams for just a little while longer.

A penny for my tax man's thoughts (which, be warned, are frightening).

I have to assume, based on the size of the bill that my accountant has just sent me, that he intends the good advice he has given me to be shared with about a hundred thousand people. So here goes.

Somebody over at the IRS has finally been introduced to the world wide interweb and noticed that Etsy (and Ebay, of course) is making an awful lot of money off of lots and lots of small, under the radar sellers. Starting January 1st, 2011, Paypal will be calculating income and, by years end, reporting it to the IRS. If you haven't already started reporting your income from Etsy or Ebay on your taxes (I put it in the "other income" category, and print out the years transactions for my own records) Now's the time. It will also be more important than ever to keep track of your expenses and costs of goods sold, because you will need to be able to show what an item cost you to make and what costs went to operating your business so that your actual net (ie, taxable income) can be calculated. Lets say for example that you sell something on Etsy for ten dollars that took five dollars to make. The IRS will see the whole ten dollars, it will be up to you to show them what your actual profit was, and that's the number that gets taxed.

As it stands now, sellers bringing in less than $20,000 don't have much to worry about. But just because Paypal won't be sending your records in to the IRS doesn't mean that they won't be aware of your business presence. Clearly, they are paying attention!

Here's the thing about the IRS, and I'm sorry to get a little scary here. If you make the decision to start a business of any size - making or doing or reselling anything in exchange for money - the responsibility to have a full working knowledge of the laws in your town, your county, your state, and your country falls, in their eyes, completely and unsympathetically on YOU. If you owe them money, they will not forgive that debt in exchange for an explanation, unless they can be proved wrong. They do not care if you are a stay at home mom, a student, or a really nice person who didn't know that they were doing anything wrong. They have the power to take away your house, your car, your credit, and your business.

You can read more about this new law here and here. Paypal has it's own explanation on their blog, but honestly it feels like the article downplays the issue a tad bit. I know, it seems a little overwhelming. You'll be able to figure it, and a system for tracking what you owe, out for yourself without hiring an accountant, I promise. Also, Etsy has a great thread about taxes over here. As much as I wish they would do more to warn their sellers about the pitfalls of unintentional tax evasion (and labor laws that pertain to working at home, and the health risks of knitting fifty scarves a week without workers comp insurance, while they are at it), the truth is that it's not their responsibility as a marketplace to do so. Its up to you to protect yourself, which could be the motto of small business in general, no?

Today I am Forty.

All in all I'm pretty happy about that. Except that I'm starting to think that maybe those little lines over my kneecaps are there for good.