100K

The latest episode of Creating Fashion with Laurel just passed a hundred thousand views. Thank you to everyone watching.

With numbers climbing on previous episodes as well, it looks like the show has found a wider audience. Laurel says she just received three book orders from New Zealand.

Sewing Techniques on B&N

Laurel's flagship textbook, Sewing Techniques from the Fashion Industry is now available here, from Barnes & Noble.

Our most recent episode, Problems with Home-Sewing Patterns continues to garner attention on YouTube. Laurel's books have been selling well as a result, so having her best-seller on B&N should be helpful, given that they'll be handling the printing and shipping.

And they've done a great job. I've seen the Barnes & Noble version and it's a beautiful hardcover book.

Now that we've figured out how to do this, we'll be gradually adding the others. As always, this and the other seven books are available from LaurelHoffmann.com.

Movie Night flyers (2024)

Happy Thanksgiving! These are all the flyers I designed for Movie Night at The Plastic Club this year. Click images to enlarge.

I co-host these events with my friend Anders. This is my third post about the flyer designs, so it's been three years since post-pandemic Movie Night began. Wow, that was quick. The 2023 flyers are here and the 2022 ones are over here.

Books and pieces

My mother has spent this past week fulfilling book orders. She has turned her basement studio, where we shoot the show, into a book manufacturing facility.

Every surface is occupied by stacks of her books and shipping materials. The nearby Staples and our local post office are receiving daily visits. It's proof of what she has said all along, "People need this information".

I still wonder if she's been discovered by someone with a large number of followers who is referring people to us, but I haven't found any evidence of it.

Looking around the internet this morning, what I have found are some random Laurel-related items. I didn't know about these two news reports:

The Glenside Local (2023)
Oreland’s Laurel Hoffmann, host of Creating Fashion with Laurel, wins award for her work at PhillyCAM

The Baltimore Times (2020)
Haute-Couture Patternmaker and designer turns her home into a face mask factory

That second one is how the show got started in the first place. She was making masks and I made a video about it for the PhillyCAM channel. More from those days in this old post.

I did know about these two articles she wrote, but I didn't know they were online:

zavesti.com (2022-ish)
Laurel Hoffmann Explains Why Sewing Can Be A Top Career Choice For You Today

Threads (2018)
All About Sewing Industry Seam Allowances

I'm proud of all the positive attention she's been receiving lately, but what I'm seeing is my mother busier than ever. With no signs of sales letting up, the plan is to put the books on Barnes & Noble.

It's been in the works for a while, but hit a snag somewhere. I'm going to see if I can get that fixed. Hopefully, the day is coming when we can refer Laurel's fans to B&N and free up the basement.

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Update (five minutes later): It turns out I did know about The Baltimore Times article. In 2020. Well, that's what blogs are for.

Episode 22

The latest episode of Creating Fashion with Laurel is now online. Since it posted on Monday, it's quickly become our most-viewed episode. It's also receiving a lot of kind comments.

Whenever the number of views on a video spikes like this, I figure someone must have embedded it on a high traffic site.

I'd switch that thumbnail image (YouTube picked it automatically) with something design-y, but I don't want to jinx anything until the number of views levels off. Who knows, maybe the big X in the corner is helping.

1K on YouTube

The Laurel Hoffmann YouTube channel reached a thousand subscribers this week. It's been four years since we started posting episodes of Creating Fashion with Laurel. Thank you to everyone who is watching. I know from the comments that Laurel has a lot of great fans.

I'm currently editing the next two episodes, which were shot on the same day. Episode 22 will have its YouTube premiere around the start of November.

In this one Laurel talks about all the problems she finds in store-bought home sewing patterns. She has tried talking directly to the companies that produce them, but they don't respond to her. So now she's going to share her findings on the show.

New paintings

sold

sold

These are all from the past few months (click images to enlarge). They're my usual painting medium and size, gouache and charcoal, 18x24". All of my paintings are completed during evening figure drawing sessions. I attend a couple of different groups.