Trail to Old West Ways

It has been quite some time since my last post. I quess you might say I have been out grazing in the pasture for just a little too long! Let's catch up, shall we? The month of May marks an entire year of pain free remission for my Polymyositis. During that time, I have been busy redesigning my web site, Old West Ways. I changed the color schemes, fonts, and I even added a new page as well as some fun western animation. Work  can get down right boring if there is no fun in it! The decision was also made to start clearing out the jewelry collections and focus more on my western designer shower curtains and pillows. I read an article that said it was generally a good idea to keep your site "fresh" and to track what pages get the most hoofs - or traffic. The Christmas season was good to me and my blessings continue to come. This month my shower curtains are being photograped to be featured in a retail magazine called Western Lifestyle Retailer. A wonderful woman named Thea Marx from Contemporary Western Design invited me to send my designs to her for this amazing opportunity.  I can tell you I was kicking my heels pretty high when the invitation came. Thank goodness I am in better health so all that kicking did not have me eating dirt!!

Happy Trails!
Carol
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Don't forget to visit my site at http://www.oldwestways.com
Old West Ways, your western home accessories store and so much more.

This matter has a spot very close to my heart so listen up......

The U.S. Senate has designated May 2007 as National Autoimmune Diseases Awareness Month (ADAM)! This and any other measure taken to educate the medical and research industry is a blessing to those of us who live with this type of disease. And a note worth mentioning is that our families and friends who live with us and love us are just as effected by  the autoimmune diseases as those who suffer from them. Please educate yourselves if you are not familiar with polymyositis or any of the other forms of myositis. Go to http://www.myositis.org today.

God loves you and so do I!

Happy Trails!

Carol

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Don't forget to visit http://www.oldwestways.com , Old West Ways, your western home accessories store & so much more!

Can I start by saying that I make my fair share of mistakes?  To add to my collection, I have the missed newsletters that are promised quarterly to the Wagon Train members on my web site. I have now two of them to my credit. I apparently have trouble with the January post.  My Mammaw used to say "the road to H_ _ _ (you know where!) is paved with good intentions". I guess it is.  I was so confident when I began my journey that I just knew I could do it all. I was sure full of it, huh? There is, of course, a lesson in each mistake that we make. As one of the herd, we are so busy running for fear of being left behind that we don't even see what or whom we are stampeding over. I think that some of the herd even forget why they started the drive in the first place. So, the lesson here is simply that everyone makes mistakes, and I am no exception. Recognize it, then mosey on my friend, but perhaps at a slower pace so you can enjoy the scenery. To continue with the metaphor,  this heifer has strayed to a quiet pasture and she really likes it here! Come on in and see for yourself.

Happy Trails!

Carol

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Don't forget to visit my web store, Old West Ways at http://www.oldwestways.com/ , your western home accessories store.

Well friends, I have not posted in a while. It seems I keep gettin' thrown out of my saddle, so to speak. This chemo stuff is getting rough. It makes no real sense to me to have a cure or effective treatment for a major disease that is actually WORSE for you in the long run than the disease itself.  And if the treatment don't get you, surely the drug cost will! So,  Congress may finally be doing something right- or at least taking a hugh step in the right direction!  Legislation has been introduced by Congress to name May National Autoimmune Diseases Awareness Month (ADAM). This is a legislative milestone folks. There are more than 80  known autoimmune diseases (one of them is mine, Polymyositis) and figures from the National Institutes of Health show that there are 24.5 million Americans who suffer from this type of disease.  To make it worse, the prevalence of these diseases is rising.  They go on to say that autoimmune disease  is one of the top 10 leading causes of death of children and women under age 65.  The sad fact remains that this family of diseases is still not well-known or well-understood by medical and research communities or the general population. 

Please help push for more awareness and research. For more information, go to the American Autoimmune Related Diseases Association web site at http://www.aarda.org   OR   the Myositis Association at http://www.myositis.org  .

As always, Happy Trails

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Don't forget to visit my web store,  Old West Ways  at http://www.oldwestways.com/

One of my dear Grandmother's favorite sayings was, "Oh well, if the dog hadn't stop running he would have caught that rabbit". What she was usually referring to was something one of us had given up on without really trying. That saying always comes to mind when I am frustrated and feeling like walking away from one of my projects. A good example of this would be my photography skills....or lack there of.  I love using tapestry fabric for my pillows. The problem with tapestries is that there is so much detail in the print. When I look at the pillow through my digital camera lens,  the picture seems to crawl and I get a blur instead of  an image of the great pillow in front of me.  I have deleted more images of blurry tapestries than I care to mention.  I have tried using different settings like portrait,  auto focus and even sport (the pictures are  moving?!?) and the end result does not seem to change much.  I think I finally have decent pictures posted on my web site of the 4 tapestry pillows I sale. I have replaced them multiple times and I still look at them now and want to try one more time to get an even better picture. I will, I am sure, keep running after my elusive rabbit and I am confident that I will catch it because Mammaw was never wrong!

Happy Trails!

Carol

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Don't forget to visit my site Old West Ways, your western home accessories store at http://www.oldwestways.com  .

Well, here I am, 14 months in my "new" world,  and I am now supposedly in remission. OK, so I don't seem too excited about remission. I am,  really,  but I am also disappointed. What the "R" word means for this disease, is your muscle enzymes are normal. The pain does not go away, the swelling does not disappear, the swallowing does not improve, etc.... In other words, no life altering miracle has occured. So, look for the good stuff Carol, look for it....... Oh, there it is! I can still do what I do. I can still design, sew, bead and make lazy on occassion and blame my illness!!!!! Wow, I feel better now. Aren't you going to congratulate me? Come on now, come on........

Happy Trails!

Carol

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Don't forget to visit my store, Old West Ways, your western home accessories store at http://www.oldwestways.com .

This is where I am supposed to expose and laugh at my mistakes. It really is funny now, but at the time this one was down right aggrivating! My last, but probably most costly, "miss" was discovered almost a year after it was posted. I actually forgot to add  "view cart"  and "add to cart"   buttons to my product pages. All I had was a  "buy now" button, but it did not allow the shopper to purchase multiple products at one time. The buyer would have to literally check out and then go back into the site and start over. And the saddest part of this is that I found it accidently, almost a whole year after I had published the site and lost who knows how many potential buyers because of this.  Friends, I guess the moral of this little story is: your water bucket may seem full, but it's the seep holes that will get you!

Happy Trails!

 Carol

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Don't forget to visit my store, Old West Ways at http://www.oldwestways.com

So, all of my homework was done, all of the math had been calculated and a prayer was said. I began sewing the pillows, bedspreads and shower curtains. I needed at least 6 of each design - 2 for my store front, 3 for inventory and 1 for a demo (this is the one I would also use to photograph for the site). As I took my pictures and posted them on the site, I also printed a copy of each for a portfolio. I figured I could show this to each prospect and then if they were interested, haul in the goods to show. With my newfound physical limitations, this seemed like the smart thing to do. (If you are scratching your head on that remark, you have not read my Personal Notes....shame on you!)  Finally, in July of '05 I published my website for all of the world to see. At the time, I thought it looked great. As time passed, I learned of the many mistakes I had overlooked. I will tell you about these in Hits and Misses.

Happy Trails,

Carol

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Dont't forget to visit my store Old West Ways at  http://www.oldwestways.com/

Now that you know "the why" part of my story, let me tell you how I started Old West Ways. It took alot of thought once I decided to go for it. First, I made a list of long and short term goals to determine what I wanted to achieve. I also listed things like what equipment I would need, how much inventory I would keep and what it would take to acquire that inventory, marketing strategies and finance. In case you haven't noticed, I am a list person (left over from working in the corporate world). When that part did not scare me away, I started to think about names for my new venture. I wanted the name to say what I did and be easy for my customer to remember. Once I had a few options in mind, I searched the internet to be sure they were not already taken. Before I could secure my new domain, I had to decide on a web hosting plan so I compared a few of them and looked at the site building programs they had to offer. Personally, I wanted a program that was user friendly, a/k/a, site building for dummies! Now I was ready to register my domain and start building my web site. Yee-haw!!

Happy Trails!

Carol

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Don't forget to visit my store,  Old West Ways,  at http://www.oldwestways.com/ .

OK, I admit it, I am , well, short. When I poof my hair, I am 5' tall, but when I don't, I am 4'11 1/2". So, needless to say, I am called "Little Bit" by some. On my web page , http://www.oldwestways.com/aboutme  I even poke fun at myself about this. It is done descretely, so you have to look for it. Enough about the physical stuff. As I have mentioned, I learned to sew from my Mammaw. She could make a dress from nothing more than just a photo, even making her own patterns. Mammaw could make anything. So, I am actually a third generation seamstress. Of my grandmother's three daughters, only one of them began sewing and today is as skilled as her mother was. Of the six granddaughters, I was the one who was fortunate enough to have inherited the interest as well as the gene. I could boast that this makes me an expert, but even I don't own a pair of hip boots!

With all of that said, I can honestly tell you I have been sewing for 28 years. However, my career was in the medical field (medical office management) until January 2006. I had dreamed of retiring as we all do and it was not until  April 2005 that it hit me to turn my craft into cash. I started planning and preparing my CEO that I was in retirement mode and began my work on the website. I would work all week at "my job" and then nights and weekends were devoted to building the website, designing products and learning how to photograph for the web. I was on a roll! I had already acquired a western store front to expose my product line and had the support of my family, friends and co-workers. Well, I must have forgot to check in with my health.

By  June of 2005  I was feeling totally exhausted and thought I was just run down and perhaps a little too old to be working this much. So, being the stubborn sole that I am,  I kept pushing thinking it would go away. Wrong. Things progressively got worse to the point that I could not move without a burning pain all over my body. After several specialists and far too many test to mention I was diagnosed in August of '05  with a rare muscle disease called Polymyositis. Wouldn't you know it, stress and over-exertion triggered the acute flare up. Humm, is there a moral here?!  Nope. Anyway, I was told to lower my stress as much as I could (yeah, right) and rest before I get tired (huh?).  So, on to retirement plan B. In January of this year, it did happen - for a few new reasons - and my dream is still very much alive. I take chemotherapy for months at a time to slow down the disease process and I have to take frequent breaks, but now I have ALL DAY to work!  How does that song go? "No boss, no clock, no dress code"! Ah, retirement....doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, fabric outlets and office supply stores! It's not all bad though, I get great product ideas under heavy medication!  ( Please don't tell my doctor! )

For more information on Polymyositis, visit http://www.myositis.org and see how you can help to find a cure.

Happy Trails!

Carol

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Don't forget to visit my store Old West Ways at http://www.oldwestways.com/