Getting a button down shirt to not gap over your bust

I know this post is pretty far off base from our company’s focus, but this is the only blog I have, so I’m putting it up here

This post is for girls that want to wear button down shirts and not have them gap over their bust. I love a good button down, but I was granted a generous bosom. This is how I solve the issue.

Please excuse the weird color shifts, I just knew that shirt color was going to give me fits if I used it in the tutorial, but you could see the steps better than on the black shirts.

First of all – let’s look at what we are trying to avoid:

Gross. No one wants to see that in a business meeting.

1. Put a pin in to mark the top and the bottom of the gaps.

2. Button the shirt all the way up and pin the placard down.

Make sure you get this straight and tight.

I put a plastic ruler inside the shirt so I can pin it while it is flat on the table.

3. Cut off the buttons in the sew line.

Don’t try to skip this step, oh you will want to. You will think you can use a zipper foot or something.  It won’t work. You will ruin the look and have to unpick it. Trust me on this.

4. Sew the shirt shut by sewing right on top of an existing thread line.

Back tack at the top and bottom. Be super careful to not sew the front to the back.

You can’t even really see the new line, here is a close up.

5. Glue the buttons back on!

I’m sure someone with more patience could skip this step, but this delights me.

6. Let the glue dry.

It takes approximately one bathroom break, one glass of water and one cup of coffee for this stage.

7. Sew the buttons back on.

I have a machine that sews on buttons. I double tack them all. Again, be super careful to not sew the front of the shirt to the back of the shirt.

8. Wear with pride!

This will make ironing the shirt more difficult. And (of course) you will need to pull it over your head, but if you undo the top two buttons and the bottom two it’s no more difficult than pulling on a t-shirt. I think the extra ironing/dressing effort is well worth knowing I don’t look like a floozy.

Cleaning Up and Managing Twitter Lists

This is a follow up post to our Revising a Small Business Social Media Strategy post. Here we’ll focus on Twitter Lists.

1. Clean up your followers - 

1. Remove anyone you don’t want to follow anymore.
2. Review who is following you that you aren’t following, decide who to add. Don’t add people that aren’t interesting to you or haven’t tweeted in a while.
3. Be sure to block all the spammy accounts.

2. Propose some Twitter Lists

Start by thinking of what lists you know you want, for me these were:

• Friends in RL (private) – People I know outside of Twitter.
• Potentials (private)- Potential clients we are trying to land or are in negotiations with.
• Competitors (private) – Similar agencies to Sawaya Consulting.
• SAWAYA clients- Accounts run by our clients.
• SAWAYA services – Vendors and services we use.
• SLC UT Peeps – People in Salt Lake City specifically and Utah in general.
• Design/Dev/Business – Interesting tweets for our industry and about business in general.
• Food & Fun – Places we eat or go.

Expect some crossover — lots of my friends are also clients, but you want to duplicate so you don’t miss something if you only have time to read through one list in a day.

3. Add more lists and update the ones you started with.

I added another list for things I think are funny and tweaked the lists above.

4. Watch your new lists, Manage new followers

Use either Hootsuite or use the Twitter built in Lists function to read through your lists, making adjustments as necessary. Manage new followers on a case-by-case basis (so you don’t have to spend hours cleaning up again).

5. Interact!

With your new lists you have more ability to interact and read through tweets. Even if you only stay current on a few lists you can start to retweet and interact with people that interest you.

Are you someone I should be following? Let me know @sawayaconsult.

Go around, go over, go through—I’m no good at waiting

“Patience is a virtue, but it’s not one of ours.” 

— My mom

I hate waiting. I have tried everything, yoga, meditation, marrying someone who is very patient. It just drives me insane to wait for things.

I became a designer and hated waiting for content from clients.

So I became pretty good at writing content (or finagling Karen to do it for me).

I didn’t like being a print designer because you have to wait for things to come off press.

So I became a web designer.

I didn’t like waiting for the code to turn around.

So I became a front-end coder of my designs.

I still wait for the heavy lifting backend (PHP, Javascript/jQuery, etc) but I’ve learned that’s a place where my talents don’t apply.

I hated waiting for other people to get back to me.

So I started my own company (it was more involved than that, but you get the point).

These are the ways I’ve learned to go around, go over and go through waiting for things:

1. Go over: If you can do a reasonably good job at something, learn to do it yourself. Even if you just get something in front of someone else that they can say “yes” or “no” to—that is a lot easier for them to do than to start from scratch.
2. Go around: There will be things you can’t do yourself. Find someone really good to do them for you—someone you know you can count on to not make you wait.
3. Go through: Look for “jump steps,” something I talk about in my Being Organized Workshop. If you know you have something to do that will cause you to wait (such as asking a client to send you some information), do that very first in the day, so you can do something else while you are waiting.
4. Go through: Plan better. As a business owner it’s easy to get sucked into emails, social media, followups with clients and coworkers and have your whole day spent shepherding and waiting. Again, do these very first in the day if possible, so you can be working while waiting.
5. Go through: Turn off your email. Quit reminding yourself you are waiting and get into something else. If you are waiting for a truly important email set a notification in Gmail so when it comes in it will send you a text message.
6. Go Zen: If there’s now way to go around, over or through waiting, see it as an opportunity…to clean the kitchen, catch up on your reader, go outside. (I’m still working on this—maybe someday it will be possible for me to view “waiting” as “free time.”)

Any other tips about how to be a better waiter (get it? tips? waiter?)? What works for you, how do my other Type-A friends give people the space they need to get things done?

Recommendation for Sawaya Consulting: Boart Longyear

We received this recommendation from our clients at Boart Longyear.

The Sawaya Consulting team gets things done! I really appreciate their creativity, technical expertise and time management skills. But for me, their greatest asset is their perfect combination of design and technology, a balance rarely found in the industry. With an almost impossible deadline, they were able to successfully design and execute our inter-company social website, complete with all of the bells and whistles we wanted. Everything that was promised, was delivered. Their ideas and expertise made it a smooth process with flawless execution. It’s been a pleasure working with them. I look forward to many more successful projects with them. — Cody Dingus, Global Marketing Communications Manager, Boart Longyear

Thanks Cody! it has been a pleasure working with you and your team and we are excited to work with you more!

Check out his site: www.brachdesign.com ›

Revising a Small Business Social Media Strategy

We are at a point where our old social media strategy is no longer working for us.

Our Strategy from 2010 — Now

Let’s look at where the business was and what we were doing.

The business

We started in 2006, Steve joined full time in Fall 2008 and I followed in Spring 2009. We were just getting going and we made a detour. Fast forward to the end of 2010. We were exiting a startup partnership and woke up to very little work on and a scarce amount of money. The economy was in the tank, but we needed to drum up business.

We revised our website first and foremost. Your website is your home base for everything else. Then we put the following strategy into place.

Twitter

• We have a twitter account for our business (click here to follow @sawayaconsult). We were posting a few times a day.
• We were reviewing everyone that followed us and following almost everyone back.
• We read all the tweets that came through.
• We performed a series of searches daily to find people that were looking for what we had to offer. We picked up a few great projects and met some new people this way.

Facebook

• We have a Facebook page for our business (like us here).
• We didn’t post to it very often.
• We did hook up our blog to it.
• We posted some images from our portfolio to Facebook. This actually posed another problem I’ll talk about below.

Blog

• We were rocking the blog.
• We were posting series, we had a great posting schedule (series on Tuesdays, whatever on Fridays).
• We had some fantastic Google rankings because of it.

The Benchmark Right Now

I’ll report back after this has been underway for a while! Is it time to revamp your company’s social media strategy? What changes are you planning to make?

This work includes the photo “Ranger Rendezvous,” available under a Creative Commons Attribution license, © The U.S. Army.