Winter

I usually hate winter, but this year has been so much better. Maybe it's because there hasn't been any snow yet. Maybe it's because my girls are bigger and more fun to hang out with. Maybe it's because I've been so stinkin' busy!

Anyway, it's been nice and cozy this year and I'm enjoying it.

That's a job well done

I got to make 5 life sized snowmen for a display for a charity event benefiting kids with cancer. It took me months, but I'm done now and they turned out really well.



I went down to the CDA Resort to help set up on friday for the Festival of trees. It was really fun, but it took 7 hours!

Black Friday

I LOVE Black Friday, so I just wanted to link really quick to a list of bunch of Black Friday sales on Etsy. My name will be on that list soon ;)

Cuteness!

Now that I'm not a month behind it's easier to just sit down and blog.

I got to make these sweet little aprons for a friend of my Mom's. They turned out so cute!

These are my kids modeling them.

We're getting ready for Thanksgiving now, and I have a lot to be thankful for. Family, home, love, success, friends, comfort.

Happy Thanksgiving!!!!

Oh good, the stomache flu

I have not died or fallen off the face of the earth. I have been so incredibly busy!!!!!!
First of all, we finished our basement and rearranged the entire house. The kitchen was the only room that stayed mostly the same. It's just like moving without the excuse to order pizza. But now the girls have their own rooms, we have an office and a nice big school room!

I've been making 5 life sized snowmen for a charity event for children with cancer. It took me 2 months to design the first one and then a good 3 hours for each one after that. Whew!

Add to everything else, my shop has just gone nuts! I never thought I'd be this busy! It's unreal! I've got custom orders coming out my ears!

And then, the stomach flu. Sometimes we need to slow down and rest and re-evaluate what's important. If you can't find an opportunity on your own, the Lord will give you that opportunity. So thank you Lord, for the stomach flu. This week I've spent a lot of time snuggling and nurturing my children. Yesterday I got to sleep all day and take a long bath. Today I get to serve my husband. That's my real job, that's more important than any old snowmen.

I just gotta say...

I love this shop! It's called Little Diva and you can find it here. I love her colors. I love her style. I love her pictures. And I LOVE her little model!! She is just so cute! Almost as cute as my girls :P

Darn, I was hoping that picture would be bigger. I guess now you'll just have to go look at her shop *wink*

I spent this last weekend with my booth at a craft show-slash-flea market. It was a very nice flea market really, all the antiques were very nice and there was jewelry and home decor. There was really only one or two booths with just junk.
However, business was really slow and I only sold one item, not even enough to pay for my booth. I'm kinda bummed about that, BUT, it was a good learning experience and I had a lot of fun.

I learned that:

• Being away from home for three days in a row is just too much for my family. My primary responsibility is and should be at home with my family. Even though the girls were in the booth with me on Friday and home with Daddy on Saturday and for two whole hours on Sunday, it was just too much for them, and so we were all stressed and cranky by the time it was over. That's most important thing I learned. I think I'll wait a couple of years before I try this again.

• I actually had a display that looked really good! I've done craft shows in the past, and my booth has looked fine, but this time it looked really good!

• I miss having co-workers. There were two ladies there with booths on either side of me that were just so much fun! I spent most of the weekend laughing!

• And lastly, paper clips do not make good display hangers.
  

Aaarrrggggghh!! Computer problems!

Do you see the frustration in my title? I feel it I tell ya'!

First off, the desktop decided to spontaneously combust. Nothing was working. My sweetie is a computer genius or all would be lost. He managed to get all our info and family picture and financial records and pretty much our whole life off the desk top and onto the laptop a little at a time with a thumb drive. Then he dropped a screw. I was being helpful and went behind the chair to get it, completely forgetting that the laptop was on the chair!!!!
Yeah, it fell and now it's kinda toast.
My sweetie managed to wipe everything off the desktop and start over and get everything off the laptop and onto the desktop, but he's worked and worked and can't seem to make that silly (I'm thinking of a stronger word, but I won't say it) laptop to work.
Well, the laptop is what I do my embroidery on, so we tried to install the embroidery software on the desktop. No dice. The software is written for a 32 bit processor and the desktop is a 64 bit. After much searching, calling Singer and cursing we have found that we're just out of luck. There are no patches, nothing we can do to make the embroidery machine play nice with the desktop.

I need a brick wall to bang my head on.

Oh Look!

I've been featured on Kiddlins! How fun! She's got some great kid's stuff over there, go check it out.

Oak

This little oak tree was a custom order, and I have to say it turned out just great. I don't know why she wanted a dragon fly on a tree, but it works!


I love the little oak leaves!

Wow! Look at this!!

I just found the most amazing softie artist! And I don't use the word artist lightly, her stuff is truly amazing. Nosey Nest can be found on flickr, etsy and her blog, AND she has a tutorial for this cute duck!

Isn't this lovely?

Today I'm featuring PSBBdesigns. She's on my Etsy street team and I think her work is just fabulous.


I think this is just lovely.

The County Fair!

We had a great time at the fair! I wasn't even sick this year! Yea!


Ziggys had an area for making birdhouses and the girls and I made some. They looked awesome...and then we took them home and the girls painted them. Oh my they're ugly now! That's okay, it was a great experience for them to create and be so proud of themselves!

Trendy Shoppes

I made these little cuties and mail them off with some birds to Trendy Shoppes! They should be up soon. I'm really excited. It's a brand new site and I get to be on it from almost the beginning! Plus the site owner is really nice.

*sigh* I really need to improve my pictures. I know my dolls look so much cuter in person! I'm just not a photographer, but I really want/need to be if I want to show off how cute my dolls really are. Arrrhg! It's frustrating, as a small home business owner I have to wear ALL of the hats. Some jobs I'm good at, some I'm not, like photographing. And marketing. If I could just sit back and dream and sew I'd be perfectly happy!

New dolls

I've been designing some new dolls and trying to figure out how to make my embroidery machine do the faces and attach them. Here's what I came up with.



The one on the right is my first attempt. I think it's kinda scary looking, but Willow loves it, so I gave it to her. I even let her sew up the stuffing hole all by herself. She did a really good job!
I like the one on the left a lot better. It has a much bigger head and smaller face. I really like the feet! They're just so cute!


While taking pictures of these babies, Violet insisted that I take a picture of her baby too. Why does that one look so much better? Usually my pictures are just average and the one in a while I'll get one that's "wow", but it's always on accident.

Worst Blogger Ever

Has it really been almost a month since I've blogged? I suck! I have been busy, but not that busy.
I've been selling my goods at a new site. Made it Myself is still in Beta testing and I think it shows great potential, plus it's free right now. I always like free.

Willow got to cook dinner all by herself the other night. She has been awful about complaining about what I cook for dinner for months, if not years. No parenting tips please, I'm doing my best!
Anyway, I finally said "Fine, you get to cook tomorrow night." And she did, with a very small amount of help from me.


She made biscuits and sausage gravy. She only burned her fingers twice. I was able to convince her that baking soda in the gravy wouldn't taste very nice. Her biscuits were very heavy. But it tasted pretty good and she was very proud of herself and best of all, hasn't complained about dinner since. That makes me very happy.

Best Anniversary Ever

My Sweetheart surprised me with a trip to a tent and breakfast. It's like a bed and breakfast, but with privacy and s'mores.

He found this place not too far from Clark Fork.

The bed was a lot prettier before we slept in it.


It was wonderful! And the owners are the nicest people ever. We are seriously thinking about moving out to Bonner County in 2 or 3 years.

So now we've been married for 9 years. I can't believe it's been that long. It seems like maybe 3, but not 9. I feel old. But I also feel great. It's been a wonderful 9 years.

I love you Sweetie.

Tshirt fun

I've been on a tshirt kick the last couple of days. Now 5 of my shirts have cutesy embroidery on them. It started with this one.



Man it's hard to take a picture of yourself! This is the best I could do.
I haven't had this shirt very long and I got a spaghetti stain on it! So I embroidered over the stain. Pretty good huh?

Then came a bird, pig, cherries and a monkey. Look how cute!


My sweet hubby helped me with this picture.
They turned out so cute I decided to put them in my shop.

Wow! Look at this!!

Monica at The Homespun Heart (my very favoritest blog ever) is having a drawing! She got Land's end to give her a $120 gift card to give away on her blog! Go check it out! All you have to do is look at their bathing suits and tell Monica which one you like best on her blog! Easy cheesy :D

For the Birds

Look what I've been making!

Aren't the cute?

Yes well, I made one and I liked it. So I made 2 more and they were great, then I made a batch of 14 more. I think I'm done with birds for a while! They're in my shop now.

This is why

This is why I've been away so long. My little sister got married last Friday. The whole month of June was a whirlwind!


I got to make the engagement dress and take the engagement pictures, which was great fun.

And do the bridal shower, which I didn't get pictures of, but it turned out great. I even made a cheese ball :)


I made dresses for my girls.

And helped make the invitations, which were beautiful and done scrapbook style, so they took FOREVER.


And hemmed the groom's pants and put the patches on his new jacket. My hubby is on the left, my brother is on the right.


And had my sweet wonderful pregnant cousin come stay with me. She did Tori's hair and photography. You can see all the pictures on her site.

All that work, and my hair looks awful. I guess I was sweating too much.

Oh yeah, and I did her bouquet! Is that a good enough excuse for not blogging in weeks? I think so.

Ebay *shudder*

I did it. I put a doll on ebay, also known as Fee-bay. I guess we'll see. Wish me luck!


It's a cute one, so it should do okay. I'm just nervous. There's just so much stuff on ebay, I worry that my little doll will get lost. Ah well, I guess we'll see.

Rainbow

One good thing about all this rainy weather we've been having is the beautiful rainbows that go with it.

This was the most spectacular rainbow I've ever seen in my life!

Check this out

I'm in a treasury. Twice! How cool is that!

Emily

This is one of the cutest dolls I have ever seen!

Her name is Emily and she comes from PEQUENABUDA. Check out her shop if you have a chance!

Willow's first Piano Recital

I'm so proud of her! She was really nervous, but she did great!



Not bad for 5 years old huh?

Better today

Thank you all for your sweet comments :) They really helped lift me.

I've decided that I've been obsessing too much and I'm going to take a week (or two) off from Etsy and make some clothes for myself for a change! I'm going to make a whole interchangeable set of two skirts, three shirts and a jacket. I tried to take pictures of my fabrics, but the light is bad for such things today. But, the colors are inspired by some beautiful sea glass jewelry I found on Etsy.


The picture comes from West Coast Sea Glass. She has an amazing shop!
Anyway, I'll post pictures of my new clothes later ♥

Blah

I'm so discouraged. I haven't had a real sale in a month. I thought my dolls were great, but I've only sold one and traded one. Both customers were very happy though, so that's good. Still, I thought they'd be a bigger hit.
I like my shop. I think I take pretty good pictures, I know they need work, but they're decent. I've learned a lot. I try really hard. Still nothing.

Etsy Buy Handmade Mylittle

I'm thinking of giving up. I was going to do farmer's market and other craft shows, but I don't want to waste my time and money if my stuff is junk. *sigh*

War bride pictures

We took Tori and Dustin's engagement pictures last Saturday and I've been waiting to blog until I got some pictures that really show off the dress. I haven't got around to it yet, so I stole this one from my Mom's blog.


The dress turned out perfect and the pictures look so good!


Here's a close up, it still needed to be ironed though. I'll post some pictures that really show off the dress later.

In other news, I had a great Mother's day. Violet drew me a picture with flowers on it. My Sweet Husband and Willow got me a gift certificate to a pottery place! I've only done pottery a couple of times since high school and it's something I really enjoy. I'll probably just get to paint and glaze some bisque ware this time, but I'm really excited!

Happy Mothers day! I hope yours was as good as mine! ♥

Wedding plans

Tori's wedding is kind of a World War II/War bride theme, and she wants to re-create this picture for her engagement pictures. She bought a vintage 1940s pattern and we've been making it this week.

Here she is modeling the top with her hat and gloves. You can see it's not quite finished. It needs buttons and you can see the facing for the peplum hanging down. The skirt is in about the same condition. It needs the waistband finished and hemmed. We should get that done today.

Vintage patterns are hard to work with I'll tell you what. It's like they make the pattern expecting you to seriously alter it. On just the top I had to add 4 darts and reposition 2 more darts, bring in the sides and make the neck bigger. But it fits like a glove now and it's so cute!!

I finally did it!

I have been working on perfecting an apron pattern for months. The first draft was really cute, but really uncomfortable. How do you make an uncomfortable apron you ask? Oh trust me, it can be done. I finally came up with this. It's just perfect! I got Tori to model it for me.



I think it has a bit of a regency flair. I was trying to think of a name for it and I thought, "What was the name of that girl in Sense and Sensibility? Ummmm......Kate Winslet? No...." I had to look it up. Tori would be aghast.



Anyway, this is the Marianne apron. Pretty good huh? I have this apron on my shop, but the pattern will only be available through my blog or in shops and craft fairs locally.

May

A new month and a new goal. I'm going to blog twice a week. I was thinking maybe Monday and Friday, but then I thought, no, that's not a realistic goal. If I don't do that I'd start getting hard on myself and that's not good. So, twice a week. I can do that.

Here are my two newest Nature Babies, Puddles and Mary.





Does she look like a marigold or a lion?

Tori and Dustin sitting in a tree

My sister Tori's fiance Dustin got home from Iraq yesterday! I got to be there when he got off the bus. And my stupid camera malfunctioned! AARRGGGGGG!!! I got one picture of the back of my Mom's hand with Tori and Dustin in the background!


Anyway, it was very sweet and they are so happy together. It's a very sweet story about how they met and became engaged, but it's really not my place to tell. I'll let Tori do that if she wants to.

Busy

I'm a terrible blogger. But I have an excuse. Kind of. I've been busy, wanna see?

Here's a new dress for Willow. It actually looks much better in person. We've had more snow and no good light for pictures. I don't think spring is ever going to come.



Look at all these Nature Babies! I took this picture right before I went over to Westwood Gardens and they took eight of my dolls on consignment! Woo Hoo! That made me happy.



I designed this image and digitized it and made it into an embroidery design.



Plus I am working on a lovely prom dress for a lovely young lady from church. And I sold my first international item in my shop. I get to ship to Germany! What fun. So yes, I've been busy.