Snowstorm

Well, the temperature has come up to at least 19 degrees now. With that also came 30" of snow! This snowstorm is record breaking. The entire city was shutdown today, nothing was open, the buses were not running, no mail, no garbage out....life is at a stand still. It's a hard concept to wrap your brain around. Life is so busy, it's always go, go, go...then one little snowstorm and life is all of a sudden stopped! For some reason it was very frustrating. Hopefully tomorrow will be better. Here's some pics from the past 24 hours. The candy canes line our sidewalk and are about three feet tall. They make the surronding snow glow.Before all the snow we got our Christmas tree. This is my favorite part about it...hee, hee! It has two tops! A lady at work offered to let us cut one from her backyard, so we took her up on it. Went to her house after dark, we had a choice between four 30 foot trees, so we eyeballed the smallest one, cut it, loaded it, got it home, trimmed it, then put it up in the living room and this is what we discovered. We didn't even notice until it was up in the living room. So funny!

Bleah!

Today is the first official day this holiday season that I have eaten myself into painful agony! I really over did it today at lunch...my boss bought me sushi (mmmm...of course I ate this after I had my sons leftover noodles), a rep brought in a whole gingerbread loaf with whip cream, another lighting rep brought in a 2 pound box of See's chocolates....OH MAN! That pushed me over the top...so full.......so painful...and I only tried a few chocolates after they were cut into quarters! It's a good thing I really enjoy Traditional Medicinal's Eater's Digest Tea! I've purchased this because I frequently overeat until I get a stomach ache...this stuff has worked everytime...20 minutes later my stomach ache will be gone! I didn't drink it today and it's been an hour and I'm still in agony. Let this be a lesson to you all...if you're going to over eat, especially during the holidays, be prepared to suffer the consequences. (Does this whole post sound like a commercial for tea or what?? I was really just documenting my first face stuffing of the season. Should I even be documenting that anyways?)

On a more crafty note...I've been in touch with Jenny Harada regarding her Elf Chums...they are the CUTEST little guys anyone could make and add to their tree or holiday decoration! I'm going to be getting a kit to make some to add to our decorations...I'M SO EXCITED!! I wanted to make them for everyone on my Christmas list, but I don't think I'll have time this close to Christmas...that's okay, their is always next year! YEAY!! Jenny makes some really fun plushies, you gotta check our her flickr pics and website. They're so fun and inspiring!

Bbbrrrrr!!! and New Etsy Items!

It's a whopping 9 degrees outside!! Yikeeess! Good thing todays plan is to stay in a sew some Christmas gifts! Yesterday I completed two dog coats, they're so quick and easy! I'll have pics soon. Today I need to squeeze in two more dogs coats, two pairs of kids pants, some more button pics and hopefully a crocheted amigurumi elephant, a pattern I got from Roman Sock's blog. She has THE CUTEST little animals to crochet on her site! I've already made the elephant for my friends youngest for his first birthday. This time I'm making the little elephant for another friends two-year-old. The only change I make is that I sew on black yarn eyes instead of adding the black plastic ones, just for saftey sake. :)

New vintage buttons have been listed in our Etsy shop! This time I added clear crystaly ones and red/green/white ones that reminded me of ice and snow and Christmas! I haven't crafted anything for our Etsy shop yet, I have ideas swarming a plenty...but right now I'm focusing my crafting on gift making. Which is a bummer, because right now is probably the time to list items for people to buy for Christmas. I'll rely on my mom and aunt to add the crafty items. Maybe when I finally put those ideas into production, I'll start up my own Etsy shop with them in it. I don't know....I'm so torn between so many ideas and really, I should be listing things that all tie in together, creating a "niche" like the Etsy Seller Handbook recommends. What to do...what to do...

Speedy traveling to NYC!!!

I added the faux leather boot pics that I made for Suzy Q to a previous post, the one where I discuss delivering her. I also added their description to that post. I feel as if I'm not keeping current when I revise an older post with new text or pics...not sure why...maybe I'm too honest of a person. Below are a few more pics that I took this week.

On my way in to work one day, I drove through this parking lot (to get to my parking lot) and saw all these NYC taxi cabs....you'd think I drove to NYC which is all the way across the county, but it so happens that a filming company is located on the same block as we are and they have been filming in the streets and in the neighboring salon this past week. It makes me wonder who's in town this time. A few years ago, they had our street roped off and were filming a car chase seen at the intersection to the right of this pic, for a movie with Chuck Norris. He was standing on the sidewalk chatting with the people, watching them film. I got his pic that I took somewhere, I don't think on this computer. We've also had Cuba Gooding Jr., and Josh Hartnett when he filmed Mozart and the Whale. I still have yet to see it.

On to a crafty note.....I've been pretty productive this week with Christmas gifts. I finished a scarf, got a few dog coats cut out, and made this...

Cajun 1st Aid!!! SO YUMMY!! Behind it you can see the Chai Tea mix I also made and all the empty jars I will be refilling to give to friends. My friend was kind enough to give me the recipe for both. Thank you JamisonTravels! They make for an easy gift to make!! The Cajun 1st Aid was her grandma's recipe, which I didn't think I would get because I don't even have my own grandma's seasoning recipe. We call my grandma's "Grandma's Seasoning." The closest thing to it in the store is Johnny's Seasoning, only her's is more flavorful and less salty. My mom and aunts don't even know the recipe, which is funny! So I have to request it whenever I'm out and she'll send me a jar. Now I have one I can give to her. :) If you have plugged sinuses, mixing this up is sure to clear them up. I cut the recipe in half and it still makes so much! Now I'm going to design a little label that says "Something to spice up your holiday season!," print on those sticky address labels, add a Christmas-y ribbon and voila! Instant quick gifts!!

On this evening...

Do you ever wonder sometimes why you agree to certain things? You get yourself into a situation, and not necessarily a bad on, then wonder "What was I thinking??" Well, I may have done that for this evening. I agreed to babysit two kids under the age of three, along with bringing my own two year old......yeah! So far it's been okay, nothing stressful has happened, but I have almost three more hours to go. Yikes!

On the brighter side, I believe Suzy Q has gone to her new home by now. I took her in to the LYS yesterday after work. The three ladies that were there thought she was just adorable! :) By now they hopefully called the lady she was going to and she's been picked up. If not, then she's still at the LYS on display for many to say hello to.

I took these pictures of her boots while at work before taking her in to the LYS. I used a brown vinyl fabric sample from work, I thought she needed some brown (faux) leather knee high boots to go with her outfit. I reshaped the pattern that was in the Knitted Babe book, added a zigzag stitch along the front, hand sewed the bottom and heal, then added some size 8 rootbeer Miyuki seed beads to button them up. I think they turned out okay, I wasn't as pleased, probably because vinyl is a little slippery and frustrating to work with.

Still no bag...

Well, I've looked in the car, in the yard, in the garage...still no handbag. I have her and a card all ready to go. I guess she'll have to go without a handbag. SO DISAPPOINTING! On the brighter side, a repairman will finally come out to fix our furnace. It only took us four days to finally call one. :)

Going Crazy!!!

I have spent the last who knows how long searching for Suzy Q's hand bag!!! I've retraced my footsteps, looked in EVERY possible box and bag she's been near, under every possible stack of paper or fabric or books. It's NO WHERE!! I spent the hour before the search creating a very cute pair of brown leather/vinyl looking knee high boots. I'll take pics tomorrow during the day, and hopefully post them. Thinking she finally had a complete ensemble with handbag, I got her ready to take to the LYS I'm going to be donating her to only to find, or I should say not find, the handbag! WHERE IS IT?? The only other place I can think of is in the car, I haven't looked there yet. It's too cold and dark outside, I'll wait until morning. The other wonderful event going on right now is our heater. It doesn't want to kick on the fan to blow out nice warm air. So I've lost a handbag AND I'm freezing!! These things come in threes...what will be next??

Knitted Babe Suzy Q

Since I opened up our family Etsy shop, I haven't posted much about the buttons or any crafting. I've been a busy, busy bee finishing up this Knitted Babe...

My mom's beautiful brown hair and dashing blue eyes were the inspiration behind this dolls features, only I didn't add any gray hairs. :) So I've decided to name her Suzy Q. (hee, hee) I've already made one knitted babe about a year ago, who ended up being Cowboy Bob (he just couldn't be a knitted babe for my son, my husband wasn't too excited about that idea). I have yet to make him a wardrobe, though, he only has a pair of boxers and recently a sweater. Suzy Q and her wardrobe are made from the book Knitted Babes It is such a cute book! I recommend this book to all knitters who have kids or grandkids, or are even a kid at heart (like me!) I altered the patterns for some of the clothes in the book, like her teal peacock blue corduroy jacket with tan fur-like trim (I had a fabric sample from work that was SO SOFT and the perfect scale of fur for her). Her jacket was the cowgirls shirt pattern with lengthened sleeves. Her dress is the same pattern as the book, but I didn't sew on the ribbon and I did a different stitch detail on the hem with my sewing machine. It was an experimental stitch an folding of fabric that actually turned out cute.

Here Suzy Q is lowering her jacket to show the details on the back side of her dress. Two black vintage buttons from my stash, black grosgrain ribbon at her waist and black bias tape on the sleeves.

My favorite part was making her handbag. This past summer I went to a Farm Chicks craft show and got a business card for an online quilt store. The card came with "quilters candy" which was this small piece of fabric I used for her handbag with the orange retro flower. It was the perfect size, about 3"x6". I hemmed both sides, cornered the bottom (I learned this trick from U-handblog's very fun and helpful website), then battled the top hem for a good hour just to get it take the leather cord through, glued a small piece of plastic canvas covered with green felt to the bottom and VOILA!! My own creation of a very cute Knitted Babe handbag! I always tend to enjoy the miniature side of crafting. Probably because I grew up with a mother who made miniatures and took me to miniature doll shows as a kid. Thanks Mom! Even in college my favorite part of our interior design studio was making the 1/4" scale models of our designs out of foam coar and museum board. Maybe someday I'll dig them out of our garage, photograph them, then toss them like my husband keeps asking me to do.

Now I can continue on with my Christmas gift making. I have a hat on needles, two inches of sead beads peyote stitched, and a whole bunch of patterns and ideas floating around in my head. Only twenty more days.....wish me luck!

Classy Christmas Dress

Check out this Dinner Party Frock Yet another very cute dress by Grosgrain. I think I may attempt one for myself, just like she mentions. It's such a classy design! Only I might do mine in red or blue....OOH! Blue taffeta! I could use some of the fabric I still have that I bought for our wedding reception tables. It was two shades of blue taffeta. YEAY!

Food Strike

Well, I think I can officially say that our two year old is on a food strike. For almost two weeks now, he has not wanted to eat any of his meals. When he's hungry he requests chocolate or some other not so nutritous snack. It's been a battle to get him to eat a meal, even the "just one more bite" is not working anymore. He won't eat the usual meals, he was pretty good about eating new things that we ate, those aren't even being being tasted. It's a not-so-fun experience.

Grosgrain: Downtown Holiday Jacket and Pant GIVEAWAY!!!!

Grosgrain: Downtown Holiday Jacket and Pant GIVEAWAY!!!!

This outfit is so CUTE!! I can't wait to have a little girl to wear it!

Fabric and more Fabric

I finally got items listed on Etsy! Yeay! I've been watching the number of views slowly increase, which brings a little hope that the items I listed will be wanted by someone! I've also almost fully recovered from Thanksgiving. We Thanksgiving at our house for the first time with just the in-laws. Small crowd, which is perfectly fine to me cuz of the small house. It was nice to not travel this year. We also spent the last day and a half out shopping. Never done that before either. That was CRAZINESS! Jo-Ann's Fabrics was the busiest! It was so crowded in there! I got fabric number 92, when I arrived they were on number 34. By the time we left (about 45 minutes later) they were only on number 49, so I gave up on my hunt for fabric. I figured I would have to wait two more hours or so just to get fabric cut. Instead, we stopped at two new quilt shops that popped up within the past year. One carries just Amy Butler patterns and fabrics. That shop was SO COOL to walk into! It's so exciting to see a quilt store carry those fabrics in this town! The other one carries a line of fabric call London Cats or something like that. They are the RICHEST plum color I have ever seen in quilt fabrics! I ended up spending the rest of my birthday money on many, MANY different patterns from the collection. I'll have to take a pic and post it soon. They are just awesome! Now I just have to figure out what to make with it.

Etsy Seller "BunkhouseBoutique"

YEAY!! I've finally made an Etsy seller account and have figured out what I'm going to list first!! I'll be selling items with my mom and my aunt. My aunt makes jewelry and my mom...well, she says she's not sure what to sell yet. She makes her miniature fairies but will set up a separate account for those. We all decided on the name Bunkhouse Boutique.

The bunkhouse is a little old hen house on my Grandma's farm, turned bedroom, turned storage room, now its in an inbetween vacant stage with a few things in it. I know at one point my mom and my aunt lived in it, I'll have to leave it up to them to comment and clarify exactly when and all those details. Growing up, us grandkids would spend the night in it when we slept over at grandma's house. I remember the mice running through the walls and keeping us up.

Here's a sneak preview of what I'm going to be starting out with listing...I found them all in the five drawer dresser I mentioned in a previous post...VINTAGE BUTTONS!!!! Since that last post, I've finished gone through all the drawers and a second dresser and have found a whole tin, a good-size cigar box and misc. bags of vintage buttons!! All of thecraft items I went through in the drawers were dated from the 60's & 70's. Very few items were dated in the 80's. This brings me to the conclusion that they are all VINTAGE!! SO COOL!! I'm still learning my camera and mastering taking close-ups, so naturally, the close-ups that I did take were blury and not good. Hopefully I'll have it all figured out and start listing a few sets by the end of the weekend. YEAY!! Oh, and as a side note, I DID take the time to sort them all out by color which took half a day last weekend....there were a lot of buttons in there!

Hectic Halloween...

Whew! I'm glad Halloween is over! I slaved almost two weeks over my sons costume and I still had to safety pin a bunch of areas in the end. Then I spent only three hours on mine. The house and dishes got very neglected all week causing this weekend to be a major cleaning weekend. I think I enjoyed the challenge though...I had no pattern, spent most of the time on a headpiece he would not even wear and I got to sew (to completion) something for the first time in quite a while. I think my son ended up enjoying wearing his after all, since we did watch Monsters, Inc. every night for the past week to get him into being Mike Wazowski.

This picture looks like he's grossed out by me trying to give him a kiss!

Here's a close up of my favorite part...they eyes. The background is about a 5" circle of white fleece, then a green fabric scrap from his costume that was zig-zagged stitched to the fleece, then I decreased the stitch length and increased the width to basically satin stitch the iris. I was most proud of this part of the project!

How cool is this costume though?!?!... Tropical Tree Frog In its own way, it beats my costume idea that I slaved two weeks over!! I wonder if Grosgrain sells her patterns after she creates them? Her work is very inspiring! She does weekly giveaways which has triggered a couple of ideas for my blog too! Which reminds me...all that cleaning included my upstairs "creativity corner". I went through one of five drawers in this little craft dresser that was given to me by a friend.

His wife recieved these two smaller sized dressers FULL of craft/sewing stuff because she made the comment to her family that she wanted to learn to sew. Well, her aunt ended up giving this all to her including a sewing machine, it overwhelmed her and then they just sat for 6 months or so in storage. They finally decided to "clean house" and they thought of me to give it to!! Yeay! My husband wasn't exactly thrilled, but here's a sneak peak of what was in that one little drawer.

That little beige fabric towards the middle top is woven with horsehair! What would you use this for? The Dritz Velvet Press Kit is copyright 1950! It was so cool! At the same time, I felt bad that it was just given away to me, an almost total stranger, and not back to the Aunt that had donated it all in the first place. What triggered this thought was this little wall hanging with hand stitched letters and sewn on buttons. It's very cute but was somebodies personal creation...for themselves? For a friend or family member?? I don't know. I also don't exactly know what the orange paper is for (on the right). There are several layers of orange and tan with one or two pieces of carbon-copy paper. There were a lot of dotted lines through all the layers. Someday I will learn what it all is. I know enough to create items, but I'm also still learning a lot.

The Beginnings of an Entrepreneur

Today was a disapointing day. I have all these ideas floating in my head and I can't seem to get them out for many reasons...lack of resources (I learned how little our public library has), lack of funds (I learned how expensive my idea would be), lack of time (a close-to-full-time job and a two year old does not allow for creativity to flow much) and lack of support...I have yet to discuss my entrepreneurial ideas with any one but my husband. I'm frustrated! I am so inspired by all these bloggers I have encountered over the past several months that have quit their day jobs to pursue their love of crafting, or are stay-at-home moms that are running a craft type business out of their home, or just have the time to put into creating beautiful and inspiring objects AND have been successful with their Etsy shop, or website or blog or whatever it is that they create! My husband has always told me (because I have always discussed this) that if you are to start your own business then it needs to be something you're passionate about. Well, it took a while, but one day I realized that I've ALWAYS created things, my entire life. I started selling bean bags in 4th grade for fifty cents and I probably made a few dollars a week. Then in 5th and 6th grade I made elastic beaded bracelets and sold those at a few craft fairs during city events. I've made everything from hand sewing, crossstitch, stuffed toys, beaded jewelry, barbie clothes, stripping and refinishing a wood dresser then hand painted each 1-1/2" diameter wood knob with a different seasonal scene (that was high school), quilting, sewing stuff for my own apartment, clothes for myself, scrapbooking, then seed bead jewelry, upholstery, costume making, knitting, crocheting.....now here I am with so many ideas swarming in my head that I can't sleep at night!!! Maybe the problem is that I am so across the board on what I have created that I need to focus on one area and develop my own "niche." Create an identity in the crafting world that will make a statement, focus on that idea and start from there. I know about business plans, I know how to craft, I just need to figure out what. And it could be because the one idea I came up with last week is in the mail (from Australia) and another part of it is really expensive (like $132 per yard plus tax and frieght expensive) and I'm being impatient and disapointed at the same time. Anyways, I do feel better now that this energy has left through my fingertips and into this blog. :) It's such a good feeling! Good night!

Grosgrain: Marie-Thérèse Gown GIVEAWAY!!!!

Beautiful Work....so inspiring...

Beautiful work...so inspiring...

I was browsing the usual crafty type blogs I browse, which I may someday figure out how to add to this blog, and came across one that mentioned another crafty bloggers website and her give away. Now I have to figure out how to create a link to this blog in order to be entered into her drawing for this beautiful gown she made for a drawing.......okay, so here it goes...It's called her Marie Therese Gown Giveaway and it's by Grosgrain. Hopefully I did it right and followed her directions good enough to be entered into the drawing. It's always fun to find another crafter out there that has inspiring work. Beautiful work!

Beginner

Hello all! I've decided to make an attempt at a blog. We shall see if I keep up with it, what I post on it and what will I talk about?? Any encouragement or ideas are welcome. Wish me luck!