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.