What a Day

My excitement is busting out! After boo-hoo-ing yesterday about not being productive and getting work done, I checked my emails last evening and I had a great Etsy sale order! I actually sold two items that I just posted yesterday (!) and two other items. And to top it all off, as a newer Etsy seller, I’ve thought it would be so fun if my “number of sales” on my Esty page was larger than my “posted items” number. My sale yesterday, moved me there!

When I was having an email conversation with my wonderful customer, I was so excited, that I went ahead and told her the story about the number of sales. After I sent the message, I was a little worried that perhaps it sounded cold and selfish – like the number of sales was the most important thing to me. When in actuality, it’s really all about people liking what I love to do enough to place the order. My customer wrote back the sweetest note congratulating me and calling it a “victory”! How nice.

I’m thankful for nice people. 

Such Great Plans

Here it is - almost Sunday evening already and it's back to work on Monday morning. I had such great plans for the weekend. I was going to be extremely productive and get my house cleaned, fall outdoor work done, pay bills (yuck!) and work on wool.

A little of that has happened - but certainly not to my satisfaction. Why do we always think we have to be so productive in order for it to be a "good" day? And, then when we don't reach those goals, we feel like we've "wasted" the day? I don't know the answer. I just know that I do it all the time.

And speaking of things to do - I keep waiting for the day that I will be more organized and do the postings on this blog that I hoped to do. I look forward to the day that I am prepared to post some tutorials for making wool mittens, flowers, softies, pillows and more. Hang on. I'll get there.

On the positive side, I did at least manage to finish three new wool chicks and a pillow for sale on Esty. 

(And I even got a "heart" on my pillow after just being posted for about 30 minutes - what a nice compliment!)

I even finished a chick for my friend Diane's birthday gift.  Shhh....she hasn't seen it yet!

In the meantime, I guess I'll get back to what I was....or wasn't....doing.

Unleashing a Monster

Come on. You know how it is when you get a new toy. No matter how old you are - you get a little obsessive about it. I got a new camera this weekend. Couldn't afford it but did it anyway. (Hoping maybe I get a few Etsy sales to pay for it!) :-)

After being gone all weekend, when I got home with my new toy, I only had enough energy to play with it from my comfy chair.  But look at all the fun you can have from one chair!

Shot from across the room...

(My dad made the shelf and the two items on the outside were once my grandmothers. Bless them.)

Christmas snowman ornaments soons to be finished and posted on Etsy...

Books I love...

Wool balls, balls, balls...

Pin cushions at work...

Last but not least, my jeans.  :-)

Sleeping in Seattle

I just returned from a trip to Seattle. My daytime job involves helping to coordinate conferences in a variety of locations throughout the year.

We had glorious weather and a very successful conference.  One of our talented speakers, Brene' Brown, posted about her experience on her blog this week. I am fortunate and honored to be a part of her blog.

Take a peek here.

My Fall Excitement

This fall is such a busy time for me - so I'm not able to devote as much time to my Etsy shop and my blog as I'd like.  But, I'm so excited - of the few fall items I was able to prepare, my fall pillow is currently being featured on an Etsy Gift Guide! I'm not sure if it's true or not, but I heard that it often can take a couple years before anyone's work gets featured on an Etsy Gift Guide, and I've only been selling on Etsy for 2 1/2 months! Lucky me! I'm so honored!

Take a peek here: http://www.etsy.com/gift-guides/122?page=2.

It's Scarf Weather

I hate to have to admit it, but here in Wisconsin, it's getting close to warm scarf weather. On one hand, I love it - because it means more fun for me making new scarves. On the other hand, I'm hesitant, because it means cold winter weather on the way.

I decided to use some of the smaller pieces of recycles wool sweaters that I have (which gets to be a lot!) and work them into new scarves. After stitching together rectangle pieces to make the length of the scarf, I knew more embellishment was in order. Enter flowers, grommets and "seam" fringe!

I love to add flowers to a lot of my work - so why not some happy summer flowers for those long winter months? I stitched on flowers and leaves to one end of the scarf and embellished the flowerettes with some simple embroidery using black wool yarn.

Then came the grommets. I knew I wanted to add some fringe at the ends using the seams of the wool sweaters. (I always carefully cut out the seams of wool sweaters when disassembling and then felt them for new uses.) I decided that four grommets on each end would be sufficient and chose to use the nice large size.

With grommets in place, I then tied on the fringe and made small stitches through the knots of the fringe to assure they don’t loosen during use.

WaLa. In no time I actually had two new scarves! Maybe I might just make a few more for some fun Christmas gifts this year…