Spring time is here

Spring is one of my favorite season, as I get to see my garden come back to life.   All those beautiful little green sprouts pushing through the ground brings such excitement.

Here are some of my favorite ETSY spring inspired items.

I love this poppy pendant.   When I lived in California the hills came to life with bright and beautiful poppies and they will always be one of my favorite flowers.  LittleGreenRoom has crafted this beautifully designed Poppy  

You cannot have spring without in-visioning beautiful yellow daffodils – and I am in love with this Yellow Daffodil Bookmark.  This is incredibly well crafted and looks lovely sticking out of  a book!

Love purple in the garden, well love it on your jacket too with this lovely Spring Blossom Brooch!  This blossom brooch is upcycled from vintage jewelry! 

Friday after St. Patricks day on ETSY

Having a good Irish last name, St. Patrick’s day was never forgotten in my household growing up and is never forgotten in my own home with my children.  This year, due to a crazy working schedule, I could not cook my favorite buttermilk soda bread or the traditional American St. Patty’s day feast of Corn beef and Cabbage.  Therefore my St. Patty’s day got post poned a couple days to today.  Since it is Friday and I LOVE to blog about fun ETSY items, I figured I’d make it all about St. Patrick’s day today.

This first item I just love.  It’s a Felt I-phone case featuring an adorable four leaf clover.  Entirely hand-sewn this beauty will fit any gadget.

Check out these fantastic lucky clover hoops from Twisted Designs.  This design is truly unique and is causal enough to fit with any outfit, on any day (not just St. Patrick’s day).

And lastly, enjoy some Guiness, the cure for all ails, but instead of drinking it, scrub with it.  I love this soap made with this very famous stout beer.

Updating BBs For babies website

New Website design

Two months mont ago I decided that I would get my toes wet with a website devoted to my ETSY shop.   Thus was born BBsForBabies.com.  Using the Intuit website service, which is very reasonable for a simple 5 pages web page set, I generated a web page devoted to my business in just a couple hours.   This option is incredibly easy.  Using their handy web page templates it’s a no brainer to pump out a website.

However having my website online for approximately 2 months, I noticed a terrible bounce rate and low time on the site.  My products were apparently not showing through enough to lure the viewer into clicking beyond the main page.  Having a love of colors, I decided to steer away from the boring template design that I had picked out previously, and created a site from scratch., using bright blues, pale lavenders, and accents of chocolate, I created a main page showcasing some of my favorite items.  Having my website updated for just 2 days, I’ve already noticed a better click through to my shop/products and a lower bounce rate.

I would love to hear some comments/reviews on this new design, as I believe it showcases my products well, but might be too graphic intense.

My Trip to the Wrong side of the tracks Fabric store

Yesterday, when the weather was nice and warm, I wanted to hit a fabric store that I had never been to before – Fabric & Upholstery Outlet 1101 Southwest 59th Street, Oklahoma City, OK.  Rumored to have an unpredictable inventory of great and affordable fabrics, I had been chomping at the bit to go there.

Located next to an empty store in a strip mall, I was blown away how wonderful it was.  It was like heaven, just tables, racks, bins, everywhere full of wonderful, affordable fabric.  Tripping over the large inventory in the way too small space, it was like I was on a treasure hunt searching for the perfect, unique, fabulous fabric.   Oh how I scored.

Not only was the fabric wonderful…. the place was not busy so I was afforded the opportunity to have a wonderful chat with the one sales woman on the floor.

Just goes to show great things come in little stores.

Why is it so Hard to find Oganic Fabrics??

That’s a mighty fine question.  What’s more, when I decided that I would open a new Etsy shop  ( http://www.x2useittwice.etsy.com) which is devoted to reducing waste, using organic materials, and upcylcing, I started calling the local fabric stores to ask them about their organic fabric supply.  I was shock to hear their response, “What do you mean.”  What do you mean??  Wow!  The local Quilting shop was very helpful.  She explained to me that the Organic supply of fabrics is presently very low and are created on a very small scale.  Because of this many of the prints do not have a clarity of the larger printing shops.  This is something that I have not noticed but I am not a fabric supplier and do not look at several hundred fabric swatches a week.

To get a good selection, I’ve had to hit the online shops.  Here a couple good ones that I have found:

http://www.organiccottonplus.com/ <- large selection, reasonable priced, good reputation.

http://www.pmorganics.com/index.htm <- great selection of bright prints, limited selection

http://www.nearseanaturals.com/index.php <- great selection, more expensive, premium fabrics

To Rip or Cut?

During the process of making blankets, which are generally square, the repetitive action of cutting little squares over and over becomes tedious.  There’s got to be a better way.  Consider the rip!  Although many talented quilters would probably cringe at the idea of ripping fabrics, as they love the careful precision of neat little triangles and squares.  I think my life better parallels the quick and dirt rip method.  Grab that piece of satin and rip to your heart content.  I work with satins quite a lot and they tear wonderfully!  Good cottons will keep their line too.   So embrace the rip!

The rebirth

In 7th grade Mrs. April called me super woman for threading my sewing machine needle backwards at my first ever attempt. There was nothing super about it, just a 12 year old over thinking the process. I loved that home economics class. I don’t even know if present day Jr. High and High schools still have the same sort of classes. Always geared toward girls, sewing (certainly my favorite aspect of the class) should be a pre requisite for all boys and girls alike (that’ll be another post).
Mrs. April gave us the creative license to generate whatever sewing projects we wanted. Some girls took on clothes, pillows, quilts… But I was very fond of designing my own patterns and producing adorable stuff animals.
Years later schooling, a professional career, usurped any creative energy that I had years previous. Desperate to regain that bug, I started sewing again, but what to sew? I came back to my creative roots and started generating homemade patterns of adorable animals. Having young children of my own, I catered those projects to my little ones.
The purpose of this blog is to showcase those items while creating a resource/inspiration for other to again go through their own rebirth, or try something new.