Saturday, January 28, 2012

More pink!

I finally came up with a design for this ribbon charm & clasp that I like! Three down & I don't know how many more to go... I have two more pink ribbon charms & four other ribbon charms, but I can always go shopping for more. Hopefully I'll find out today, while they're still on sale. Though, the Hobby Lobby in town was out of the plain silver charms. :/

Friday, January 27, 2012

More bracelets & house progress


Not the greatest picture I've taken, but I wanted to show both the bracelets & the other charms (as well as the fancy clasp & some of the beads)that I made/got for breast cancer awareness bracelets. Ok, that sentence totally didn't work, but I think you know what I mean & I don't feel like fixing it! :P

I thought it was neat the way the charm on the far right matched the fancy magnetic clasp I already had (further right/top) & I plan to use the little crystal beads with both of those, but I've already tried two designs & don't like them, so we'll see what I can come up with...

As for my project clean house: I haven't really accomplished any of my stated goals. I did move some of the kid-friendly craft supplies to my daughter's closet & cleaned up my old easel (omigosh was it dirty!) & put it in her room. She had fun coloring on it. It has a chalkboard surface & then is set up for a roll of paper to be on top. Unfortunately I showed my two-year-old how to color on the chalkboard with chalk & then how to color on the paper with crayons... so, of course, she keeps trying to color on the chalkboard with the crayons! >_< Oh well, the chalkboard already has paint & tape on it! Our neighbor said she's going to give us her son's little drawing table that comes with two stools & has a two-sided dry-erase top that comes off to reveal a little storage caddy so she has room for a new train table for him. :) We have a drawing table we got at a garage sale, but it's missing things & is quite colored on. It's in our dining room. I think I'll see if the new one will fit in her room, but I still think we'll get rid of the old one.

Enjoying her "new" easel!


Thursday, January 26, 2012

Some more recent creations

Here are some recent creations that have already sold or been gifted. They all feature awareness ribbon charms & were each accompanied by a donation made to an appropriate organization for what the ribbon color represents. I used this website for color reference: http://www.trinitylondon.com/awareness-ribbon-meanings.asp
Pearl bracelet (with real pearls!) made for my mother-in-law with a donation to be made to the local multiple sclerosis society in honor of her sister-in-law.
This was the first awareness ribbon bracelet I made & put up for sale. Grey stands for asthma awareness. It can stand for other things, but I listed it for asthma b/c I've suffered with asthma myself. My cousin, whose littlest (3 years old!) has been suffering with really bad asthma & allergy attacks lately, bought it & requested I make a similar one for her friend. I couldn't find the same grey beads & her friend preferred something more rounded so I found the beads seen in the next picture!
Asthma awareness bracelet made for my cousin's friend whose husband suffers with asthma. Modeled by me. ;)
Both asthma awareness bracelets together. A donation was made to the American Lung Association for them both.
Alzheimer's awareness bracelet & earrings I made for my mom's birthday accompanied by a donation in memory of her mom to the Alzheimer's Association. <3

After a shopping trip today, I'll be making a pink ribbon breast cancer awareness bracelet for my mother-in-law's cousin-in-law (anyone else confused by these relationships?) or maybe multiple bracelets for her whole team in the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

New Year's Resolution

What's your New Year's Resolution? Have you stuck to it, now that the first month is nearing it's end? Mine is two-fold: Resume Operation Clean House & improve upon my business & the Etsy Team I'm captain of.

So far, I've found three books on organizing & simplifying that I downloaded for free! One I've been working through (& am really liking it) focuses on cleaning out a messy house (what I need) even if it's the house of a hoarder (I'm not quite that bad, but do have some of the tendencies) and then reorganizing & developing systems to keep it that way!
The next one I got focuses on organizing the whole family & your time... it doesn't apply to me as much since it focuses more on a family with school-aged children.
The third one focuses on simplifying your life: stuff & time. I'm liking it, too, but the first one has really spoken to me.

With the aid of the books & my counselor, I've made a plan for cleaning & reorganizing the whole house, top to bottom! I've started with small goals & plan to build upon my successes. I gave myself weekly goals and daily goals. I'm ahead of schedule with the weekly goals, but have been quite negligent of the daily goals. The weekly goals are from the big plan & involve really sorting through things & weeding out what I don't need any more. The daily goals are general cleaning around the house.
With the weekly goals I've already accomplished cleaning out the catch-all basket in the kitchen. Now it only has the cat's leashes & coupons that hadn't expired as of the Saturday I cleaned it out.
I sorted out my daughter's outgrown clothes & packed them up for storage. We're keeping pretty much everything right now b/c we plan to have more kids. If number two is a girl, we'll have all this stuff to re-use. If we have a boy, then we'll probably start selling the girly stuff. I'm pretty proud of myself in that I've sorted all these clothes out by gender & sizes & they're all folded neatly & such! :)
I reorganized my linen closet. That was pretty easy; I just picked some of the old bedding to put in our garage sale, moved things around a bit & made room for my place-mats & cloth napkins.
I sorted through some of the stuff that had collected on the landing at the foot of our stairs. This included a major victory! I found my necklace that my husband had gotten me for my first Mother's Day! It had been missing for over a year (you see how bad I am about going through this stuff??) and I thought it had been stolen & was gone forever! I still have another laundry basket of random stuff I need to sort through from this, but I moved it up to our bedroom. Now, all that's on the stairs is/are the diaper bag, balloons left over from her B-day party (I need to get rid of those, too, but we just can't bring ourselves to pop them!), and the laundry basket I use to throw dirty towels, washcloths & bibs in.
Today I cleared out my daughter's closet. It seems pretty empty now, but I plan to take all the kid-friendly craft supplies from my craft room in the basement & store them in here. I'm a little wary of this, since she can open the closet... but we'll see. Most of the stuff I took out of the closet is in the hall right now. I needed a break before moving it all. Not sure where all of it is going to go even.
Next on my list, after those things is cleaning out my purse! At my mom's group last Friday we played a little game where we got points for different things we had in our purses/diaper bags & I almost "won" the messy purse contest! I would have won handily if I'd have actually been able to count the crayons in the diaper bag, but it was in the nursery with my daughter. :P

I did NOT expect to write this much!! Kudos for reading this far!
So, since this blog is kinda supposed to be more for my business.... my other accomplishments towards my Resolutions were to list six new items on Etsy & I sold two of them (one of those was a custom order.) I also finished another custom order that I'll deliver on Friday (since it's for the daughter of another mom in my group.) As for the team... well, I've continued to maintain it & accept new members & add them to the yahoo group, but I haven't actually done much else yet. That's still on my list. ;)

Here are the new items that are still available: