This is How I Roll

The ingredients for a relaxing evening in front of the zombie box.

There comes a time when curling up on the couch with some handstitching at the end of the night is just the right thing.

I often feel guilty just sitting and vegging out because it isn't productive.  But it's OK to prioritize down time.  If my brain needs just a little bit more stimulation then keeping a pad and pen for doodling or a little bit of light sewing next to me does the trick.

So cheers everyone, I'm turning the sound down on the baby monitor and cracking open a Blue Moon while I sew some fur onto some ears and watch Law & Order.

House Crazed

Warm thoughts as the weather gets cooler.

There are paint chips all over the floor, taped to the walls, shoved under picture frames, with circles in ink around favorite colors.  I'm having an 'I can't stand my house' moment.  More accurately there are two rooms I cannot stand and one that needs painting. 

The house is a little rancher with 6 total rooms built in 1968.  There are things that could be done without, like the horribly poor job someone did texturizing the ceilings... why would anyone do that?  And then there are these perfect weird little abnormalities that I am slowly learning to embrace.

So far I've changed my color selection for the rooms about 6 times and am faced with aggrivation and frustration due to my indecision.  Then a funny thing happened...

I was reading backlogs of emails from blogs I follow and there was one particularly interesting post.  Apparently I am not the only one who starts maniacle home and garden projects when faced with artistic stagnation.  I just didn't know that's what was propelling my behavior.

So instead of running out to Home Depot and spending $200 on paint that I might not actually want, I ambled down to my basement studio (which I'd been taking a time out from to spend more time with the hubby and tyke).  There I started work on something that had been rolling around in my brain for a couple months and it felt *really* good.

The challenge then becomes not to renovate the entire house every 6 months and leave multiple partially finished projects staring accusingly at me, but to learn my own emotional cues and balance my life accordingly.

Open for Business!

The new shop, Sunny Plum is officially open for business!  There are some old favorites from Dog&Daemona as well as fresh new designs.  I have more new goodies on the way, just check in every so often to see them.  There is a free shipping offer for the first five sales in the shop.  Enjoy!

Consolidating

I cannot run two shops, I have decided.  Recently I read a great article and took from it how important the act of editing your product line is.  This is almost a relief, because as wide ranging and plentiful my ideas and prototypes are, it's unrealistic to include everything in my stores.  As a result I realized that I need to streamline my online selling experience, edit my stock, and make some changes to my storefront.  Part of this includes choosing one store to represent my artistic efforts, not two or three to accomodate the multiple tangents my work seems to follow.

So I've started the process of closing my two existing shops and opening a new one.  This act ties into a whole slew of other personal growth and identity recognition activities I have engaged in recently.  My house has been reorganized, stripped of all the junk that clutters my self expression in my living space.  It feels... fantastic!

The new shop should be announced in early October.  October is the best month, it's my birthday month.

So big!

This is the cutest thing I ever made.  Got some great pics outside in the yard yesterday!

Yum, grass!  Nom Nom!  I guess we've been spending too much time with the horse.  Had a great time hanging out at the barn watching the farrier put shoes on the horse today.

Doorknob Allure

I am experiencing a growing obsession with antique doorknobs.  It's really difficult justifying wanting to collect them, especially since I splurged on nice ones when we moved into our house 4 years ago.  The real underlying and undeniable problem is that our actual doors are hideous and cheap.  I've spent the last few weeks while Mark has been out of town reflecting on what in this house is representative of me and what is just crap I've accumulated.  Turns out I have a lot of crap.  The doors are definitely NOT representative of me.

Now the questions is... do I paint the doors and throw some awesome antique doorknobs on them, paint them and leave the nice expensive doorknobs on them, or leave them crappy with nice doorknobs?  Here are a few that I found browsing on Etsy:

nikkimyers1127

VintageNewHampshire

TexasSkye

kizzyrayan123

Tiny Tuesday Promo

As many of you know the Plush Team has a Tiny Tuesday special every week.  A handful of artists post items for under $10 in the team shop.  How cool is that?  This is my day and I made these bitty bunnies.