Making a name...

I'm now deep in the throws of building a website and online store to sell my crafty goods! It is VERY much in the preliminary stages, so I won't release the web address yet, but it is so exciting! So far I've set it up for free, though I do plan on paying for the hosting service soon to get my own unique domain name and to remove ads from the website. Also, with the free service you are limited to 5 items in the online store, and that just simply won't do! (Even though right now I only have 4 items... LOL!) Once I start paying for it, I'll be able to have 30 items, so clearly I've got my work cut out for me to fill those spots! So far I'm focusing on these super cute baby and toddler hats, they are fast to make and the materials are inexpensive. I do also plan on making some pressed flower note cards with the paper I made left over from the books I made two Christmases ago, and hopefully I'll come up with other fun gifty items adults will appreciate (not to say adults don't appreciate cute baby hats, but usually the adults who do appreciate them are the moms of the babies they want the hats for...) ;) (Now how's that for a run-on sentance ending with a preposition?) So far the website is designed with a pre-designed template, though I have replaced the generic photo logo with my own, if not temporary, logo. I'd like to eventually learn html and css so that I could design my own site from scratch, but for now I am actually really liking the predesigned site, and with a little tweaking it has become my own!

And as a teaser preview, here are a couple of the items I have already added to the inventory... Drool away!

I'm working on it, I swear!

As I have posted before, I usually slow down in the summer craftwise... But things are starting to pick up again! My shed is very nearly empty, there are a handful of things left to be dealt with, then I need to cleancleanclean it, decritterify it (there's an unoccupied birdsnest and who knows what else in there), bug bomb it, and then it'll be ready for me to insulate and sheet and install a window! Woohoo! It probably won't be functional until fall, but I'll be sure to take lots of pictures along the way to track the progress! I'm so excited for it! Woohoo!

I've also been thinking hard about setting up a Made in the Mountains online store so that I can sell my crafts. We could certainly use any extra income, and it would be fun! I'm in the research phase of what hosting service and ecommerce service to use, and I need to build up an inventory before I put anything online, but I'm excited about it! I think my biggest item will be my crocheted hats, mostly for babies/toddlers/kids, they are fast and easy to make and the materials are inexpensive. Yay! Keep an eye out for more on the website! :D

I just made this hat for my best highschool friend's new baby girl, and I'm about to make another one for her 2 year old daughter as well (Kate, if you see this, act surprised when they arrive!). This is my first floppy brimmed hat, I totally winged it (no pattern) and I think it came out great! I'm going to add a grosgrain ribbon around the brim so it can be tightened if it's too loose or used as an under chin tie, but here it is thusfar! So cute! (I'm going to use the foam ball it's on later for photographing hats for the website, I only just got it today so I haven't had the chance to put it on the dowel and make it look nice!)

Ok, I just added the ribbon and had to post a picture of it finished, cause it is SO DANG CUTE!

Summer is here!

Yet again, it's been a while since I've updated here! Perhaps I hit a crafting slowdown since the weather has been so nice? We've been so busy with the garden, I think I have a good excuse! Though late Spring has brought with it several new ideas for fun projects! Our ornamental cherry trees in the front are blooming like it's nobodies business, and their fragrance is AMAZING! (Actually we're not sure what kind of trees they are, they are some sort of ornamental (inedible) cherry, or perhaps some kind of Japanese plum. The birds don't eat the fruit, so I'm assuming they are poisonous.) I've been wanting to bottle their scent for some time now, and it seems like I just might be able to! I've done some research into perfume making, and it seems easy enough, if I have enough time left in their blooming season! To make perfume or essential oil, you need to have a continuous supply of fresh petals for at least a week, if not two, and I might have missed that window of opportunity this year (if so, next year I'll be prepared!)(and maybe I'll still try it this year with our oriental lilies!). Despite that, I plan on picking up some supplies today to try my hand at it! I'll be using techniques described in Back To Basics: A Complete Guide to Traditional Skills, which is really the seminal book of homesteading self-sufficiency in my opinion. It is full not only of great crafts and recipes and DIY projects, but also has all sorts of info on all matters homesteading- building, farming, raising livestock, really you name it, it probably has it. It's new Third edition is great, I really do recommend it!
Anyways, back to the perfume making- I'm not sure whether I'll try making perfume, or essential oil. To make perfume, you need a fair amount of lard (or crisco), melted onto 10 or so shallow plates. Then you score a crisscross pattern in the solidified lard, and put the petals inbetween two sandwiched plates, and seal them with tape. Every day or two, open up the plates, replace the wilted petals with fresh, and repete about 8 times. Then, discard the petals, put the lard in glass jars, and fill with ethyl alcohol, seal and store in a cool dark place for 6-8 months (!), shaking each jar once every day (!!!)... After 6-8 months, you strain out the fat and add a fixative oil (such as musk or ambergris, or sandalwood oil). Fairly involved process, no? Essential oil is much faster and less involved to make. You put petals in a jar filled with an odorless oil, replacing the petals with fresh ones every day or two, repeting about 8 times. Still as involved as the beginning of making perfume, but thankfully you stop there! I'm not sure which one I'll try (or if I'll try both). I'm also not sure what oil to use for essential oil, what oil there is that is odorless and safe for the skin... We shall see!

I suppose I haven't been entirely projectless lately. I did sew Wyatt's curtains for his room (finally! I've had the valance since before he was born!) not too long ago, though I think that's about it! (he's still snoozing now, or I'd go take a picture! I'll post one soon!) I think fall and winter are naturally more crafty times of year for me, with the weather keeping you indoors and the prospect of the holiday season approaching! Though late summer is typically the time I'm most busy with food-related crafts, namingly canning and preserving! Our sour cherry trees are just beginning to lose their petals, and it's almost time to cover them with bird netting! They're all looking very healthy, so if we manage to keep them well enough protected from being pecked clean, we should have a very delishous harvest in about a month and a half! Also, our recent bout of very rainy weather has forced Red to work on his shop rather than in the garden, which is good news for me, cause once his shop is done he can move his tools out of my soon-to-be craft shed! Yay! He is very nearly done, and I think the only big thing left to do is to have a trench dug to bring power to it from the pedistal, and then have LPEA (our electric supplier) come out and install an RV pedistal! (and we have a friend who has agreed to bring a backhoe over to do the digging!) Hooray! So hopefully soon I'll be able to begin work on making the shed my craft shed! Can't wait! :D

Quick seed starting pots!

Here is a great little project to make homemade (free!) pots for starting seeds in! (I can't take credit for this idea, it was originally in an issue of Mother Earth News, I am afraid I can't remember what issue). Save your empty paper towel and toilet paper rolls, they are definately good for something other than making silly kalidescopes!

Press the empty roll flat, and cut in half (in fourths for a paper towel roll). On the bottom edge, cut four 5/8" slits equally spaced around the tube (if pressed flat, cut through two layers right in the middle, then fold it so those slits are on the folded edges, and cut through again in the middle)

Fold the four flaps shut like you would a packing box, tucking the last one under the first one (so it stays shut on it's own, without the need of tape. Tape would hamper its drainage)

Fill with good soil and plant seeds in them! The great thing about them is when it comes time to transplant into larger pots or into garden beds, just unfold the bottom flaps and plant the whole thing (cardboard and all!) right into the ground. The cardboard will degrade, and before it does it helps retain moisture around the tender new roots! (However if it looks like the seedling is rootbound, just tear the cardboard away, it should be very soft from all the watering of the seeds you've done!) (by the way, to water them gently, we recommend a spray bottle) Here are some of our seedlings, the sugar snap peas are just about outgrowing their pots!

Been a while, busybusy!

It's been a while since I've updated the ol' bloggityblog, but that doesn't mean I haven't been crafting! Since learning to crochet a month ago, I've made several really cute hats, and have even created my own pattern for them (and tested it several times to make sure I wrote it correctly!). Wyatt's is super cute, he still doesn't care for it to be on his head longer than a few seconds, but what are you gonna do? Hehe!

And here's his hat with another hat, same pattern but a size smaller, for an undisclosed baby's first birthday gift!

Other than those hats, I have not made too much else, though we've been very busy around the house. Red had some time off of work, and we were very productive with it! We finally painted the livingroom, after having had three gallons of paint waiting in the closet for over a year! It's wonderful! We also painted the spare bathroom, and did alot of touchup spots elsewhere in the house were we missed the first time around. It's also inspired quite a lot of spring cleaning and decluttering and reorganizing, which is long overdue (mostly on my part). In trying to make more shelf space, I'm cutting out interesting articles and recipes and such from my rather large collection of Real Simple magazines (I have issues dating back to 2004), and am puting them in a binder. If I do ever finish that project, I'll probably do the same for my smaller collections of Sunset and Good Housekeeping magazines. Not entirely crafty, but definately needed to be done! We've also been starting work in the garden and greenhouse, it's still too cold to plant outside (infact we just got snow last night and are expecting more this weekend) but we've started seeds indoors and are having great success rates of growth! (which reminds me of an easy reusing craft project to make seed starters, I'll post that next in a separate post!) We will hopefully be growing a lot of produce this year, so much so that we've got plans to put in more garden beds and have turned previously ornamental beds into kitchen garden beds, so I hope to have alot to make wonderful preserves out of this summer and fall!!!

There is an interesting note circulating around facebook lately, where for the first 5 people who respond (who are not in your current circle of friends you see regularly), you will make them something -anything- and send it to them. (the catch, as with most chain things, is that they too have to post the same note and do the same for 5 of their friends. Cool, huh?) I decided to do it for the first 8 people, and I have until the end of the year to send them all homemade gifts. I'm excited about it! I imagine I'll probably stick pretty close to crafts I already do well enough to make them speedily, and it might be a few months if I'm going to include freshly made preserves and whatnot, but it's going to be fun. I've got a good mix of people to make gifts for, some old camp friends and old highschool friends (all of whom I haven't seen in years), and a few mommas from my webmd circle of mom friends, most of whom I've been in contact with since we were all pregnant together (I feel like I know them all, and even refer to them in conversation with Red and others, as though I see them every day! In fact, I do see them every day, but just on webmd or facebook!). It's a pretty cool experiment, the main point is to reconnect with old friends and such, but I like especially that it's a homemade handmade thing that you actually mail to them, rather than just sending someone an e-card or something... And what's also fun is it is getting people who wouldn't otherwise be inclined to be crafty into making handmade gifts. It's the best chain note I've ever seen, beats the pants off of silly quizzes or surveys or those stupid emails that say if you don't send this to 800 of your friends in the next 37 seconds your dog will bite your face off the next full moon... Gotta love those. At last, a note worth posting, one that is actually productive! (Not to say I've never filled out a survey or taken a quiz, but still...) In a world that is becoming faster and more into instant gratification, it's important to remember and appreciate that not all wonderful gifts or ways to connect with friends are point-and-click. (infact I would say that the most wonderful gifts or ways to connect with friends are most certainly not point-and-click.)

Learned to crochet!

This week I learned how to crochet! My mother in law taught me, and after some trial and quite a bit of error, I got the hang of it. I have to say, while I'm much better at knitting, crocheting goes so much faster, and is much easier to customize (at least what I've messed around with has been.). I picked up a set of hooks and some cotton yarn at Walmart (and was very pleasently surprised by their yarn selection, no wools, everything was synthetic or cotton blends, but they had some nice stuff, including some gorgeous and very soft yarn made from 100% recycled plastic bottles! I almost bought a few skeins cause it was so nice and in beautiful colors, but I don't have a project picked out for them (and am in the middle of my Central Park Hoodie) so I have to be patient...) and set about to crocheting a few little random projects. I made a little dishtowel and a headband out of one of the cotton yarns, and then decided to try my hand at making a hat for our friends son Tyler's first birthday (which is today, sadly I am not feeling well and can't make it to the party...). I found a cute pattern for free on ravelry for a beanie with a little brim on it, though I didn't quite understand the pattern's terminology (it's quite different from knitting terminology), so I used the pattern as a basis for what to do, and customized it as I went for to make it right. I must say, for a first official garment, it turned out pretty damn cute! It's a 100% cotton variegated colored yarn, I had just enough to finish it with a little bit left over (it was a small 2oz skein). It's a bit big on Wyatt, and his head is pretty big, so I'm sure it will be too big on Tyler too, but it is damn cute, and could be shrunken if needed (or he'll just grow into it!). (once again, Wyatt wouldn't let me take a picture of him with the hat on, I managed to just catch him before he pulled it off, it's a great game for him!)
Since this hat was such a success, I've decided to crochet hats for all the Vallecito babies's first birthdays, (Tyler is the first in the stretch of five babies amongst our friends, Wyatt is next! Yikes!) all in different colors of course, but once they're all 1, the group picture should be super cute! Hehe! I just wish Wyatt liked to wear hats... Oh well, that's not going to stop me from making him one! Yay for crocheting!

Impatient for warmer weather...

I am definately getting impatient for warmer weather here. For obvious reasons of course (ahem, no more snow! Get me out of this house!), but for crafting reasons as well! This past fall, we purchased two 20 foot metal cargo containers (like these). One will be for storage and a place to park our atv, and the other one will be Red's workshop. Unfortunately we got snow before Red finished his workshop (he has framed out the inside and insulated it, and has it wired for 110 and 220 electricity, though it is not yet wired into our electric meter yet, and still needs to be sheeted and shelves and workbenches built), but come spring he will finish out the inside, which means he'll be able to move all his tools out of our big shed, and the shed will then become my sewing/craft shed! It's an 8'x10' shed, and it currently sits in our driveway, though I think we will have it moved up to the back of the yard across from where the shop is. We will also probably insulate and sheetrock the interior, and hopefully install a window or two, and wire it, and then it's all mine! After sheetrocking it the interior dimensions will be closer to 7.5'x9.5', and since it's a shed roof the back wall is not quite standing height (it almost is for me, not even close for Red!), so it poses some interesting design issues, but I have a thing for designing small spaces so I'm excited for the challenge! It will primarily be set up for sewing, though I hope to have enough workable surface space for most other types of crafting, minus anything that requires water (unless I do watery stuff outside with the hose!). I do have a nice sewing center cabinet, though I'm not sure if I'll use that in there, or build custom shelving/counter/table space. I can't wait for the snow to be gone so we can get a start on all of this!