Random Friday: Christmas in September

• On Sunday I posted my declaration of intent to use my Etsy shop as a full time job.
• On Monday, I had a panic attack about that very thing. Am I crazy?
  
  
• Then I ignored those mean voices in my head and made this stocking.
• The first few people I showed it to loved it. The next few hated it. What do you think?
• I started a new blog series over at the Made by Lisah blog about Product Development. I'd love it if you would go over and comment. I'd love it more if you'd go over and follow the blog!
• Speaking of the other blog, have you all gone over to enter my giveaway for Digital Scrapbook Software?
• On Wednesday it was 49 degrees out when I sent the Pirate off to school. It was 87 when I picked him up from school. How're you supposed to dress for that?
• Did you see my tutorial for making Friendship Bracelets? (Hint: it's not what you think.)
• Yesterday Trish posted about her favorite song, which shoved me right down the rabbit hole of looking up songs from my past. Now it's 24 hours later and I'm still randomly listing to songs.
• The Pirate had his parent-teacher conference. There was nothing noteworthy to mention, except that he's a good kid and gets along with others. Yay!
• This weekend the Pirate starts selling his Boy Scout popcorn. If you're in the market for popcorn let me know, I'll send you a link so you can support a kid you "know", instead of the ones standing in front of Wal-mart!

What I'm Reading:

• 31 Days to Finding you Blogging Mojo by Bryan Allain. Funny, and helpful!
• Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake by Sarah MacLean. I'm loving this one. I'm only about 100 pages in, but so far it is perfect. This is my first book by Ms MacLean, but it won't be my last.

Tutorial: How to make a friendship bracelet

One of the things I've wanted to do on my blog is post a handful of FREE TUTORIALS.  This morning I had the perfect opportunity to write one up. I even took pictures! 
Step 1: Make sure the house is clean.




And the dishes are done





Step 2:
Go back in time to 1995 and haul out your special edition Beauty and the Beast cup from Burger King. And some thread. Be very impressed when the Bug calls it thread, and not string or rope.





Step 3:
Crank up some PM Dawn.

Step 3.5:
No, louder than that.

Step 4:
Pin to your leg and start tying.





Step 5:
Tie off and tie onto the Princess, who is squirmy. "Oooohhhh," says the Princess.




Step 6:
Repeat for Bo Peep





Step 7:
Make one for The Bug, who insists he wants one and who will reject it. Wear on your own arm instead.





Along with your Life is Good bracelet and two rubber bands, of course.

Step 8:
Consider starting a second Etsy Shop.

Step 8.5: Or  moving to live on the beach in Cabo, accosting tourists.

Step 9:
Consider writing a note for Mike, asking him to check YES or NO, and folding it into a fancy little rectangle with a pull tab.

Step 10:
Skip note writing in favor of teaching the Princess and Bo Peep how to play M.A.S.H. instead.



*Or 1989, which is the last time I remember making them.**
**Though the process is awfully similar to hair wraps, which I definately was making in 1993.



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Wanna win some free scrapbooking software?

I recently reviewed a bit of digital scrapbooking software, and now I get to give away a copy!  Go Here.
 

I am an Amazon Associate. As such, any purchase you make at Amazon.com after following a link from this blog will earn me a (tiny) percentage back as income. Thanks. All content copyright Books. Lists. Life. at http://bookslistslife.blogspot.com. If you're reading this post anywhere other than there, you are reading stolen content.

Deep Breath!

I own my own business.

I am a small business owner.

I work from home.

My Etsy shop is my primary source of income.

You know how sometimes you have to say it outloud or write it down before it becomes real? Now I've said it. I've been giving it a lot of thought and I've realized that I will not get a better chance to make this happen. I am going to do whatever I need to do to make a profit on Etsy.  I will make enough money with my sewing that I don't need a day job. It's true that I have a lot going on right now, but that doesn't make it any less true that there will not be a better time to do this. If I can't do it now I'll need to get a 40 hour a week job, and if I do that I'll never have this opportunity again. This is something that I've been thinking about and talking about for years. I've made all of you follow along with me, and I really hope that you'll stick with me to see it through to the end.

Here's my game plan:

I am going to write a mission statement and post it publicly, so you can all hold me to it.

I hope to will hit 100 sales on Etsy by the end of next month, and 30 more by the end of the year. At a minimum.

Make at least one new item a day. I won't like post one new item a day, since things are easier in batches, but I want to average out to making one a day. If not more. I would love to will have a full shop of non-custom items, ready and open for Christmas shopping on Black Friday/Cyber Monday.

I am going to write a mass email announcing the new shop plans and send it to everyone I know by the end of September. I will only do this one time, but in that email will be a link to signup for my real newsletter, which I plan to send out no more than 6 times a year. I hope you will all sign up for it.

I plan to blog about my journey. I'd love to read how other women, moms, parents, crafters, whoever, made their dreams a reality, and I assume that there are other wannabes out there who would like to read how I do it. (Note: Completely positive statement there! No crashing and burning!) I have four or five topics in outline stage already, and I'll often refer my business in my other posts.  It is inevitable that this will impact all the other aspects of my life, so prepare yourself for tales of how the Princess played in the dog's water cause her mama was too busy sewing to notice care, and how the Pirate wore dirty socks cause I forgot to do laundry, and how you can't walk through any room in my house without stepping on toys.

I don't plan to stop doing other things I enjoy, like sewing dresses for my little girl, or reading books for pleasure. I'll still blog about that too, just like always.  Some of you have been reading long enough to know that I don't always follow through well, I've been talking about this for years! But I've been home for over a year now and I can't imagine going back to a job every morning. I can't imagine letting my baby spend 50 hours a week with someone else. I can't imagine doing something I don't love. 

This is my chance and it won't get any better than this.

FYI: Blogger profile picture change

Aww, poor baby. So sad.

Just a quick FYI, I changed my blogger profile picture, so if you're like me and you look at the little commenter picture thingy to identify which of the many Lisas commented on your post- mine's different now!

Random Friday: Wow. Friday?

• You guys, I have no idea where this week went. I feel like I haven't stopped to breathe this week, yet can't tell you what we've been doing to be so busy.
• Two questions: How often do you wash your bathmats? Where do you feed your pets?
• Oh wait, three questions: How much does it cost to have pants hemmed?
• I've been working on some new shop items for the craft show. In a few days I'm going to put up a poll (if I can figure out how) asking you folks to help me narrow it down. I can't spread myself to thin, but I have a hard time figuring out what would be popular.
• My husband has been working 80 hour weeks, two in a row now. He claims he'll take Sunday off, but I think he is full of it.
• We were supposed to have a yard sale this weekend, but see above statement.
• The Pirate lost his second tooth this week.
• Things are mostly going well with Bo Peep, I just need to figure out how to get her to need me a *little* less, for things she can certainly do herself.
• Did you all read my post on couponing?

What I Read this week:

• Still working on Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel.
• Chasing Perfect by Susan Mallery, half done. My first Mallery and I'm liking it. She reminds me a bit of Nora Roberts.

Wordless Wednesday

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Extreme Couponing goes too far.

I think extreme couponing is worse than just stealing your food. Seriously. What seems like a great way to save money for one person merely raises the prices for the rest of us.  At least if you steal your food you only take what you need. I hear your rebuttal now, it's "sour grapes and I should clip coupons, too!" I believe that's the extreme couponers way of justifying unethical behavior.

The way extreme couponing works, and I'm sure I'm not explaining it well, is that you buy so many multiples of an item that is both on sale and you have a coupon for, that you end up actually making money, which you then use to purchase the stuff you really need, stuff that doesn't go on sale or have coupons- like milk and fresh produce.  I'm sure there is more nuance than in this explanation, but that's the idea, right? You also split your purchases into multiple transactions to get the largest possible return on all these coupons. Now I'm all for saving a buck and (you can ask my husband), I'm the cheapest person on earth, but I am disgusted and horrified by this trend.

Here's why- if you have to buy 40 boxes of a product you haven't tried and don't know if you family would eat, as one woman did on the last episode I saw, in order to make enough money to buy your veggies, you are wasting that product.  In her case it was couscous. Let's say they didn't like it, now they have 39 more boxes.  Oh sure, they can donate it somewhere, but here's what I bet happens, I bet it sits in their pantry until it expires because they keep thinking they will try it again a different way and maybe it'll be better. And then they donate the expired food or toss it. Meanwhile, those of us who DO like couscous have to pay a higher price on ours because the store just had to pay someone to take home 40 boxes and throw them away. On that same show a family without pets had a coupon for catfood. She put in a request that the store order extra cases of this particular brand, because she need to buy a large number of packages in order to maximize her return. She filled a shopping cart with catfood for the cat she did not own.  Yes, she planned to donate the food to the local shelter (and I am happy for the shelter) but what do you think is going to happen to the price of catfood now that the store had to give away all that? I have a cat (two, actually) and if each of those packages was $7, she easily just took hundreds of dollars of product she didn't need, so she could buy a couple things she did.

I'm sure many of you are reading this and thinking how you'd love to get stuff for free and what kind of idiot (Lisa) would not?? And hey, I love free stuff! Give me a coupon for a free box of catfood and I am all over it.  Send me a coupon for half off my gallon of milk and I will be in line.  But here's the deal- we use both catfood and milk at our house. I already know I enjoy (if you will) both products.  Give me a coupon for an item I've never tasted and I will happily get my one (or two if the coupon is buy one get one free) and try it out. I will not fill my pantry with a food I might not eat for the sake of saving a buck. I would happily take a product for review that I've never tried (in fact, I'll have a software review soon and I have ads here on this very blog) but I won't do it at the expense of everyone else and I won't take an unreasonable amount.

Additionally, have you ever noticed which products have coupons? Sure, sometimes it's toilet paper or Windex, but usually it's pre-packaged processed food- like Hamburger Helper or Pop-Tarts. Yeah, we eat both those things, but we don't have a pantry full of them. In this age of obesity and couch potatoes, do we really need to eat MORE of that stuff? But Lisa, how'm I supposed to afford milk if I don't buy Hamburger Helper? Yeah, I know, times are tight. They are for me too, but it doesn't help if extreme coupon shoppers are making it worse out there.

There are some stores, like Walgreens, who have a system of Register Rewards that often lead to free items as well. For example (and I'm making this example up rather than find a flyer, but this is how it works), you buy 2 of a certain makeup brand and you get a coupon for $5 off your next purchase. Your next trip you find an item that also offers rewards and use your $5 coupon to get another reward coupon. The trick is, the rewards expire very quickly and you have to keep buying stuff to keep it up. Miss a week and you start over. You can certainly game this to maximize your return (sorry to repeat that phrase, but I'm so sick of hearing it) but here's how it's different to me- it's a system created BY Walgreens, for use AT Walgreens. You can't walk into any store with your Walgreens Register Rewards and spend them. And I've yet to hear of anyone buying three shopping carts worth of crap they don't need to get a free bag of apples.

This has also changed the way people behave when shopping for other items. It doesn't hurt to ask for a discount, no, but if the store refuses, or doesn't give you the item for less than cost, don't take it out on the store.  Give away too much for too little and you'll soon discover that your town no longer has an Ace Hardware or a Small-Town furniture store or an Independent Bookstore. You'll be buying all your food at Wal-mart because the local Grocery Mart can't compete. You won't have a bookstore or a fabric store. If you ask for more than they can give and then refuse to shop there when they can't give more, don't be surprised when it's gone. I just read that north Texas Kroger stores will no long double coupons, because they are losing money. One of my local grocery stores (not a chain) has large signs in the window that they will no longer accept any coupons printed off the internet, because of fraud. We continually hear cries of "buy local" and "buy independent" but at the same time those stores are going out of business because they are forced to compete in ways they can't. No profit= no stores.

To be clear, I don't have a problem with coupons. I don't have a problem with saving money or getting a good deal.  If you can buy all your groceries and save more than you spend I'm happy for you- if they are the groceries you'd have bought anyway.  If you find a great Groupon and get free ice cream cones for life, more power to ya. If you are a pro at spotting the free nugget day at Chik-Fil-A or the free scoop day at TCBY or whatever, that's awesome, I wish I had that ability.  My issue lies with buying bulk quantities of stuff you don't need in order to get the things that are really on your list. Or buying your 38th package of toilet paper because you needed some eggs. These are the things that drive up prices for everyone.

And don't even get me started on how I feel about getting caught in line behind someone who believes themself to be an extreme couponer...


I am an Amazon Associate. As such, any purchase you make at Amazon.com after following a link from this blog will earn me a (tiny) percentage back as income. Thanks. All content copyright Books. Lists. Life. at http://bookslistslife.blogspot.com. If you're reading this post anywhere other than there, you are reading stolen content.

Random Friday: Jumping in with both feet

Kentucky Wildcats reusable fabric tailgating banner

• Big news! I've decided to enter a craft show. I'm so nervous. What if I don't have enough stuff made in time? What if everyone walks by and no one looks? What if someone else does it better and we're right next to each other?? But, deep breath and here I go!
• That said, it seems that I'm jumping in with both feet and trying to make a decent income with this sewing thing. 10 years ago I would never have predicted this.
• I'd still love it if you followed the shop on Facebook!
• Our days with Bo Peep are going well. I spent much of this week teaching her and the Bug about eating schedules, and that if you leave your sandwich on the table and walk away that Scout WILL eat it and I will not be making you more until the next meal/snack time. I think they are starting to get it! 
• My coffee is extra good today.
• The Princess is still doing well in her little room. She's gotten into a pattern of waking once and nursing hard and then sleeping til almost 8. This is unheard of. She's also napping way way better.
• There are so many spiders in this town. It seems our apartment has more than it's share of wolf spiders. Last night I stepped on one and at least 30 tiny babies ran out. I almost died.
• It got COLD here this week. Mid-40s two days in a row and we're only up to 46 so far today. Time to dig out the coats and tights. Supposed to be 81 on Monday though.
• I picked 5 more Etsy favorites this week, go take a look.

What I Read this Week:

• Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. I'm maybe 2/3s done. I'm enjoying it, but not loving it. I'm hoping for a huge finish.
• Mr. Cavendish, I Presume by Julia Quinn. Very barely started.

What's new for you this week? Big weekend plans? What are you reading?

The world's most boring park

Around the corner from our apartment is the World's Crappiest Park. The Bug is in love with it because one time we saw another kid here. There is a sandbox made of gravel, two big kid swings and a climbing thing that even The Pirate disdains. This morning The Bug insisted we walk over with Bo Peep. It was 44 degrees out, but we loaded up in the wagon and went. Perhaps not surprisingly, they didn't really have fun. They chased each other around for ten minutes and we came home for hot chocolate. I'm thinking it might be a very long, very Indoor, winter!


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School Lunch Suggestions?

The Pirate takes his lunch to school every day. He'd be completely happy to eat the hot lunch, but so far he hasn't really complained about having to take it from home, so I continue to pack a lunch. I feel like it saves us so much money compared to the $2.10 a day at school, plus you know he's not going to even touch half of the food on the school tray. The problem is, I'm already running out of original ideas for his lunch. The Pirate doesn't seem to care, but I feel like the more I mix things up, the longer he'll be happy to take my lunches.

We are limited by a couple of factors. First, his school is a nut-free school, and that means ALL nuts. Not all the schools in our system are, just ours. I gather we have at least one severely allergic child in attendance. So, no peanut butter, which is about 75% of his at home diet. Secondly, the Pirate doesn't like crackers. NO crackers, not graham crackers, not Goldfish, not saltines, not Ritz cheese ones, none. No crackers. (He also doesn't like frosting, but I don't often try to send frosting to school.)

They do have a microwave in the lunchroom, and I suppose they must have help with it, because we don't have a microwave at home and I can just see him nuking something for WAY too long.

On a typical day I will send either a ham and cheese sandwich or a cut up hotdog and cheese stick, some kind of fruit of veggie (typically applesauce, apples, grapes or carrots), a carb like chips or dry cereal or pretzels, and a dessert (usually an Oreo.) I do have a little bowl with an icepack and sometimes will send leftovers with him- steak cut into bits or spaghetti or mac n cheese. I've sent bagels with pizza sauce to dip. I think he'd eat a hardboiled egg if I sent one and if we ever have muffins for breakfast I'd send those. I think chicken nuggets would be ok.

What else should I be sending? His palate is fairly limited. He prefers meat to veggies and isn't a giant noodle lover (the Bug would eat noodles at every single meal, given the option.) He doesn't enjoy things with a lot of sauce or gravy.  It can't be too complicated because they only get 20 minutes ( I think), but it doesn't have to stay completely cold either, because they eat at 11. What do your kids do for school lunch? Do they take theirs? Eat at school? What has been a hit for you?

Sleeping through the night

I'm not naming names, because that would be silly, but someone slept all night. Finally.

(can you see her lifting her little foot up to climb out?)

We've been struggling a lot with sleep here, because in this small apartment it's really hard to let a baby cry it out when you know you could pick them up and get them back to sleep really easily. The Princess knew this and would wake up multiple times a night to be nursed back to sleep. We're talking five or more wake ups a night, every night, for months. This weekend we swapped up all the sleeping, with the boys sleeping with their dad in my (lovely, soft, comfy, big) bed. The Princess slept in the Pack N Play in the boy's room and I slept on the couch. This way at least three of us slept well. The first two nights involved a lot of crying. It was heartbreaking. But then Saturday night she someone slept all night!

Heartened by our success we embarked on a giant room reorganization project. We flopped our bed over to the interior wall, which means you now have to walk around our bed to get to the sliding doors, or if you sleep on the far side you have to walk all the way around to get in bed. That part sucks. Then we moved the crib to the corner away from both doors. We installed two big hooks in the ceiling and hung the curtains from our old living room, on the rod from the old bedroom, from the ceiling. This gives the Princess her own (very tiny) room! Now she can no longer see us sleeping in the same room as her. She can see me walk around the bed, if she happens to be awake and looking at the right spot.We're thinking about adding another matching one to make it a wall all the way across, and then using the other half of the poor girl's bedroom to store stuff. (See: ongoing storage unit project.)

For now though, we're enjoying the idea of getting to sleep all night long, for the first time in well over a year.

Faithful Place by Tana French

I finally got around to reading a book by Tana French, thanks to the BlogHer Book Club. There were parts of Faithful Place I really liked, and parts that I decided just weren't for me. You'll have to click over to my review to find out which parts were which!  To see what other people in the Book Club thought of the book, click through to this page, where you'll find links to all the reviews (so far, anyway!)

Random Friday: A detailed look at my weekly calendar and to do list

• This school year I bought a planner and have been using it for a month. It shows a week at a glance with a section for my to do list, and a side bar for additional notes. (It's technically for menu planning, I don't use it for that.) It's ridiculously full each week, because I write a daily to do list on it, but it's really working out for me.  I tried to make notes for how I use it, but you'll have to click on it to see it bigger. The key turns out to be writing out my to do list in excruciatingly tiny detail. Each morning I make a new to do list, carrying over whatever didn't get done yesterday. It does not include things like laundry and feeding children. The section under the pirate ship are future blog posts, if I ever write them.  How would you tweak this to do list to fit your life? What am I missing? What could make it easier to get organized?
• I dusted off the made by lisah blog yesterday, with a post of my Favorite Etsy finds of the past week. Pop on over and take a look!  (I also worked on sprucing up the sidebars and vacuuming the dust out of the corners.)
• We're going to have a little friend staying with us a couple days a week. We've had her here twice now and I think it's going to work out well. She's a little younger than the Bug, but he still enjoys her company. We'll be calling her Little Bo Peep, just cause I think "Bo Peep" will be fun to type.
• I've been lugging these 4 or 5 underbed boxes of paperbacks around with me for the last 12 years or so. As part of my storage unit clean out, I just purged 4/5 of them. I added them to my yard sale stacks, but honestly I can't imagine who is going to want to buy 15 -18 year old Harlequin romance novels, or other old, non-stellar, titles.  I did keep a handful of my favorites. (G, if you're worried, Jake's Mountain is safe!)  I also purged about 1/3 of our other books. I still have 2 or 3 boxes to go, but a lot of them are Mike's so I suspect they will stay put.

What I Read this week:

• Finished Divergent by Veronica Roth. I loved it so much. Probably more than The Hunger Games.I might even review it.
• Started The Help. In Large Print!! Kinda worried I'm not in the mood for something serious, which means the next one is really crazy...
• Started Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I've been telling Trish I would read it and the anniversary of 9/11 seemed like a good time.

I am an Amazon Associate. As such, any purchase you make at Amazon.com after following a link from this blog will earn me a (tiny) percentage back as income. Thanks. All content copyright Books. Lists. Life. at http://bookslistslife.blogspot.com. If you're reading this post anywhere other than there, you are reading stolen content.

50 minutes

We have a little friend staying with us today. She's been here less than an hour. The Bug has had to show her every single thing he owns.


Who do you suppose will clean all that up?

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Happy Birthday, Princess Dorothy.

My sweet baby girl turned one this week. If you're wonder how that could have happened, so am I. We didn't want to go all out on a party, but she needed a little cake of her own, so we had a Wizard of Oz Princess party for her. I made her a little Dorothy dress and found her a pair Ruby slippers.

I was in love with all the multi-colored cakes on Pinterest, so I made a pink one for her. I frosted it in white, with pink sugar.

In lieu of giving her her own cake, we cut a big chunk out of the big cake.

As it turned out, she was not at all interested in smushing it with her hands and insisted on (trying to) use a spoon.

 I have no idea how a year has passed already, but I can tell you that I can't imagine life without her. She's my sweet, smart, funny, tiny (18 pounds, only 14th percentile!) girl.

She makes me happy, every single day. I can't imagine how I ever thought I had enough.

I love you, baby girl.

Random Friday: Late again.

• Who turned on the Fall switch this morning?
• I get the Martha Stewart Craft of the Day email every day. I can not tell you how many times I see a cool idea on Pinterest and THEN it shows up on MS a week or two later.
• I'm still doing the 21 Day Challenge, but I haven't been taking photographs. I'm really glad I'm doing it because it's really opened my eyes up to more options in my closet and to what I should be looking for to fill spots. Also, it seems like many of us have this shirt.
• The Pirate is suddenly undergoing a bit of separation anxiety. Yes, the 6 year old. I suspect it has to do with school, but he is incredibly paranoid that I am going to leave him behind somewhere. If I am in the garage for 5 minutes he will check on me 10 times, no exaggeration. If I take the garbage out he will come stand on the sidewalk to make sure I come back. He can no longer fall asleep in his room, he has to come sleep near us. It is crazy making. I wonder what happened to make him nervous.
• My absolutely perfect work at home job is ending in two weeks, a layoff of sorts. I'm scrounging for things to bring in a little income, so expect more sewing posts.
• Starting next week we'll have a little friend staying with us part-time. This will provide a tiny bit of income, but more importantly it will give the Bug someone to play with.
• On Friday I heard the Pirate reading a book outloud to the Bug on the way to school. Awww.
• We've decided to give up the storage unit, which means alllllllll our crap will be in this apartment soon. I've been sorting and selling and donating even more stuff. A few more moves and we'll be able to comfortably live in a one room cabin, I think.
• Preparations for a birthday party are underway, just as soon as I get off this chair.

What I read this week:

• I picked up Divergent again and go sucked way in.
• What the Librarian Did by Karina Bliss was a nice little romance. About halfway through I noticed that the cover said "Larger Print" all over it. Yay for Larger Print!