Tutorial for Ruffled Pillow

You have got to check out this wonderful tutorial for a ruffled pillow from Jones Design Company! 

http://jonesdesigncompany.com/create/5-days-of-favorite-projects-day-3/

This pillow is so much fun to make and adds a lot of great texture and dimension to the room!

A Baby Quilt

I rarely have time to quilt, but recently put together a baby quilt for a dear friend who is having her first baby in October.  My quilter friend Chris helped me with the quilt last week and we had so much fun working together on this little quilt!
Thank you Chris for your help.  They LOVED this quilt!

Glue

So a part of making clutches is gluing the clutch to the metal frame.  This is not my favorite part of the process, but an essential part!  With 80-100 clutches on my back-log at any given time I do a LOT of gluing.  The heat of the summer makes gluing a bit challenging.  I have to glue either in the morning or the evening (if it cools off). 
The best part of the glue is going to the store to purchase it.  I finally found a store that sells the glue locally for a good price. When I go I typically purchase about 10 tubes at the same time which always brings strange looks from the clerk at the register. The last time I purchased glue, the clerk asked if I was at least 18.  I am not making Meth people!
My least favorite part of gluing is wearing a mask to keep from breathing the horrific smelling glue.
My dear husband thinks the mask is cute so he decided to snap a couple shots of me at work gluing in the backyard.
Not my best look...

Packages in the Mail

There are a lot of packages going in and out of the house here lately. 
I order most of my fabric online, and I often get multiple packages on a weekly and sometimes daily basis.  No matter how many packages that arrive in the mail, they are always so fun to open.  By the time they get there I have usually forgotten what I ordered.  So it is like Christmas to open them and see what wonderful surprises (usually fabric) are inside.  Scott thought he was being funny to capture me being silly while opening the new treasures...

Online business is GREAT!

Trends

I do not claim to be very on-trend by any stretch... I am just too lazy and frankly too thrifty to want to keep up with the ever-changing trends.  However, trends fascinate me.  Especially now that I am working with brides who are always very interested in the latest and greatest trends.  Have you seen a bridal magazine lately.  (OK beware, I am about to date myself...)  The colors are so very interesting... really they bring me back to the 80's!  (Though some say they are 60's colors... I wouldn't know...?)   Bright Orange, Lime Green, Hot Pink, Deep Purple... and the list goes on.  Oh, did I mention all of these colors can often be used in conjunction?  At first I wasn't sure about the trends, but they have grown on me.  Use the right fabrics with these colors and anything is possible.
What amazes... truly stuns me, is that I will often get multiple requests for the same color palette in the same few days.  I cannot tell you how many times this has happened.  It is like there is a new trend report every few days and all of the sudden every bride wants that to be her color palette.  It does make it nice when selecting fabrics as I can gently persuade brides to use similar fabrics and it helps keep my costs down.
One of my recent favorite trends is gray and yellow.  Actually I cannot stop getting orders for this color palette.  If I were getting married again I would use these colors.

Or there is the shades of gray...

Then I might be persuaded to use the robins egg blue and gray... I am very partial to this too...

The Barn Wood Chalk Board

In the previous post I mentioned the Chalk Board that Scott helped me create for my sewing room.  We had some barn wood that I had taken a few years ago from the barn that sat on the back corner of the 2 acres I grew up on.  It was a GREAT old barn that we used to play in!  And before my parents moved we took as much barn wood as we could for future creative uses.  (Sad note... we SHOULD have taken it all as the new owners tore the barn down and probably threw the wood away... EEK it makes me cringe to think of all that good wood thrown away)
I had used a couple pieces of this beautiful red barn wood for a little creative decoration for a number of years and finally decided to re-purpose it for this little project.
I just love my new little chalk board (never mind my terrible penmanship).  And never mind the terrible picture.. hopefully you get the idea. 

I am ashamed to say it has been two months since my last post.  Where does the time go?
It is now officially summer (well actually tomorrow is the first day of summer).  And it is HOT here!
Summer is the time for weddings, and boy don't I know it!  Each week I have more and more contacts from brides, and more and more orders.  I was feeling quite overwhelmed by it all for a while until my fantastic father helped me get my business tracking organized.  My wonderful husband also helped me create the perfect and stylish little chalkboard for the sewing room so that I can have my "to do" list right there in front of me. It is all coming together, and this business is flying!
On a recent Saturday (or was it Wednesday? The days meld together), I was busy fulfilling two orders that just happened to be using similar fabrics.  (That is another strange phenomenon- how I can have three different requests all in the same week for nearly the exact same color palette...another post to follow on that one!)
Anyway, I thought I would take some pictures of the madness (or as I like to call it- Organized Chaos) in the sewing room.

Insides and Outsides waiting to be put together

Waiting for their final seam...

All lined up and ready for their frames...

Standing pretty ready to be shipped. 


Am I the only one that thinks it would be kinda fun to get married again just to plan it and decorate it all over again...?