These days my heart calls out for color. Bright vibrant colors speak volumes to me and these three were at the top of my list. I bought more but these are like Mary Poppins. Practically perfect in nearly ever way! I have a new product heading to the shop and I think you will like them. Yes, I have more than one for the shop! Yes, I am so excited about it.
The house has been really quiet this week as our high energy kid is at camp this week. She is the one that keeps us talking and busy. She is fun and exciting and makes life that way too! While quiet is nice and allows me to think in complete sentences, I miss her. I miss her chatter and vibrant personality. Thankfully, she comes home tomorrow. I need to go and sew some more as the photographer promised to take some pictures for me tomorrow.
Did you realize that discouragement can be a valuable tool for your business? It forces you to do three things, look inward, look outward, and make decisions. Today I am discouraged. It has been a long week of work and family. Somethings have been great and other things not so great. I have prototyped manyseveral about 12Â new items and very, very few have worked out. I have had a great time with my family. This is awesome. So, why am I discouraged.
I am tired and not just tired but weary. We are still recovering from that bad cold. I have put in 2 – 8 hour days at the sewing machine. My house is messy, because I have put in 2 – 8 hour days sewing (funny how it works like that). I have stretched my thinking and planning by being creative and trying new things. I have failed, gotten up and failed again!
Tired
Messy House
Failed creatively
Here is the looking outward part!
I haven’t left the house in several days. I keep comparing myself and my business to other people and their businesses. Blogging has been really, incredibly hard the past week or so.
I am tired and I haven’t left the house in several days. Â This is simple to fix as I need to make a supply run and run some errands.Comparison is a horrible thing, not fair to myself, not fair to others. It completely sells everyone short. So the only comparison I should do is to see how far I have really come. So, I need to track the business and see if it is growing, stagnant, or failing. The writing part will come easier when I get out and about. Feeding the creative juices is critical and rest is a part of that. I will take Friday off and have fun with a close friend. I really feel much better except for the tired part. I think I can beat that with an early bedtime and some much needed rest. The failing part on making the prototypes is simply to go back and make things that I know how to make!
P.S. You will notice that not much was said about the messy house. I will take care of that in small bits and pieces of time, which makes it easier to swallow.
Date night….was wonderful. It is years since planning a date was a simple as a phone call. Planning date nights was as complicated as planning a cross country move and required just as much cash to pay a sitter. I was also not quite comfortable leaving the kids for long as they were mischievous. Last night was a wonderful time; listening to live Jazz and eating Mexican food with my brother. He lives out of state and it could only have been better if more family had been there.
This was parked out in front of the restaurant. Street legal and ready to go! The music was played by Grady Nichols. You can find out more about him here. http://www.gradynichols.com/ It was a lovely night to sit and listen to jazz.
I have been sewing quite a bit this week and my new fabric came yesterday. I can’t wait to show it to you.
I remember going to my Granny’s house for a week or two in the summers. Once a week we would gather (I say we, but it was mainly my mother and Granny) all the laundry in the house. Loading it into the car we would take it into town to the laundromat. It had a screen door that had a broken spring. It smelled clean like soap and heat like the driers that were stacked on one wall. There were all kinds of ladies at this laundromat. They would load all of the clothes into the washers and the last load would be my Grandpa’s overalls. He was a tractor mechanic and his overalls and work shirts would always go in their own washer with the Oxydol detergent. Then they would sit and wait for the washers to finish. There was usually a chance to drink a pop out of the machine in the corner. It was cold and sweet and very bubbly. Granny didn’t put her clothes into the dryer we would take them home to her house and hang them on the line. ALL the clothes on the line, even our underwear, though Granny would put them on one of the middle lines of the clothes line. As kids we would run through the cool wet laundry feeling it flap on our arms, but not too much as it would pull the clothes down.
My grandmothers would never let their clothespins stay on the clothes line. They were kept in a bag like one of these. They would bring the clothespins after their laundry day.
My other Grandma, we called her Gran, would also dry her clothes on the line but hers was an umbrella style clothes line and she could stand  in one place and hang all of her clothes. The queen sized sheets fit on the outside line and the socks on the inner lines closest to the middle pole. It turned around and she would hang and turn the line and keep hanging the clothes until the basket was empty.
When our children were little I had a clothes line and we hung our clothes to dry. It was a way of saving money. We had a clothes dryer for wet laundry days. It seemed that the kids created laundry for fun. If we didn’t do laundry; at least three loads every day. They now do their own laundry and it keeps that monster under better control!
Here are some things that I have learned recently that are helping my business and might help you. They are quick and easy to do. I have been trying to fix one thing a day and I feel a little overwhelmed with two online shops, twitter, facebook, Instagram, Â and the blog to take care of everyday.
If you remember this blogpost:Â http://www.chocolatedogstudio.com/2014/04/05/overwhelmed/ you will remember that one of the words was Automate and the other thing to do was to hire a virtual assistant. While I can’t hire a virtual assistant at this point in my business life I did sign up with HootSuite. It puts all of my social networking stats in one place and keeps me from hopping all over the internet. It also has some neat automated services that I am taking advantage of. You should take a look at it and see if there is anything there that will work for you.
The simple thing I did today was change the name on my Pinterest account to ChocolateDogStudio which makes it easier to find my shop. The other simple thing I am doing is to start a time log to see where I really am spending my time!
I wrote this about a month ago. Believe it or not everything that I was worried about has been handled. All of the things that I thought were worthy of worry are now solved, resolved or handled. Shall I share the outcome of each of these worries.
I am starting to push the panic button. In the next month we have a ton of things happening.
The college girl comes home with all of her belongings  She is home and everything is great!
Sr. recognition Sunday at church for our graduating senior Done and over!
High school graduation for our youngest son Graduated!
Our 26th wedding anniversary Celebrated and wonderful!
Memorial Day, a day which we now try to put flowers and remember those who have passed away and those who have served in the military. Done
I need to get a child ready for camp
send her to camp
I have two kids needing to find summer jobs They both found jobs on their own without my interference!
feeding all of the people that will be here this summer I have two extra cooks and meals are getting accomplished daily!
find out about my foot in the boot and what needs to be done. The boot is gone. I am mobile and taking up the rhythms of life again!
I guess I am discouraged by the busyness of life. I need to take time to remember that these busy times are sweet family time. We will once again all gather around the table and share stories, insights and food. It seems that my family places importance on food as it gathers us all together.
Yes, we do place importance on food as it is hard to get all of us together at any other time.
I hope you and your family find some sweet family time this summer!
I love perennials in my flower beds. These grow in the raised flower bed at the front of the house. I am transplanting an off shoot to the new flower bed.
Aren’t they bright and sunny. I can’t remember the name of them. We also have Russian Sage growing in this flower bed. The sage was planted in the middle and has migrated out to the front edge.
It has bright blue flowers that the bees love. It is tall and ferny and simply lovely and yes I cropped this photo so you can’t see the tree growing in the bed at the back. Here is a good shot of reality. It is the area around the corner from the front garden bed.
It is pretty wild and needs a lot of work. These are the new flowers that we added last week.
English daisies and Purple cone flower both of which we had at our last house. They seem to love hot summers and the so- so watering job that I do.
I have too many projects going right now and I feel really stretched thin on the creative side of things. I am in the process of adding some new to the shop and I feel really pretty overwhelmed and terribly forgetful. I am tending to skip around from project to project during the day and not seeming to accomplish much.
I guess I need a new challenge and there is one I am thinking about but I just can’t decide if I really want to participate. It is a daily listing challenge and I am wondering if it would be wise to try it. I would have to list something new in the shop everyday. Summer, has been a little crazy so far. We have three of the kids home. One is working a full time internship with regular working hours and the other is working almost full time hours at Arby’s. This means that he has crazy hours. So I am not sure about the listing challenge. The other challenge is a one hundred Granny Square block challenge. I am still thinking about this one. I have been tossing it around since we lived in Iowa, which is close to 2 years ago. The other challenge has to do with more scrap busting! I am still thinking about this one, but I know that it wouldn’t be wise to totally stop buying supplies like I did for the 100 items in 100 days challenge! Â http://www.chocolatedogstudio.com/2014/01/17/1-thing-for-100-days-challenge/
We are almost to summer break. I can’t wait. I tend to wake up and sew first thing in the morning. I love working early in the morning. My mind is clearer and I feel more ready to tackle the harder projects. So, my schedule will be changing. There are several things that I want to do this summer.
Re-arrange the studio
The kids are switching rooms as one room is tiny and the other much larger. So the kid going to college will get the tiny room/office and the one still in high school will get the larger room.
Go through the books and get rid of home school curriculum that we will no longer need.
Make cushion covers for our large black couch. Someone, who was on pain meds… (me) sat down with scissors in her back pocket and did some bad things to the somewhat leather upholstery
I can’t decide which one to do since I like both. I think I like the denim one the most. It is in the den and would be super comfortable to have it covered in denim.
I couldn’t wait and started cleaning today. I am so unorganized in my studio that I can’t bear to work in there any more. ( I will post all kinds of ideas later!)
Remember the stars from yesterday. They were the beginnings of the stars.
Here are some of the stars! I had great fun putting fabric together. I even made some Doctor Who inspired Christmas ornament stars by using Tardis fabric. If I dig a little deeper into the scrap fabric I might be able to make some with Daleks too!
Yesterday it was a rainy Monday. I sent two kids off to town. One to apply for a job and the other to drive him there and do some errands. It has been a busy day already with a trip for two to the orthodontist and then a trip to the bank to open a checking account for one of the kids.
I spent time yesterday morning sewing some new bibs and then I spent a little time crocheting this.
I love the bright red lady bugs. and the red crochet cotton just goes so  nicely. We will see how it looks when I am done. I am trying something new for the shop. I think the fabric and cotton thread go so nicely together.
