Brand New Year with Brand New Endeavors Posted on January 4th, 2012
Our family is starting 2012 with some exciting new adventures – art, designing, sewing, upholstery and essential oils to name a few.
Breezy is busy creating art, and it is always delightful to peak over her shoulder to see what is appearing on the paper. Emily Rose is juggling several different web design and photography projects — I can hear her fingers flying over the keyboard even now. Besides Rob’s regular work schedule, he has an antique car upholstery job to work on. Me, well, I am tweaking our menus to a more “normal” healthy diet. After going gluten-free 2 years ago and then last year going completely grain free, we are working back to more familiar flavors within a healthy, gluten-free diet. What I like to call the “new normal”.
This past November the girls and I started a new embroidery pattern business. It is a complete joy to work on together as a family. Breezy and Emily Rose both put their creative touches on the designs and then I get to stitch up the patterns and be the “textile manager”. Rob helps with delivery and is our biggest encourager. Clementine Pattern Co. was named after a great-great grandmother (and the fact that we all love the name Clementine helped, too). We will be adding more patterns throughout the year to the Etsy shop and hope to include tutorials & videos on the main website, ClementinePatterns.com. The fact that I love to embroider makes this almost too good to be true!
Something else that we are adding to our family this is year is using Young Living Essential Oils. After reading Stacy McDonald’s blog, The Common Scents Mom, and having actually used some that we were given, we were ready to try some more. So far, we are having wonderful results with the oils that we have been using – more about that in future posts. Stacy posted a great Natural First Aid Wall Chart that shows how she is incorporating essential oils in her family and getting rid of several over-the-counter medications. I already printed and hung up my copy so the whole family can see how to use the oils. We are all very excited to use more natural products and to get the great health benefits of the oils.
We did sign up to be a wholesale distributors of Young Living Essential Oils so that we could get better prices. If you are interested in placing an order through our account, our customer # is 1285966.
Joy to the World Posted on December 24th, 2011
May you and your family rejoice in the Lord. And may His steadfast love be ever a reminder of His great mercy.
Joy to the world! the Lord is come!
Let earth receive her King;
Let every heart prepare him room,
And heav’n and nature sing.
Joy to the earth! the Savior reigns!
Let men their songs employ,
While fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains,
Repeat the sounding joy.
No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make his blessings flow
Far as the curse is found.
He rules the world with truth and grace,
And makes the nations prove
The glories of his righteousness,
And wonders of his love.
-Isaac Watts
Tutorial: How to Make a Nine-Patch Pillow Posted on August 19th, 2011
Spending time with our daughters while teaching them to sew (or learning along side them) is so rewarding. First of all you get the opportunity to spend that important time together, second you are teaching them a skill that they can use their entire life, third you teaching more than sewing you are teaching perseverance, patience, diligence, etc. Fourthly, you are helping them to learn to be creative!
Join me over at Raising Homemakers today for a tutorial on making one of my daughters’ favorite projects when they were little.
Simple Sewing Tutorial: How to Make a Pillow Case Posted on April 7th, 2011
Have you been sewing with your daughters? It is a skill that you and your daughters will be blessed by having. So get out those sewing machines and join me over at Raising Homemakers today for my simple pillow case tutorial.
Little Bag Sewing Tutorial Posted on February 22nd, 2011
Several years ago my oldest daughter, Breezy, created a little bag that was so adorable that I wanted to make some of my own. This little bag tutorial is based off of her design. You can join me over at Raising Homemakers where I share the tutorial.
Tutorial: Standing Recipe Holder Posted on September 13th, 2010
This year I decided to change the way I stored my recipes. I wanted something that was easy to read, standing up and it needed to be cute! Hop on over to Raising Homemakers today to see my tutorial on making my standing recipe holder.
Beginning Hand Sewing Posted on August 10th, 2010
I have a post over on Raising Homemakers today on beginning hand sewing. It will also explain my odd looking embroidery in the picture.
Handiwork Posted on April 23rd, 2008
One year for Christmas, I wanted to make my mother a cross stitch picture. I found just the right pattern, it was the words of Amazing Grace with a lot of delicate border work and it was going to take quite a bit of time to make.
I gathered all the different colored threads and material that I would need for it, and with much anticipation, I sat down to begin working on it. All of a sudden, both girls were on either side of me leaning over the material watching me work with thread and needle. Now they had seen me do different projects before, but for some reason, this project fascinated them. They were 5 and 3 and wanted to be very involved in it.
The problem was, this was for a Christmas present and I didn’t have a lot of time to do it in. Every time I picked up the cross stitch, the girls were right there wanting to “help” make it. I let them do a couple of stitches, thinking that it would satisfy them, but it did not. They just wanted to do it again. After a few days of this, I realized something had to be done.
I decided I would make them their own little sewing boxes and they could sew every time that I sewed. I found a couple of shoe boxes and rummaged around in my sewing supplies for items to fill them with. Things like buttons, felt, ribbons, embroidery thread, scrap material, burlap, yarn, scissors, sewing needles, straight pins, spool of thread, etc., all went into the boxes.
So the next time I sat down to work on the cross stitch and the girls were leaning over my work, I told them I had a surprise for them. I pulled out the boxes and presented them with their own little work baskets. I wish I had thought to take pictures. It was precious. They were so excited to have their own sewing boxes, they didn’t care that it was a shoe box or that everything I put in there were scraps and leftovers. It was their own and they loved them.
I put my cross stitch away for awhile and we examined their boxes together and talked about all the different things they could do and make. There wasn’t any planned thing for them to make, I just wanted them to play around with the needles and thread and see what they could come up with. I pulled back out my cross stitch and the girls sat on the floor by my feet and we all happily sewed.
They made all sorts of little things. They sewed little pictures onto the felt, sewed buttons all over little pieces of material and made little pouches. It was so fun to see them work on little projects with no set plan, just their imaginations. The stitches were all different sizes and directions, but they were still so proud of the things they made and so was I. There was the usual little dramatic scenes when the thread tangled or got knotted up, but we just stopped what we were doing and tried to fix it the best we could. I showed them when my thread would get tangled or knotted so they would see that it happened to me too. I was able to get the cross stitch done in time for Christmas and the girls started a lifelong love of working with their hands.
When we started to officially homeschool, anytime I read aloud to the girls, I would have them quietly work on something with their hands. They could sew or draw, later adding in crocheting or knitting, whatever they wanted to work on, sometimes they just made things with legos, just as long as they were working on something with their hands while I read. Their skills have improved dramatically with time and they don’t always need to have a pattern to come up with what they have in their minds.
