Lace and Science

I can't believe it's already Friday again. These short holiday weeks play havoc on my need for structure, but the week wasn't so bad. Doing the giveaway this week boosted my mood and I'm fairly certain the exposure is also the reason I finally got a few days of steady sales. I'm not naive enough to think that the slowness is completely behind me, but I feel better and I've gotten some good work done as well.

After I finished some lovely colorful earrings yesterday I got back to  he white thread. This project really is slow going, but hopefully it will be worth it in the end. For immediate satisfaction, I keep getting some great lace photos with my phone of all things. I Imagine if I was a better photographer I could sell things like this...I'm not though, so they'll just make my blog prettier.

I'm currently halfway through the second round of the last piece and the next round goes very quickly so I'm hoping I'll have this done by Monday. The one thing that will stand in my way is that we're suppose to be moving my mother into her house this weekend. If you were wondering was all the family drama recently had been about, it was all about her buying a house and absolutely nothing going right and money issues and her crazy current landlord, so I'm not certain even this weekend will be on track. It's one of those, 'I'll believe it when I see it,' sort of things.

In other news, after a failed science build in a lesson on electricity, I purchased a circuit making kit for the kids so we could do it again correctly without worrying about which components might be to blame for it not working. It arrived yesterday late in the afternoon and the kids immediately had to get building. It was really neat to see them both excited even though it was technically just the oldest that needs to play with it. It even managed to pull them away from Mine Craft, the game that has stolen their free time away. I just thought you might like to see the two legged kids after all the cat pictures.

Well, here's to a stress free and productive weekend...I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Doctor Mom

The chaos at my house has grown considerably in the last day as the second child gets sick and the first has developed an earache that she doesn't understand. Taking care of sick children is so very all encompassing and exhausting. The guilt over not being able to make it all just go away is the worst of all. I feel like I should have some sort of magic parent wand that fixes everything, but alas there is no such wand and all the reassurance in the world does not take the pain away. I suppose I should stop beating myself up over it, but since the kids are so young I know that this is just the beginning of many more things I can't fix and I feel a little helpless.

I did finish my most recent custom order yesterday. It was the second scarf tatted in my Art Deco pattern. This time around it worked up much faster since I knew where I was going with it when I started. The yarn was a hand dyed merino wool from knitmommy.etsy.com. It's a much richer brown than my pictures reveal. I really like giving people the option of picking their own yarn to make the scarfs with. Plus, it means I'm not spending days making a scarf in colors than may or may not appeal to anyone but me.

I got a few more ideas for projects by looking at my google analytics for the blog yesterday. Every time a search brings people to the blog, I get to see what it was they were searching for and it has certainly given me some interesting ideas over the last few months. Of course, I'm otherwise occupied with sick children so it may be a while before any of them come to fruition, but it's nice to add more things to that imaginary project list. Back to the kids now, I hope they feel better soon!

Somebody Has A Case Of The Mondays

Yep, it's gonna be one of those days. The day hasn't even begun, but I have little hope that it will turn out better that it started. The day started with my official monthly household job, bill paying. In the age of Internet bill paying, this is a task easily completed although I downplay that fact it ensure that I am properly appreciated for the task. This morning however, it was a painful reminder of how lax we've been with spending lately. I've been a champ at not buying new supplies or extraneous etsy shopping, but every time we see a new widget for the kids we buy it without a second thought.

We went to see Wall-E this weekend, wonderful film, then we proceeded to buy all the merchandise we could find. You could bury the children in the amount of toys they now own, seriously it's like the big baby in Spirited Away. I know we spend too much and yet I we continue to do it. We try to save money on ridiculous stuff like not buying bottled water or sodas, but we don't seem to have a problem with spending an insane amount on toys. Oh well, I got the morning bills reality check and hopefully we'll stay on track now.

On an etsy note, I reached one of my three goals over the weekend. I have now exceeded 1500 hearts. I have just two more sales until I reach 300 and four more feedback need to be left before I reach 400. These are just mind boggling numbers to me, it seems like just yesterday I was excited about 100 hearts and 10 sales. I was also flabergasted at the number of treasuries my pieces appeared in over the weekend. I was in a total of 6 of them and 5 were in the main treasury. I'm still in four this morning, of course that does not undo my Monday blah, but it helps a little. It seems I might be getting a little more notice lately. Here's hoping that all these trends continue!