Yup, that’s our pin on page 8 of the new September 2011 Creative Knitting Magazine!
They contacted us a few months ago to send them our Celtic Double Swirls and Curls Aluminum Shawl Pin / Hair Pin to be included in their article on closures. I said, hell yeah!- well, in a more business like way. So far it has just been sent out to subscribers and I don’t think it is in the newstands and stores yet. But we are getting LOTS of orders.
It’s become a tradition to drag the kids down to the 4th of July parade in Corvallis every year.Unfortunately I got the time wrong. I thought it started at 10 which I swear is what the local paper’s website said but it actually started at 10:30. So when we arrived there were very few people and I was appalled at the lack of enthusiasm in this town. We had an extra half hour to bore the kids.
Here is some of the entertainment the kids came up with.
Finally the parade arrived.
Henry is pensive.
The main draw for Max is gathering the gutter candy that they throw to the kids.
They had inflatable bouncy entertainment for the kids. Max’s approach to the wrecking ball game is to hunker down.
Where’s Nick? Hiding in the shade.Can you find him?
Later in the evening we joined our friends Jeremy and Jillian and their kids Ethan and Olivia for some good ol’ lame Oregon fireworks.
This is the moving flaming tank before it shot under our car and got stuck shooting flames towards the gas tank. It was a terrifying moment as we wondered if the car would blow up with us stupidly standing next to it. It burned out and all was fine.
Good times!
School has been out for 2 weeks. T Ball Mom continues for a couple of more weeks..
We’ve started swimming lessons again. Max finally overcame his fear to jump off the diving platform without a foam noodle.
My honeysuckle is blooming on the trellis I built many years ago back before kids when I had time for stuff like that and no money to just buy one.It is right outside the window I work at in the dining room and the smell is heavenly. Pay no attention to the pile of kids toys as you look through the gate.
Honeysuckle
The daylillies have started blooming.
The cherries are getting closer to ripening.
Just opened a fresh new roll of brass wire.
Oh and how could I forget the most important happening so far of the summer. We just took the kids to the park with their bikes and Henry rode for the first time without training wheels. It is the sad life of the country kid that lives on the steep gravel rode that he is the last of his friends to learn how to ride a 2 wheeler. Max will need at least one more try but is close. Nick and I are the exhausted old parents in their mid forties trying to hold off the heart attack while running alongside the kids trying to ride. Mission partly accomplished.
I just added a new little sterling silver pin to our shop to add to the tiny lace pins available.
I love that they are so small and light weight that I don’t need to charge a lot for them even though they are made of silver.
I also had a little time to take new pictures of these old earrings.
My very old and quirky Sony Cybershot camera is starting to give me a hard time so experimented using our Nikon Coolpix. I think they came out just as good as the old camera. I had my favorite weather conditions to work with- overcast.
We are having a slow cool start to summer- and I like it!
The kids had their last day of school this week. Max’s class had the end of year Kindergarten picnic at the park.
He also started T Ball
Posing for the team pictures. It’s pretty hilarious watching a bunch of 5 and 6 year old swarm after the ball in the field, occasionally breaking down in tears fighting over it. Then standing around confused not knowing what to do once they get the ball and randomly throwing it to another kid who is usually not even paying attention while the runner runs in the wrong direction. My hats off to the awesome team coach Candy who has 5 kids of her own and took this process of herding cats on.
One of my favorite random flowers that pops up in my unmanaged front yard.The Foxglove.
This boring photo of our road in front of our driveway is of interest only because today they came and oiled it. It is a gravel unpaved road that despite our taxes the county has decided isn’t worthy of paving or managing much so we have to pay to get it oiled. If we don’t like we didn’t last year then we have to inhale dust all summer long.
On a personal note I have been weepy with joy today (which has nothing to do with my typical perimenopausal hormone fluctuations) because I got the amazing news this morning that a dear friend who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer this past Christmas is in full remission with no detectable cancer in her. She is completing a new chemo treatment and has been doing dietary, exercise, qigong and meditation as well. Her doctor said he had never had a patient respond completely like this. The recent study of the drug had only 1 patient out of 171 have a complete response like this (.6%). She is the second.
I have to admit,in case you haven’t noticed, I am prone towards cynicism and was not optimistic about my friend’s future given the statistics on pancreatic cancer. But she has blown me away. I’m going to stop here before I put some sort of crazy jinx on things inadvertently according to the whims of the universe. I’m just saying something especially really good happened. Yay!
I got to be a chaperone on Max’s kindergarten trip to “Wings of Wonder “ on Independence Oregon.
The display greenhouse was aflutter with tons of beautiful butterflies. It kind of freaked one of the kids out to have these creatures flying around all over and landing on them sometimes but most of them loved it.
They did a great teaching the kids about butterflies although some of it went way over their little twitchy kindergarten heads.
The kids were great and adorable. One of the little boys in my group was very affectionate and clingy and insisted on holding my hand and petting me most of the time. He whispered to me “I want to marry you.” Max told him I was already married. He said he didn’t care. I was flattered until the teacher’s assistant told me he’s just like that.
It’s hard to believe it’s been 5 years since we first opened our shop on Etsy!
Nick says he already knew about Etsy and had been thinking about it but his cousin–in-law Aimee of Pancake and Lulu was the first person I can recall telling me about it and how she had just opened up her shop and we should too. We had a website that never really got much traffic. We actually still have the site as our Nicholas and Felice homepage that has links to our blogs and other stuff but it links to our Etsy shop for our jewelry.
To think that I didn’t even know what a shawl pin was back then! Things started out slowly but picked up a lot by the week before Christmas that first year on Etsy. It’s been a wonderful ride so far. According to the Craft Count top seller list we are the 8th top seller on Etsy for jewelry! Of course our numbers are so high partly because we have been doing this for 5 years and have been able to accumulate all those sales numbers.We are about to reach our 12,000th sale on Etsy very soon- knock on wood and every other good luck charm and juju totem necessary to keep the good luck going! Of course I never take any of our success for granted and am convinced each day that this could be the end and I’ll need to start applying for jobs at McDonalds any day. Every sale still makes me happy and temporarily relieved.
So THANK YOU ETSY and all our wonderful customers and friends!
Well so far just one but there will be more coming. I got a special request from a customer for little sterling silver pins that would work well for lacy fingering weight shawls. I already make the Little Dragonfly pin.
This is the Little Double Crossed Loops Sterling Silver Shawl Pin or Brooch
Stay tuned for more….
On Wednesday Henry’s second grade class had a special Mother’s Day Tea . They all painted self portraits to share. This is Henry’s.
Their teacher got a grant to buy guitars for the class and she has been teaching them how to play. As you can imagine it was super adorable.
They sang songs and memorized poems. I thought I was the only sap tearing up and holding back the sobs. Turns out I wasn’t.
Henry and me.
Max lost his first baby tooth yesterday. He lost the one right next to it a couple of hours later. He now speaks really funny.
Here’s my attempt to imbed a video of the kids singing that had me all verklempt.
We got a special request from a customer to make the Coda Symbol as a pendant. She has a very musical family and they named their son “Coda”. She was very excited when we said we could do it and now she has the perfect Father’s Day present for her husband.
The coda symbol is used in musical notation as a navigation marker.
We also made the Dal Segno Music Symbol Sterling Silver Stamped Pendant - Keepsake for Musicians
It is used in musical notation as a navigation marker.
From Italian for "from the sign," D.S. appears in sheet music and instructs a musician to repeat a passage starting from the sign shown at right, sometimes called the "segno" in English.
And of course you have to have the earrings-
and
