Little by little

This week I registered my business name, Davis Custom Design, and I opened a business account at our bank.  It now feels official to me, and I can’t be happier. I have slowed down on the orders but it has given me a chance to catch up on the business part. And making things for my family and occasionally rarely me.

I hate coins.  I hate the sound they making jingling around, I hate how they weigh my purse down, I hate how it takes so long to find the right coin you need and because of all these reasons I regularly clear the change out of my purse.  My husband usually takes the quarters, dimes, and nickels for work; and my girls do little errands for me for the pennies.  Which I will find thrown all over the house a few hours later, so I have decided to stop that and start saving them to deposit into my new business account.

Now normally I would be telling myself “I need some kind of change holder” and take off to the store to see what I could find.  But this year I have decided I need to stop that and shop around my house first, if I can’t find anything then I go shopping.  I didn’t have to shop long at the house though before I found this pretty vase.  I kept it when my husband got me that beautiful orchid that I just had to have, and then killed it by forgetting to water it.  *sad face*  I figured the size was perfect because who wants to be behind the crazy lady depositing the ton of change?  Not me!  I figured more frequent, brief trips to the bank would be better.

It seemed so plain to me though.  I wanted to add a little saying, but didn’t want the famous “a penny saved is a penny earned”.  So I went to trusty Google and searched for quotes, I found this one that I love.  So then I went to my scrap vinyl and found this perfect little piece that was the exact size that I needed.  I dressed up the quote a little bit with the Samantha font, the only font I have ever paid for.  But, don’t tell hubby!!  And this is the new change holder.  It gets robbed quite a bit from the hubby and kids but any change I find goes in there so it is more than just pennies.

“little by little a little becomes a lot”  I love how cute it turned out and it looks so good on my desk.

Winner #2’s order

When I had the drawing winner number two was so excited! She loved the glasses so much that she even ordered this sign. She collects Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls. Her guest room is decorated with them with special made pillows for the bed. She told me she had been wanting something on the walls for a while but couldn’t find anything she liked. She wanted something that would go with the pillows which said “Raggedy Treasures” and she loved the font on her glasses. I did some playing around with her requests and came up with this. She instantly fell in love and I think I have a new loyal customer!

There’s no crying in…

I have officially done it! I decided that I need to do what I can to help my family out financially and since I did so well right before Christmas I decided to try crafting full time. I’m keeping busy with a two to three orders a week, I think that is pretty good since I just started this.
I decided to make my personal card page on Facebook my business page. My personal card page only had like 20 likes on it (dedicated friends and family), I knew to make this work I was going to have to get myself out there more.
So I decided to do a drawing. Once I hit 100 likes I would draw a winner. Big step since I needed 80 more likes! It took weeks and I was starting to feel like a nag begging everyone to share and like my page. But then I hit about 75 likes and I was getting excited! This was actually working. Orders were starting to come in and people were telling their friends about me. I think the greatest thing was when a new customer said “I just love how you are a mom too and you understand” this was after we had to cut 2 phone calls short after screaming fighting kids in the background wouldn’t cooperate. Surprisingly it wasn’t my kids, but I have been there many times and understood. So finally after the kids were all in bed we had phone call #3 and got all the details of her ordered figured out. I when I delivered her ordered she was so excited and happy with it. I love to see that on peoples face, and to know I made it happen is a better high then any of the drugs out there. Actually I wouldn’t know I’m just guessing.
But anyway I’m getting way off topic.
It was a slow start with the likes.  But I was up to around 80 when my niece finally liked my page and found out about the drawing.  I would say she must have been living under a rock but she was just really busy with the state basketball tournament. But once my niece got on board there was no stopping her, it was like she was on the court and all business!  Within an hour she had 10 friends like my page!! And within days the page hit 100!!!

She was doing all this in hopes of my fixing the drawing to where she was a winner.  I got this from her constant, “I better win Aunt Stac” lines she dropping.  I wanted this to be fair though but she was such a big help that she needed something.  So I told her since she was such a big help that I would make her something special.

She is the sporty one; volleyball, basketball, softball, and baseball are all her sports.  She is very competitive and I love watching her attitude completely change once she hits that court or field.

I saw this as a shirt on Pinterest and right away I knew I had to make a sign for my niece!  Not because it is a famous line in a movie that she loves, but because I can seriously see her saying this to someone.

I wish I had a picture of her face once I gave it to her.  Priceless!

Happy Valentine’s Day!

I’ve been super busy this week and didn’t get a blog post wrote up so instead I’m going to post the bottles I made for my daughter’s second grade class.

 

 

And for her teacher

 

Hope everyone has (had) a great day!!

Bathroom Rules

I have been seeing so many of the “bathroom rules” signs lately.  I think they are really cute but none had the sayings that really fit our bathroom.  Since I made a towel rack for our bathroom I decided that I would just make our own bathroom rules sign.  There were lots of little sayings from other signs I seen that I liked, they never seemed to be on the same sign though.  And another problem I was running into was that I was using a scrap piece of wood and only had a 12 x 9 area to work with.  I wanted to remind my girls to wipe their butts, flush the potty and wash their hands.  But for the adults and guest I wanted it not to so instructive.  Since I had limited space anyway I thought the best way to that that was to simply put “wipe, flush, wash”, I wanted this to be the main focus so I put it right in the middle.   One thing that drives me crazy about our bathroom is that I seem to be the only one that sees the empty toilet paper roll and hand soap bottle, I must be the only one who knows where they are stored because no one ever does this.  And I had two rules that mainly pertain to my teenage son; if it stinks, spray it and put the seat down.  Does anyone else just hate going to the bathroom after your teenage son?   And with seven people using one bathroom “be neat and tidy” just seems to be a must for a rule.

We had no hand towel holder, apparently when my husband and his brother were young it somehow got ripped off the wall and never was replaced.  It’s still a mystery of who did it and they still blame each other.  But the hand towel just gets thrown on the sink, sometimes in the sink which causes for a useless hand towel.  The bath towel rack gave me an idea, turn the rules sign into a hand towel rack.  So for the last rule I added “hang up your towel” as a reminder to hang up the hand towel.   And to be polite I added a thank you at the bottom of the sign.

After a couple weeks of being up no one refills it if it’s empty still.  But the other rules seem to be helping…a little.

Fresh Towels

Living with my husband’s parents has it challenges. For instance, his brother lives her also. Right before Christmas his girlfriend moved in also. The bathroom situation is the toughest challenge. There are seven people that use one bathroom, his parents have their own. Towels get washed pretty much daily but we have so many that the hooded towels the girls love always seem to get lost. I added some command hooks to the back of our bedroom door to hang them their but we also have a coat rack there and with all the things hanging on it and then the towels on the door when it’s open has caused our door to only be able to open about three fourths of the way. Not a problem until you are coming in from the store and you have your hands full and the door pretty well comes back and hits you in the face. Yes it has happened to me once, or a few times. I keep saying that I’m going to make another coat rack that is longer and maybe even two so that one is hanging higher and one lower. It hasn’t happened yet but that idea gave me a possible solution for the towels for the bathroom. A towel rack!

Right before our family came in from New York for Christmas my mother-in-law repainted and wallpapered our bathroom. She’s one of those that has to constantly be doing something, so the hunting/deer theme is out and the country bath theme is in. So I searched for country bath things online and what I found I didn’t really like. A lot of it was signs with old time prices of bath houses, which was fine but I didn’t really need all the prices of hot water, soap, and extras. I took the concept though and made a “Country Bath, fresh towels 50 cents” sign. I might be priced a little high on my fresh towels for the old bath house days, but it sounds reasonable for these days.  I added the stars with my original plan of the hooks going in the middle of those, one hook for each child. But when I gave it to my hubby to put the hooks on he put them lower and added two more hooks. I think it looks awesome though. Sometimes it’s the little unexpected changes that help something. I really love this and it seems to be a hit with everyone, the hooks always have towels on them.

Scrap wood signs

I have been sick for the past week.  I think I have the flu 😦  .  I have an appointment with my doctor tomorrow morning so hopefully she will give me something to make me feel better.

There was an afternoon when I thought I was feeling better.  I thought I was getting over this, but then I woke up the next day and felt horrible again.  But in that brief afternoon the kids and I started cleaning up the basement.  I found some 1 x 2 wood that had been cut for something that never seemed to happen.  The ones that was all the same length I put together to make a bigger sign sometime.  But there were two left.  I decided I would make single signs out of those.

The first one I made a dark blue painted layer.  I then cut out the saying on my silhouette and put it on that and then did a white layer and peeled up the letters.  And because I love distressing so much, I just couldn’t help myself so I distressed it a little so that the blue underneath would show through just a little.

My cousin is a LPN, she spent her whole life working hard and is so close to getting her RN license.  It really shocked me when she fell in love with a farmer, and loves farm life.  She’s always been one of those “city girls” growing up.  Her life now consists of raising her three children, chickens, cows, horses, and a pretty big vegetable garden in the summer.  She gets just as excited telling stories of how many eggs her chickens laid as she does about some trauma patient that came in the ER with a limb barely hanging on.  I’m not much for her nursing stories so I would pick the egg laying chicken stories any day!  She was my inspiration for this sign, and it will probably end up being a gift for her because it just screams her name to me.

I did the same PVPP (paint, vinyl, paint peel) method on this one.  But on the top coat I didn’t brush on all the way, I made sure I got the letters good but wanted that old worn look.  Once the top coat was on I took a damp cloth and rubbed the paint away in some spots, I had to be careful because this takes off quite a bit of paint.  So I had to rub softly to get the effect I was going for.  In others I wanted a softer rubbed off look so I did the same thing with dry cloth.  I really like the black and cream colors of this sign.  My husband then drilled two holes for me and I added a piece of twine so she can hang it.  I have to admit I’m pretty in love with this sign but I think she will love it even more.

Hidden treasures

For Christmas my hubby gave me a gift card to my favorite craft store, coincidentally his parents did also, I wonder how they knew.  😉  My husband made this even sweeter though by offering to keep the kids while I went, a trip shopping with no kids!?!  This hardly ever happens so I jumped on it.  I rarely get a break from the baby.  She is so attached to me that no one likes to keep her.

One of the things I wanted to look for was something different I could put scrap paper in.  I had it in a file container and files for every color.  This seemed like the idea storage solution but I found it kept my scraps put up and forgotten.  I added to it all the time but never got into to use anything so it pretty much just took up space on my desk.  I found an awesome wire container that looks old, not sure why I love the old look so much but I do.   I couldn’t wait to get home and switch out my paper!  My girls liked this too because they got all kinds of scraps to play with.  And I found paper that I didn’t even know I had!  I seriously found paper that I couldn’t believe I wasn’t making cards out of.

Since my New Year resolution is to send a card to everyone I have written down on my calendar on their special days, I thought it would be a good idea to restock my cards.   Lately I have been creating other things more than cards so my stock is pretty non-existent.   And I had found the perfect paper, well 3, these were already cut and I honestly do not know where they came from!  I’m thinking they were probably donated to me by some wonderful person.

I wanted to attach some embellishments and I had the perfect thing in mind.  Over the summer my friend and I had went to a church sale, and I had found these clip on earrings.  My friend thought I had lost my mind at first for buying them, until I told her I had no intention of wearing them but putting them on cards.  With some minor adjustments they were easily attached to the cards.  I only had two of these though, which worked out well since I wanted each one to be different.

So I went into my pretty bowl of things with no home and found a hello tag that was saved from another card as well as an antique looking button leftover from my brother’s wedding invitations.

Since I was adding the hello tag under the button that left the darker strip open and plain so I attached some pearls to it.  I then attached it onto a Kraft cardstock base.  And if you look closely to the background, that is my new container for my papers.  🙂

Next I moved onto the card that had the medallions on them.  I had to make them different somehow, since I wanted to keep these cards simple I decided the best way to do that was with a different card base.  So I went with an elegant looking ivory card base with this one, I also took a scrap piece of the card stock to make a banner for the sentiment.  I hand stamped the “just for you” onto this and added a little distressing ink around the edges.  I had to make the banner long enough for the sentiment but that made it cover the other part of the card.  So I curled it a little to make sure nothing was overshadowing anything else on the card.

That left the other card with the medallion.  I went with a “happy birthday” hand stamped sentiment for this one.  I also took some distress ink to it, for some reason the photo isn’t showing that too well, it looks like the paper is just wet.  I need to work on my photography skills too in this New Year.

I love how pretty these cards turned out, I also can’t believe that I had them hidden in my stock and didn’t know it.

“When it rains, it pours”

They say “when it rains it pours”. I’ve heard my mother say it a lot throughout my life. I have had bad luck raining down on me between my car and the dreaded discovery of bed bugs. You can read all about them in my previous two post. Last week it started to pour. My husband’s car has needed some work done for a while, he has an Expedition that loves to drink the fuel! He slowly took over my car saying it’s cheaper on gas and he will get his fixed soon. Well once we found out about my car, soon became now. So we took it to the shop with the long list of complaints of what was wrong with it. Thursday we found that his car is going to cost more to fix it then we could ever afford. At this point it would be easier to list what isn’t wrong with it then try and list what is, there is so much. It basically just needs to be rebuilt, which we would never be able to do.

 
They say that you are not given anything you can’t handle. But I don’t have the best history when it comes to handling things. I get embarrassed and try to cover up and hide everything. I push my feelings down and don’t talk about them until eventually I blow. But the past few weeks has had me so down that I needed to talk to someone, and to do that I had to be honest and open.

 
My best friend is great, I love her to death, but I always feel myself not being completely honest with her over embarrassing things. A couple years ago my husband was really sick, we went to the emergency room twice because of this. The second time he was diagnosed with diabetes. Doctors, medicine, and testing supplies quickly drained our savings account, rent was due as well as his refills on medicine one would have to wait. I can’t live without him though. We got his medicine and moved in with his parents. This was a very humiliating moment for me that we were not able to provide for our family. I hid it from everyone, including my best friend, for months. When someone asked if they could come over, I would suggest meeting for lunch. My close family was the only ones who knew. It took me about 3 months before I told my friend, did she judge me? No, I had no reason to keep it from her other than me being embarrassed about it. We are still here, and I can say it works out great. His parents never make us feel like a burden to them. On April fool’s day my husband teased his mom we were moving out and she started crying. Everyone works together and it really is awesome, surprisingly.

 
We started saving up again. This is taking a lot longer than before because we still have hospital and doctor bills, I have had a hysterectomy since then also, as well as the medicine and testing supplies my husband constantly needs. But then the cars happened and basically we have spent our savings, as well as our cell phone bill money, on two vehicles. Only to find out that those vehicles are not worth fixing. So now we have no savings, our cell phones have been shut off, we have no vehicle, and our credit is horrible. October has been horrible for us. And Christmas isn’t too far away.

 
Normally I would be horrified and too embarrassed to tell anyone the truth about anything, I would try to hide everything as long as possible. But this is a lot! I needed someone I could talk to about it. I always have my mom but when talking with her I usually get a lecture about what I should have done differently. She acts as if I can look into the future and see what is going to happen and then I do the opposite of what I should. “You should have paid your cell phone bill before taking the car to the shop” she said. “Mom, we have no car and (hubby) has to go to work, how was I supposed to know that spending all that money would have been a waste?” Don’t get me wrong, I love her and she is a great mom, but we have these kind of conversations when something comes up.

 
My friend on the other hand has been wonderful. I have been able to dump all this on her and she helps me talk through it and feel a little better about the situation. So even though the bad luck has poured in, I feel like I have grown from it. I have accepted it and let it out in the open, and that feels great!

I’m still crafting but it is still in designing stage.  I will post when I get something done.

Boo to you…

My husband and I went shopping with his mother last night, they are so excited for Halloween.  My main goal of the shopping trip, hitting up Hobby Lobby.  We had a late start because the kids were going to stay with my parents, but was attending a wedding first.  But I checked online for the hours of the stores, Halloween store was closing at 8:30 and Hobby Lobby at 9:00.  So we headed to the Halloween store first, not too much was out yet so it was a little disappointing.   Then we headed over to Hobby Lobby it was 7:50, so I would have plenty of time to spend a lot of money, right?  No, the hours on the door said they close at 8, and they didn’t look happy that we were coming in.  So a mad dash to the crafting section for a new mat for my silhouette and trying to look around for something, anything that would make a pretty card.  I see now why game show contestants just kind of freeze when playing a timed game.  I seemed to going back and forth and not getting nothing.  They called over the intercom and started shutting off some of the lights, game over.  I did walk away with the mats I needed though.

We then headed to Wal-Mart, because they are open 24 hours a day.  And we didn’t just limit ourselves to one, we hit both of the stores that are in town.  And I have a confession, I have a sticker addiction.  I try to stay away from the cards you stick some stickers on and call it a day.  But, there are some awesome stickers out there that no matter how much I stamp, cut, or emboss, I just wouldn’t be able to make.  So probably my cheapest trip to Wal-Mart ever!  Well I picked up these and while most are really awesome, some I picked up for the kids.

I liked the haunted house, so I thought I would begin with that one.  I decided on a grey card base and envelope, I wanted a dark, spooky feeling without going with black.  I then went through my Halloween stash for a background, again I wanted something dark and spooky, but not black.  I also had to make sure I didn’t make it too dark for the house to stand out or pick one that would have the card with too much going on.  Once I got my background I took some pumice stone distress ink to it, to give it that dark feel I was going for.  Because this is a bigger card then I am used to, and I make my own card base I had to make this card front and back and then glue them together.  I needed something to hide the seam and what better item then a ribbon.  I used a black sheer ribbon that I had with a hint of green in it.  I was going to put the house on a glitter background, like the saying but found it took too much away from the background.  So I placed the house right on the background.  I added a sentiment with a glitter background.  I crumbled it, tore it, and took some more distress ink to it before attaching it to the card.  And I decided I had a lot on one side and not really anything on the other so I added a bat sticker, he seems pretty happy there.

And because I have been told the inside always needs a little surprise…

I stamped another little haunted house.