I worked on some monsters yesterday. It was a good activity for the cold, blustery, rainy weather.


This one is on it’s way to Pengiun Publishing in Australia, where her pattern is going to be included in a book about softies. How cool is that? I’m pretty excited. I also recently got an e-mail asking me to apply to be in a new book from Lark Publishing about beads and quilts. I better get working on that this week! You know what is the best part about participating in these sorts of projects? Free books, of course! I’m really looking forward to seeing the Softies book.

I also have a blue monster and a green monster nearly complete, and I’ll be putting them in the shop, hopefully by the weekend.

Here you can see that the chickens are hoping the fuzzy pink thing is some new kind of food for them:


Poor chucks spent the day under the porch yesterday, it was raining so hard. I think we have a second layer now, though. I got two eggs yesterday, one was sort of pointy and blotchy, which makes me think someone laid their first egg! I just ordered 100 egg cartons, so they better all get to work soon.

I added Lou to the shop today.

Lou has several older siblings in various homes across the country. Lou herself actually traveled to Ohio for Plush Rush. Her big sister Olive went home with somebody, but Lou flew back to California and has been hanging out with me. I have plans to work on a few more monsters this weekend.

When I was adding Lou to etsy I realized that I hadn’t connected my Paypal account to my etsy account. Doh. I hope no one wanted to order something with Paypal. It’s all fixed now, luckily.

I’ve really enjoyed reading other bloggers talking about Pure Style, and living simply. I am slowly trying to simplify and pare down. One of the things I hope to do by making and selling things is to use up all the Stuff I have. I feel so weighed down. But it’s not easy to let go of things I might need someday. I live in a very small house, we don’t have a garage, but we have a little shed and a tiny guesthouse. Lately it seems like whenever we want to find something we look everywhere, moving piles, making messes and shifting junk around. I don’t like the feeling that my stuff is such a controlling part of my life. So I am letting go. And it’s hard.

I listed my piano on Craig’s list yesterday. It’s 30 years old, and my grandfather bought it for me when I was young. I took piano lessons for four years as a child, and never really had the touch. I could play, but I wasn’t anything special. So someone is coming to look at the piano on Saturday morning, and they might just take it with them. I never play it, I never will. I can only do so many things in the hours I have each day. Our living room is way too small for a piano. I know it is the right thing to sell it cheap so some other person can use and enjoy it, but it’s still going to be hard to let it go. Could somebody please reassure me that I’m doing the right thing?