Finally! The renovation to our home is complete...

and we have returned to a bit of normalcy. Whew! I didn't think we would survive another week of the crazy things going on at our house. Construction started the first week of January and ended last Friday. We added a whole new home office/work studio to our house, right off the master bedroom. It is beautiful and it is exactly what we wanted, but the journey to get there was getting downright ugly!

I am a person who needs a clean and orderly house. Dust distracts me. Dirty floors send me into a tailspin. And lets not even bring up clutter lying around. I can't handle it. So, to have our house in such a mess for 6 weeks was almost more than I could bare. How do people do total home renovations? I can't imagine having a home that's under constant construction.  We added a new room and painted and old one. I almost needed to be sedated! {Just ask my poor husband, who got to hear all about how the distruption was getting to me on a daily basis!}

Well, I wanted to share with you some of the pictures from start to finish. We've always wanted to turn our old study into a guest bedroom and add a new larger room for both of us to have a workspace. We decided to put the new room right off of our bedroom, leaving the existing exterior brick as one of the walls. We just love how it has a warehouse loft feel. It's a good mix of traditional & industrial with a good pinch of pretty thrown in. And while we have all of our furniture in place, we've yet to hang anything on the walls, so we will post more pictures when that's finished! Let me know what you think~~~~Laura

Weekly Etsy Feature: Half Stitched

I found a wonderful little shop called Half Stitched on Etsy to feature this week! Alician is a very talented designer, and I just love her little shop. I will be putting her fabulous paperclips on my Birthday wish list!  She's also a fellow Texan, which makes me love her shop all the more :) Everyone, meet Alician, owner and designer of Half Stitched! ~~~Laura

In Her Own Words:

I was a store manager for a popular home goods retailer for over 7 years. I was finding myself very unfulfilled and decided to leave. Right around the same time the economy decided to tank. I found myself stuck between a rock and a hard place, only being qualified for what I was doing but did not want to do that anymore. So, I decided to return to school and finish my degree. Since I had a lot of time on my hands I started to finally use the sewing machine my mom had gotten a few years back. She had helped me make a dress once but, for the most part I am self taught. I made a few dresses for my nieces and got great feedback on them. A family member suggested I try to sell them and told me about Etsy. I had never heard of Etsy prior to last June. I looked into it and fell in LOVE! Since then it has been completely awesome meeting and reading about other crafters and how they operate. I've really enjoyed putting myself out there. Etsy is always exciting and new and full of great people. Everyday I'm thinking of new ways to grow my business. I would love for it to one day support me, or at the very least pay off my newly acquired school loans :0)

Next on my list of things to tackle is learning how to use my Grandmother's Serger she left me. It's old and in need of a good cleaning but I am excited about the possibilities.

Thanks so much,

Alician
 
 

Spring 2010 Beanies Have Arrived!

I've just finished making my first set of Spring 2010 Beanies! I simply love how they turned out and the colors are so fresh and pretty! Here's a sneak peak! If you would like one of your own, hop over to my shop at http://www.lullabycouture.etsy.com/ and get them before they are gone! I have newborn, infant, toddler & girls sizes! ~~Laura