Oh, what a rough couple of weeks it has been! The boyfriend had more teeth pulled on Monday - he's been having so many teeth problems from an issue he was born with, that the dentist recommended just having them all pulled and fitting dentures, said it would have him a lot of pain in the future. It looks like that's the path he may be taking, I don't blame him either, teeth pain is so terrible and he shouldn't have to keep going through it over and over again.

Wednesday was also the six year anniversary of my mom's death. She passed away from a long and hard fight with lung cancer, she was such a strong woman to go through all the treatments that those doctors put her through one after another.  My sister and I stayed up late all night talking and keeping each other company online. Keeping her and our dad and all the good times we had. My mother was such an amazing crafter and I used to watch in awe at the stuff she made .. and she could do everything! Sewing, crochet, knitting, etc.. there was just so much much she did! She always tried to teach me things then, but back then I would just rather watch then want to do it, and I got so easily aggravated as a kid I did want to bother with it. So now that I I'm doing all this crafting and crocheting myself now as an adult, while it's not something we can physically do together, I feel like she's there with me when I'm working away on my projects. :)

Me, my mom & my younger sister in our last picture together. :) She was such a beautiful woman!

On a happier note, I had nephews birthdays to make presents for! And since they all love Angry Birds so much, they each got a hat from me! The smiles I got when they got them made all the work worth while and my niece tells me the baby goes to sleep with his on every night because he refuses to take it off! How cute!

I had a lot of fun making them! I think I like the red one best but I love them all! 

Clips, clips, clips!

So my newest obsession in crochet accessories has been clip making! I'm having such a good time making them and it has really brought out my inner designer I think. I was wanting some really cute Easter hair clips and couldn't really find much that I liked personally to use, so I decided to just take my hand at creating some of my own! Hats have been easy, how hard could making a few tiny Easter appliques for clips? I was glad to not hit any snags and made a few in the past couple of days.

This one could be a baby chick or duck. I did find one similar to this one... but the pattern was in Dutch, and I certainly don't speak Dutch.. ahaha. So, I picked up my hook and yarn and went to town.

This little cutie was inspired by a cute felt bunny head that I saw.. I think this one is my favorite. :)

 This one seems to be my fiance's favorite, it was my first design of all the Easter cuties.

And another baby chick! I love her little feet, makes this little chickie so cute. I have one more that I made, I will get a picture of here soon. :)

I'll probably write the patterns for them out here soon, I have a few Easter orders I'm working on for this weekend - plus a toy net for a friend's little girl's birthday this weekend. They asked for one is one of my favorite colors I have on hand to match her newly painted room. I recently made the daughter a drawstring bag (which I am kicking myself over not taking a pic of before sending it off to her!!) in RHSS's Bikini & in Black and she loves it so much and uses it for everything. Really puts a smile on my face to see my work being used. :) The girl also LOVES manatees, so I'm going to see what I can come up with for her too.

I just realized with all my work, I still have a unfinished cupcake hat I was making for my own daughter -- that's one WIP I would like to finish up this week.

Outside of crocheting & work it's been a wonderful weekend. We've gone for lots of walking, went fishing and hit the pool yesterday to let the kids swim and they've had a blast! Today was time for daddy to go back to work, he gets 3 days off work and 4 on and his days off are different since they are during the week... we are used to them being just the weekend but it is so nice having him home for a few days during the week. :) Today its back to relaxing time around the house for me & the kids.. but I think maybe this mommy will be filling up their little pool here at home so they can get in some water play after nap time. And now with my two year old waking up and ready for mommy's attention.. I leave you with a few images.

My little ones fishing, this is also my son's first time getting to fish.

Touching and getting a good look at his first fishie.

It's amazing how quickly a month can fly! Life has been extra busy around our house. My little princess is has been working hard learning her letters & how to write everyone's name. She's doing a great job and this mom is definitely proud! We've also gotten a new addition to our family! Meet Zoey, whose made a bed out of the empty side area of the tv stand.

She and our 50 lb Dixie our best friends already and play non-stop all day. Zoey seems to favor our little girl - considering my monster chases her around roaring at her - which is okay since Dixie and Logie already have a strong bond. I absolutely love her ears!

So I've been hard at work getting Skylay Designs going. I've had a few orders through Etsy and a good amount of sales locally. Yesterday I started making hair clips and it has been soooo much fun! So far I have bows and butterflies and some flowers. I found a butterfly pattern I liked to use.. but they were just coming out too big so I ended up recreating it and making it a good 1" smaller. I'm very happy with it.

The top one is from the original butterfly pattern ( Simple Butterfly @ KrochetLove ) and the bottom two are my smaller recreation. I can't wait to get these little babies in my daughter's hair. :)

What a busy week it's been! I meant to do sooo much with the blog but I was just so busy. I started doing homeschool Pre-K with my daughter since we were unable to get her enrolled, but it is working out extremely well and I think she'll be nice a ready when it's time to start kindergarten in the Fall. She loves doing it so much too and even when we're done with her work for the day she keeps asking for more and more. I'm really glad she enjoys learning so much!

During the week I was also working on my Cupcake Beanie pattern at a few peoples requests. After getting it tested and retesting it myself as well, I finally have the pattern available at my etsy store: The Cupcake Beanie Pattern.  I'm working on getting the Strawberry Beanie pattern done and writing a few more that were asked for. :)

Here are a few more items I completed this past week:

We needed some new dishcloths and my man requested a large one to go with them. So I made two 8x8 squares and a 8x14 larger towel for him. 

My daughter asked me to make her a strawberry shortcake hat since she loves her so very much, I should be finished with it today. I hope she loves it! And I just finished an earflap hat for my little sister. I'll have to get some pictures posted up this weekend. 

where does the time go.

So, I have definitely not updated in quite a while.I'm going through a no internet issue for a bit and random free signals are iffy most times. Life has been quite busy lately, too. We got the truck fixed and on the road, finally! My daughter's fourth birthday was last month, she had a birthday party with her cousin who turned 5 at my brother's house. They all got to play, eat cake and swim. We also finally made it to the beach for the first time this year! The kids had a blast and I can't wait to take them again.

I haven't had much money for yarn so I can start on new projects.. but I did managed to push myself into frogging a blanket I haven't touched in a year and began making a giant butterfly garden for my little girl. She loves it already and I enjoy working on it. All I need now I one last skein to finish it and it will be finished! I will try to get some pictures up of it soon though.

So I am still around, sort of.. just not as much and busy life. Hopefully I can get some extra cash to start some new projects. :)

Busy, Busy, Busy

So, it's been a few weeks of total busyness.. I haven't had the time to blog and updated until today. Last week, DF went out of town for work and I stayed with his mother with my princess and little monkey and we brought our dog, Dixie, along. :) The kids enjoyed spending time with their Grammy and Aunt Gabi.

Then with in the past few days, DF got very sick.. he was sent home from work, really out of it and vomiting. :( When he blacked out on me, I called the ambulance and he was taken to the ER. They told me it was a good thing I did and didn't wait. Turns out from the motorcycle wreck, when TGH stitched up the now scar on his left eye, they didn't clean a thing of it -- I know this because I had to clean what I could myself after he got home.. there was gravel stuck under the stitches.. but it gave him an infection behind his eye now which started it. Then he got hit with heat exhaustion and dehydration on top of that. He's feeling better now though, on some medication to clear the infection up and went back to work this morning.

While I haven't had time to update, I do have lots of stuff going on with my hook! I'm gonna start with my WIP this morning and perhaps get to my finished stuff later today.

Summer Mystery CAL @ The 'Ville
So there is only one clue left to go! So far, here is what I have:

Close up.

All of the pieces together.

Close up of the flowers.

I was so positive it was a bag or tote.. by now I have another thing in mind. So close to finding out, I'm excited!

Textured Ballet Style Slippers [ pattern ]

I was originally making these for myself.. but I learned after finishing this first one that it's about a half a size too big. So, I'm now making them for my DF's little sister since she is the same size as me.. but she's only 11 so still growing. :)

I can't wait to get the other one done to give to her with the bag I finished.. which will be in a post a little bit later today. :)

Also, if you've noticed on my side bar, I have a little crochet pixel. :) And here it is again just in case you don't.. but I'd be more then happy to make them in different colours if anyone was interested.

Busy Bee

It's bee about a week since my last update and I have been a busy busy mommy. We had a flea outbreak -- they are just bad in this area in general and since we have a dog... -- I have been up every day first thing in the morning and all night, vacuuming, spraying, sweeping, mopping, bathing Dixie .. plus keeping up my normal cleaning -- which was slacked a tab bit in the kitchen. I'm sooo tired. And it doesn't help that my df has been working very hard this week at work, getting up at 4:30am not getting home til anywhere from 5pm - 10pm.. by then he's so tired there's nothing I can ask of him but to get some sleep for work tomorrow.

He's worked so much this week I even took up the job of cleaning the yard up this week. I found someone interesting hiding near one of df's toolboxes.

Now, I don't know how, but I found time to crochet through all the mess going on! I completely finished a few small projects. First is a Scrubbie Dot that I also crocheted the red netting from a popcicle bag into the middle red area. I've already gotten to use it and it definitely did it's job. :)

Then I made a matching Spiral Dishcloth to match it. =]

Last night it poured down rain for the first time in weeks! While I loved the rain, while I was next door, we had a new leak pop up and it got on my poor unprotected laptop. :( Luckily, the worst it did was get water in the screen.. it took up almost half the screen last night, but now it has dried up to a small strip.. I'm hoping it will dry up too.. it almost looks like it didn't happen at all. So while I was grumpy about my laptop and the internet was out because of the rainy weather, I decided to take a stab at free handing a circle spiral dishcloth. It didn't come out perfect, but I'm still happy with it. :)

Then this morning I decided to work on a hat for my daughter, because she was so upset about the summer mystery cal not being a hat for her. Lol. So I let her pick out a colour from my stash and I worked on it all day on and off as I could... the hat is Josie Posie and here is my little princess posing with her new hat.

And last not but not least for tonight's update: my progress on the Summer Mystery CAL. :) Last week's clue left me with this and I'm very excited to get to the next clue tomorrow.

early birthday for me!

So while my birthday isn't until Monday, my two older brothers and my little sister gave me my birthday present a few days early! They bought me WotLK and Cata for WoW! Woot! Now I can finally get full and level fly everywhere, yaaay. Kal showed me some fun flying in StormWind.

Here we are, as high as we can fly.

Here we are, falling to our doom! Lol.

In other great news, our truck loan is finally paid off and we will be getting it back this weekend!!! I'm so excited to finally have my truck back. <3 Now I just need to get the transmission fixed and it will be perfect again. Everything is slowly falling into place!

Mystery WIP Update

There hasn't really been anything exciting going on this week other then starting the kids on the Your Baby Can Read DVDs. I'm really interested to see if they will work! I know that thanks to Blue's Clues, Sky knows how to spell blue, so I'm hoping she'll be able to pick it up quickly. :)

Now for pictures of the mystery CAL project. So far there has been two clues and this is what I have so far:

I'm not sure if my flowers will match as well as I hope, if not I'll make those out of the main 'Bikini' yarn so they match perfectly. I was hoping my selection in colours would work though. :) I'm excited for tomorrow's new clue!

And on Monday I will be turning twenty-four! I can't believe where the time goes... I still remember playing games with my little sis when we were fourteen & sixteen. <3

red as a tomato..

Yes, that's right -- I'm sun burnt. Thankfully I was on top of my kid's sun screening more then I was my own .. it hurts, but I'll live. We had a blast at the lake yesterday, though! The kids got to swim and build sand castles for a while before we got onto the boat and took turns on the tube. It's been a while since I've done it, but it was so much fun and I only fell off once!

I found this pattern for the Cupcake Cake Purse and wanted to make something like it for my daughter. So, I managed to make something like it, only smaller. Here is the Cupcake Wrist Bag I made:

My three year old absolutely love it and takes it everywhere with her! I didn't write down how I did it though, and now my younger sister-in-law wants one too, so looks like I'll be writing it down this time.