unfinished business... and a new start

this wreath, which the bean and i started last year, was finished on december 23rd of this year. two new stockings were completed at 11:35 on christmas eve, just in time for santa to fill them up. as with many things, my blog included, there just isn't enough time during the busy holiday season. for most people, this is true. with parties to attend, gifts to buy, places to see, the holidays can be crazy stressful and not so much fun. but when your business is based around this already busy time, things can get infinitely more... well, insane.

i have spent the last months thinking about my blog and how i wanted to use it. i'm certainly not the most important blog out there, i know. but it is important to me to give an accurate representation of how my life really plays out. i'd love for this to be a happy-martha-fun-perfect-stylish blog, but that's not my reality. my house is cool, but messy, my studio is worse, i don't always bake the prettiest cookies, and i even forgot to put the advent calendar up until much later than i care to admit.

since i've had my kids, i've often found support in blogs out there, ideas, encouragement, a kind of community. but somehow in the 'branding' of these blogs, the reality of imperfection can be lost. i feel the need to be honest, although i will not show you a picture of my living room at just this moment, thanks. what i will do, for myself and for other moms out there, is be more honest. and i'll start here: sometimes i think this career path is the most insane choice i've ever made. i'm not the only one... i was so happy to see this new york times article which really voiced the reality of this life much more eloquently than i ever could.

the nice thing about having a business based around the holidays is that there is a natural and necessary break from the insanity, and along with the new year creates the perfect time to reflect and plan. 2009 was my first year as a full-time artist, and i've learned a lot. it's been a tremendous and tumultuous time - i mean, i'm not sure what i was thinking trying to pull this off with a newborn! but i made it! and i had fun, and i'm feeling excited and hopeful about the new year.

i am so, so, so grateful to my husband, who supports me through this craziness, and my mom, who helps me out so much whether she's pricing work, distracting the kids or sending over a home-cooked meal. i am thankful for my amazing etsy customers, the wonderful people who come to shows and tell me how happy my work makes them. and i couldn't make it without my friends, the ones who visit or help at shows, and the girls of BEST, who keep me going when i think i can't.

i thank you all, this wonderful community, i love this crazy life. i hope you have an amazing 2010, i can't wait to see what it holds in store for me.

quarantined.

image by shopworthy

well, not really, but we've learned that having a child in pre-school means having perpetual runny noses, and lots of other fun stuff. the sickness hit the day after halloween, and somehow, here we are 2/3rds of the way through november!

well, after having a busy week in the shop last week, i'm now caught up on orders, recovered and getting ready for the few shows i have in december. (you can find my schedule here.) i'm a bit behind in beefing up my etsy shop, but if there's something you want, please please contact me and i'll be happy to make it! i'm just a little behind on photos.

i'll post more on my shows soon, but in the meantime just wanted to share that we are healthy! awesome!

a very belated happy 2009

hope you all had a nice transition from 2008 - 2009! rick had the week off, so we had some much-needed family time. not restful, but good. we had a really nice christmas, then made it to cincinnati to see rick's family, eat some chili, and see the festival of lights at the cincinnati zoo. (that's the zoo in the photo above.)

we spent our typical quiet new year's eve, in our pajamas, playing games and snacking. lovely. since new year's i've been obsessively (between naps) trying to clear my house of all the clutter of the holiday selling season. you would not believe how much room felt can take up!

2009 has been a bit crazy so far. we've all been sick, had several trips to the doctor, one broken furnace, one broken camera, an almost-trip to the ER, and a bunch of busy-ness surrounding the event BEST is hosting at the creative alliance.

i'm super-excited to start out, i've got lots of new work swimming in my head, and lots made. as soon as i get my camera working, i'll have lots to share.

happy new year!

one more thing about handmade arcade

just found this image of me and my booth at handmade arcade. none of my pictures turned out... thanks, tigerlillyshop!

where i've been

because i am even more like an adolescent girl than you will ever know, i've spent the last 2 weeks devouring not one, but four large volumes of teen goth romance novel. everyone was reading it at the beach this summer, and something just called to me to pick up the book last week. (i mean, it is halloween season.) two weeks later, lacking sleep and avoiding the ever- growing need for inventory for handmade arcade (two weeks away!), i finished it. all of them. and because i am more of a geek than you will ever know, now i am obsessing about the movie. where were the teen vampire love movies when i was a teen?

off to sew. nonstop. for the next two weeks. gads.

i was a really good mom

i picked this book at Red Tree a few weeks ago, and finally got to read it while we we are the beach. it's a light read, and probably simplifies things a bit too much, but i highly recommend it if you are a mom and ever feel yourself headed toward the edge of insanity.

"I don't know how she does it!" is an oft-heard refrain about mothers today. Funnily enough, most moms agree—they have no idea how they get it done, or whether they even want the job. Trisha Ashworth and Amy Nobile spoke to mothers of every stripe—working, stay-at-home, part-time—and found a surprisingly similar trend in their interviews. After enthusing about her lucky life for twenty minutes, a mother would then break down and admit that her child's first word was "Shrek." As one mom put it, "Am I happy? The word that describes me best is challenged." Fresh from the front lines of modern motherhood comes a book that uncovers the guilty secrets of moms today . . . in their own words. I Was a Really Good Mom Before I Had Kids diagnoses the craziness and offers real solutions, so that mothers can step out of the madness and learn to love motherhood as much as they love their kids.

i could totally relate to lots of stuff in this book, particularly since i am up at 6am on a saturday to shoot photos of everything i've been making but not had time to photograph, only to find that i had left the camera on, and thus, had a dead battery. ah, the futility.

the book made me take a good hard look at what's really important to me. it made me more willing to let go of the little things, and more ready to focus on the moment. and it made me really, really grateful for my friends who are willing to admit that they don't have it all together either.

in that spirit, i'm off now to play with the bean. happy weekend!

all about me

i usually don't mirror posts i write for the BEST blog, which often means i write there and not here! but this one took so long, and yet i had so much fun, here it is:

Twenty things you didn't know about me, by jenmenkhaus

1. I have an unreasonable, unrelenting fear of spiders.
2. Mayonnaise grosses me out.
3. I have always wanted to go to India.
4. My hair used to be pink.
5. I stayed up all night to read the last Harry Potter book.
6. If I could eat one thing for the rest of my life, it would be sushi.
7. I saw Moulin Rouge five times in the theatre the first week it came out.
8. I can always justify spending money on shoes.
9. I miss Jeff Buckley.
10. I am terrible at gardening.
11. I make coffee so sweet, it tastes like candy.
12. The most difficult thing I have ever done was ride a bike in San Francisco.
13. Among the jobs I have had – dog groomer, ice cream scooper, produce stand attendant.
14. My husband proposed to me at the Haunted Mansion / Nightmare Before Christmas ride in Disneyland.
15. I can do math in my head.
16. I speak enough French to get by. I can swear in Spanish or Italian, and I know the words for “beer”, “jewelry”, “vegetarian”, and “thank you” in German and Czech.
17. I actually like playing video games, although I rarely do.
18. I once drove to Boston on a whim.
19. No one believes this, but I am actually an introvert.
20. I would move to London in a second.

things i learned this weekend

• i will always find a way to procrastinate before a show (like making a new sign)
• early in the morning, it is quite likely that i will nearly put salt in my coffee, instead of sugar
  
• if i put a white-ish shirt on, i will immediately spill that coffee on it
• it is impossible to eat a hummus sandwich gracefully
• i should always remember my hand cart when going to a show
• velcro is really difficult to stitch through
  
• after a show, i really can sleep for 12 hours straight
  

thinking...

it's been raining, and dreary, and we've been getting lots of bad news lately. not for us, personally, but just all around us. so i'm spending some time thinking... i started looking back through old pictures, and found this one. it's from just about 5 years ago, i was just married, and i was traveling. i was so happy, so much to look forward to, nothing seemed impossible to overcome or achieve. sometimes it seems like everyone's (not only our) lives are so packed with busy-ness that we never have time to just think, enjoy, or just be. gah. what kind of morose blog entry is this, anyway? we're all really very lucky, we just need to take the time to think about it.

it's my birthday...

and we're taking the day off... but there's free shipping in the shop today.

enjoy your day!

cookie elves.

we have finally gotten into the holiday spirit! things have been a bit crazy around here, but finally i'm getting into it. i finished the matching (cheesy, i know) aprons i made for the bean, my mom, and myself just in time for our marathon cookie-making days. we are squeezing a ridiculous amount of baking into just 3 days. (normally we bake for weeks ahead.)

i love how they turned out... i can't get the bean to stand still these days with the amount of christmas excitement and cookies in her system, but this photo shows the apron off the best...

i've also had just a fantastic end of year in the shop . i had some small goals for myself by year's end and i doubled each and every one. so thanks! i'll be saying thanks in a special way starting the day after christmas in the shop, so stop in when you can.

i'm down to my last bit of christmas making, just a few more presents, including a tutu for the bean, a pin for my gram, and a couple other bits. i'm finally starting to relax... come on, christmas!

i hope you all are in the same spot - happy making & baking!

hindsight has rose colored glasses.

or something like that. i doubt the cakes my mom made for me for my birthdays growing up were anything like i remember them. in fact, i don't really remember them at all except for one holly hobbie cake and a fuzzy memory of a yellow care bears cake. (did i just give my age away?) but i thought it was amazing that she made them and no one else had a cake like it.

so, the bean's 2nd birthday was last week and of course, i had to make her cake. she is currently obsessed with jojo's circus, in fact, of the very little tv we watch, it's what she always requests. i decided to make her a jojo cake. oh, what it looked like in my head - it was amazing. it was going to be colorful and oddly proportioned and was going to make the whole party. well, i made a few unfortunate decisions: 1) to bake the cakes at 11pm, then 2) to have purchased one pan when my intention was to make two cakes 3) to make the batters one after another. I ended up taking a hot cake out of a pan and putting it on the only surface i had that was large enough, a platter which oddly enough turned out to be more like a bowl than a platter. the cake, being hot, immediately adhered itself to the platter, so i was committed.

luckily, my mom came over the next day to help ice it. i used an obscene amount of red dye to get red, and i didn't release just how terrible this caused my homemade icing to taste until the bean tested it and said "yuck." (a two year old turning down butter and suger? unheard of.) we forged on... and while i couldn't help thinking i needed to fix bits here and there - i placed no less than 7 wooden skewers in it, covered it with plastic wrap, and barricaded it in the corner away from cats, husbands, and toddlers. i felt really bad about using all that plastic wrap, but i would have felt worse if it had become a cat trampoline.

the bean thought it was great, but me, i still can't help thinking of all the ways in which it does not look like i planned it. i just hope she has the same kind of memory as her mom...

so maybe i am really going to like this.

maybe it's just the fact that i spent an extraordinary amount of time alone today, but i think i've been waiting to write this stuff down for awhile. all day today, i felt like will ferrel in that movie where he's a character in a book.
it's a bit rainy and cooler today, and i am so excited for fall that i wore my fantastic new skirt today, which i bought on etsy. i've spent a little more time than i should there, but i think this christmas we're going for an all-handmade gift theme. (i did that two years ago, all handmade by me, with a four month old baby sitting in a babyseat on the worktable next to my sewing machine! what can i say? i was a little nuts.) so, really, i have every reason to be looking around, right?
since the bean was up with a cold last night, i'm heading off to dreamland early. sleep tight.

dipping my foot in.

here i am, probably the billionth person to start a blog when there are just about a billion left who don't have one. right in the middle. i have kind of a love-hate relationship with the whole blogging phenomenon, and yet here i am... just how do you start a blog anyway?

hi, my name is jen. i am foremost a mom, which is something i'm still adjusting to even after 2 years. i left a wonderful job in the american craft industry to (mostly) stay at home, although i do work just a bit to help pay the bills. i live in the suburbs just at the end of the city, in a pretty normal house, with my husband, daughter, two cats, and a dog. normal. it wasn't always this way. after being one of eight in a class, yes eight, "jens" (jennys, jennies, jennifers) through most of school, i went to a large college and did my own thing. i had fun. lots of fun. i traveled, had interesting friends, a few really cool jobs, and then i met my to-be husband, and had more fun, traveled lots more, met more interesting people. we were always out and about.

then my daughter, the bean, was born, and suddenly our idea of a big night was spending it at the playground. as anyone with children knows, it's a big adjustment. for me, it's the biggest. she is the greatest thing going, but i often wonder where that old me is. (my guess is prague.)

i guess this blog is going to be about coming to terms with all the really wonderful aspects of just being average. afternoons spent blowing bubbles, the hidden potential of crayons, and whatever of my own interests i can squeeze in. all in all, it's pretty great being normal.