The Sign We Made

This is our sign for Market. We made it ourselves out of poster board, fabric, glue, and a Sharpie.

And we bought the frame at Hobby Lobby.

I love Hobby Lobby.

All Dressed Up

A few weeks ago...we had the pleasure of meeting a woman named Corinna!

And when I say meet, I mean we discovered each other through the wonders of Facebook.

You see, about two weeks ago, as I was checking our Facebook Fan Page for updates, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Corinna Hyde of Corinna Couture had shared some photos of her new summer dress line that feature our Flora fabric!

And if you can't already tell from the photos, Corinna is quite the talented children's dress maker (Mom and I have always had a solid respect for anyone who sews clothes...which are a little out of our sewing league). In fact, I almost wish some of her designs came in adult sizes too!

But really, Corinna's awesomeness goes beyond the fancy clothes she makes. Because, in addition to designing 4 of the dresses in her summer line around our Flora fabric, she has also generously offered to make a few dresses out of our new line, Birds & Berries, for display in our booth at market next week. Thanks Corinna!

And these pictures are just a sampling of Corinna's work! She has a Fan Page on Facebook, but more importantly, she also has an Etsy Shop where you can buy one of these little gems for yourself.

So, thanks for sharing your talents with us, Corinna! We can't wait to see the Birds & Berries dresses, and we'll be sure to tout your mad dress making skills at market.

Lauren & Jessi Pretending To Be Construction Workers

So this year, we decided to have a booth of our own at Quilt Market in May to show off our newest line, Birds & Berries.

I'm currently living in New Jersey and my mom is down in Spartanburg SC, so I drove down to her place for a week with the goal of finishing our booth.

Not knowing where to start, we decided to just drive over to the Home Depot and take it from there.

We walked around aimlessly for a while until one of the employees asked us if we needed help.

Which we REALLY did.

I showed the guy a photo of a booth from my iPhone… which he used to draw us up a little diagram… PLUS measure out all the wood for us…

After him, we talked to 7 other employees while gathering the remainder of our supplies… each of whom taught us something new and exciting about building materials.

We now love the Home Depot and its team of incredibly helpful employees!

I have to say… throughout everything, my mom has been quite the little trooper. She didn't want to actually build a booth for our first year because curtains would have been a much easier alternative. But in the end, I think we were both really happy.

The rest of the story probably isn't that funny to any one else except us. Ha. Suffice it to say this little adventure consisted of 5 long days of the "blind leading the blind".

And… we wouldn't have finished at all had it not been for our next-door neighbor Mac McPherson checking up on us everyday to make sure that we were on the right track. :)

And actually, truth be told… we didn't QUITE finish. The basic structure is finished, and we painted our walls. But we still have yet to actually do a trial run to make sure that this puppy isn't going to topple over.

Bad-Boy Soup

This is our sweet boy Rudy… (as many of you probably already know)… and we think he's the greatest.

Whenever we're busy with a project… either on the computer... or laying out quilts, Rudy will usually start to feel neglected... and, as a result, he'll act out to get our attention. After his many failed attempts to entice us to play with his "Headless Bunny", "Dead Squirrel", or "Baby Duck" (his three favorite toys)… he'll plop down, right in the middle of whatever it is we're doing and look up at us with the most adorable expression, as if to say, "What, you didn't want me to sit on top of the fabric pieces that you have been painstakingly arranging for the last hour?"

So when our fabric arrived in the mail, I planned on using this bad-boy-habit of his to my advantage… my plan was to lay out this entire color-wheel of fabric, while ignoring him completely... with the hope that he would eventually wander over and sit in the middle... allowing me to snap some nice photos.

When I finished, Rudy was off by himself looking for salamanders to "play with"… Completely unconcerned with me and my color-wheel.

(On any other day, this would have done the trick.)

Since my plan didn't work, we then tried other techniques, like burying treats inside of the fabric... but this just made him frantic and a mess.

Then we tried using the age-old "Sit" command. But, for some reason, when Rudy learned this command way back when, he learned it in combination with "Roll Over". And, oddly enough, he's never been able to separate the two. He'll sit for a second, then immediately throw himself onto the ground in order to "roll over".

We spent about a half hour trying to get this little dog to act right... but to no avail. The collage of photos shows the results of this little photoshoot.

(A few years back, one of us started telling Rudy that it's a good thing he's cute… otherwise we'd have to make Bad-Boy Soup.)

This particular day was definitely a Bad-Boy Soup Day!