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Monday, April 30, 2012

MAY DAY FOLLOWFEST IS HERE!


Happy late night Monday or for some of you early risers Happy Tuesday morning!!! I am super stoked because the May Day Follower Fest is here!!!!! What better way to welcome May?!

My name is Lish and Imprintalish is my little spot to share my pretty finds and tales of life with
two little men and one big man. You can get the low down on me here.

I am really looking forward to finding some new favorite blogs and if your stopping by my page for the first time, please say hi and introduce yourself! I love chatting with new people and making bloggy friends!

Feel free to snoop around and enjoy!


HOW DOES IT WORK?

Link up on any ONE of the hostess’ sites: 

Our links will be interlinked, which means your post will be displayed on ALL 4 of our sites!

Go to the links on any of the host pages beginning Tuesday May 1st!  

Link up any post you want to showcase your blog!

ONLY ONE REQUIREMENT: 
you must visit each of the 4 hosts sites! 
WE ARE THE FIRST 4 LINKED UP!

Make new friends!!  Increase YOUR readers!!!
GRAB THE BUTTON AND TELL ABOUT THE PARTY!!!!!










a Rafflecopter giveaway



Lish

The If's, And's & But's of My Life Lately

IF I could get my 'time' organized better, I think something might actually get accomplished (like cleaning the dark dungeon of a basement we have) on a weekend, BUT, then we wouldn't have had time to do nothing and everything...like go for walks to the Dam with friends and meet new family members.

AND lately, time together as a family has been taking precedence over everything-as it should be right?
I really want to enjoy this time I have with my kids as a SAHM. They are only young once AND I want to be the best mom I can be without having to juggle things around. BUT some days it seems like I am still juggling no matter what. Maybe IF I didn't have this desire (flaw?) to be superwoman things would be different...


IF my time was better organized I wouldn't be so hard on myself for not getting something done right away. AND it's not even the general cleaning daily things (although that has been slacking too), but the designing/blogging thing that I feel like I am not giving 100% on. BUT in all honesty, I've lost about an hour and a half of 'me' time in the afternoons-which seriously makes for long days. It seems that my almost 3 year old, doesn't like to nap anymore...


...except on the occasion above. He feel asleep on the couch one afternoon...how cute is he!? In is little boy undies! IF only that would happen everyday AND believe me I have tried! AND I haven't wrote much about potty training, but for the last 3 weeks we've been going strong and haven't had an accident for a couple days now!Woohoo!

So not sure why I expect myself to get as much done as I did when I had that extra time to myself AND to top it all off I'm kinda working on a little 'secret' business. I love little handmade shops and I creep them all the time AND while I have a shop on Etsy-I don't necessarily categorize my shop as handmade. I mean the process is handmade..I take the photos, I edit the photos... BUT a camera and computer do most of the work...so it's not 'really' made with my own two hands. I love making things, you name it, I will try it and I consider myself to be pretty crafty. What I am working on takes everything I am interested in and ties it all together. Right now I am in the planning, trial and error phase AND I hope to show it to you, IF AND when everything comes together! At least a little sneak peak maybe in a couple months or so. Until then...you'll have to wait!!! :)

IN other news, my new part time job is working out pretty well AND I soooo enjoy the break away from home/kids/dishes! This will be my first full week of it AND it's also supposed to be really warm this week too...which is a bonus because I am working outside! IF I didn't tell you already, I forget if I did,  BUT I'm working in a Garden Center :)

Hey, AND did any of you notice that I totally missed posting the  Frivolous Friday linky post on Friday..yep, didn't think so, LOL...IF you are one of few people that link up, I'm sorry! I completely forgot! And because I can't even remember I don't expect you guys to either..so Frivolous Friday's is going under lock and key. Done. No More.

Oh, AND speaking of change...why is it that Blogger and Gmail and Facebook and everything else under the sun always has to change?! It's so annoying! What I really can't stand is that when I read a blog in my reading list on Blogger I can't open multiple windows with each blog. For days now I've been wondering why I hadn't read certain things, cause I was clicking on it...BUT it opens it in the same window on top of each other!! Grr...so now I have to actually choose 'open in new tab'...makes multi tasking so difficult!
Anyway, that's what's been going on in my life in a recap...

Oh AND last but not least you still have until midnight tonight to enter my two huge giveaways! Look up to the top right sidebar (I'm too lazy to put in the links-lol) and the May Day Follower Fest starts tomorrow too :) YAY!!!
Lish

Little Girls...



I've always dreamed of having a little girl...my two handsome men are the best ever, but really I think every woman secretly wants a little mini version of themselves, right? Someone to wear skirts and cute polka dot dresses, flowers in their hair and pink tutu's.

I am so lucky that I get to be an Aunt to two beautiful little girls. One that is growing up into a beautiful young girl and another that just came into the world yesterday. So precious and perfect, so gently and soft.

Maybe I'm not destined to have a girl of my own (which could be a whole other post-should we stop at two?!) but being an Aunt is definitely the next best thing, because I can spoil them and make pretty pink things for them and then I can send them back to their parents when they cry or are PMSing... :D

Love you Jillian & {new addition} Khloe!
Lish

Saturday, April 28, 2012

Lazy Weekends

Lazy weekends are nice...I worked a bit this morning and now we are all just hanging out...might do some
shopping but other then that, I have no set plans! I am hoping that I will get to meet my neice or nephew sometime this weekend...But for the most part we will be doing things like this...




Playing with the best things- paper, crayons and big boxes...


Just a reminder that there are only 3 days left to enter my two Huge Blog-iversary Giveaways...#1 is here and #2 is here...plus make sure you come back on Tuesday May 1st for the big May Day Folllow Fest AND to find out if you won the above giveaways!!!

Happy Weekend!!
Lish


Friday, April 27, 2012

Leap Into Spring Photo Challenge-Rain/Water

There is something about the air after it rains.

 So refreshing and clean.

Like when you get out of the shower. Everything is calm and still.


You wipe the steam from the mirror and you see your reflection.

Wet and glistening.

An unmasked beauty.

Just like the ground after it rains, it looks familiar but just in a different way.


Lish

P.S. Only 4 more days till the May Day Follower Fest!!!


Thursday, April 26, 2012

Loves on a Thursday

It's Thursday already! This week is flying by...

What I wouldn't give for just a little bit of time to put up my feet and relax-by myself! Or live by a beach..ahhh...!For me, water has always played a big role in my life-maybe not so much in the foreground of it all, but it's always been there somewhere. Must be the Pisces in me!
So if I had a spot to just go and sit like the ones below...everything would be perfect!

Here are my Loves on a Thursday...


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Loves ona Thursday


Guidelines:
Please credit the original source when using other's projects and photographs.
Link up your blog post about your lovely finds/pins, not your homepage.
Leave your blog name in the title.
Please link back with a button or text :)
Be friendly and have fun :)






Also linking up with Bantron{Life} for Pinning!
Lish

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

First Birthday Party Details

Since I posted Westyn's first birthday party photos I've been getting a lot of questions about some of the crafty decor, so I thought I would give you a more in depth post on the how to's that were involved. Most all of the projects were made with supplies that I had on hand to keep costs down...

Scrap Fabric Wreath

Start with a crap load of fabric scraps! I did have quite a few fabric leftovers on hand, but I also bought some too. I went to Tonic Living and picked out a bunch of coordinating fabric samples for $1 each and then went to work. I cut them all into small strips, maybe about 4 inches long{ish}. 

I found some random wire in the basement (thick enough to hold, thin enough to bend by hand) and shaped it into a circle.

Then I started tying...


For the monogrammed initial, I painted a small wooden letter that I got at the Dollar Store and glued it to two circles cut out of scrapbooking paper. I pushed the fabric ties out of the way and secured the embellishment with a piece of thread.

Voila! I still have it up now too, I just removed the 'W' and it looks so springy on our door!

Fabric Bunting


Actually the fabric samples that I mentioned above were originally bought for this bunting I wanted to make (it's now in Westyn's room), the scrap fabric wreath was an after thought to the bunting since I had some material leftover. For the bunting I just cut out triangles and sewed them together with a yellow binding.

Ruffled Streamers


I originally saw these ruffled streamers on Pinterest and fell in love! They were so easy to do (you just need some thread and a sewing machine!) Go {here} for the full tutorial.

The Cake


I did not make the cake {sort of}! I love baking, but really, I didn't want to worry about having to make the cake, plus I found this beautiful photo of a cake that was so cute! It had little cars along the bottom and a cute number 1 on the top. So we got someone to make it (she made my 30th birthday cake-I loved it). Well...long story short. The cake looked like poop. The only thing that looked like the photo was the color of the blue icing. My three year old could have drawn better cars and worst of all the cars and icing were PINK! She said she couldn't get the icing to go red...URG! The number one on top was just a red candle and totally clashed and made the pink cars look even pinker! So I scrambled last minute, peeled off the cars (ate them-obviously) and slapped some whipped white icing along the bottom to cover up where the cars were and since it was Easter, popped some jelly beans along the edge. Put a new candle on the top that didn't emphasize the pink letters and there you have it-Westyn's first cake!


Photo Timeline Banner


I was totally inspired by Emily at 52 Mantels by her Year One Timeline that she made for her daughter's first birthday. For mine, I picked one photo to represent each month (that took hours-LOL!) and then cropped each photo into a 5x7 triangle. I use Photoshop for all my photo stuff and for this project I used the Clipping Mask to cut out the triangle area.  For the circles I used the bottom of a glass (I was too lazy to look for my circle cutter!) and traced it out onto coordinating scrapbooking paper. Then after cutting each one out I ran them through the sewing machine in chronological order. Wrote the months on the circles and then attached it to a bare frame!

And that's that...Happy Wednesday!
Lish

HE WALKS!

Westyn has started walking!!! Friday was the big day and he's been on a role every since!!! Here's a little video for you taken on Saturday...(please ignore my over excited voice-LOL!-and the ladder in the background-and Gray's wonderful singing-LOL-he's my little wannabe rockstar!) Anyway....


There's no stopping him now :)
Lish


Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Sponsor in May?



Wouldn't it be fun if we could all get together and play in May? Have coffee and chat about stuff? Like how our kids are growing too fast? How I burnt myself again with my glue gun, or how peanut butter and jam sandwiches just hit the spot sometimes? Wouldn't it be fun if we could all get together and dance and laugh like crazy idiots, go for walks and paint our nails?

Well we can, sort of...

Come hang out on my sidebar and it will be lots of fun I promise!

More details {here}

Then go {here} and {here} to win some fabulous fun stuff !!!!!

AND don't forget about the big May Day Follower Fest too...
(Ohhh and the giveaway for that too!!)


See?! Lots of fun to be had in May!
Lish

Getting to Know Nicole @ Knit Nicole Knit!

Well, today I am very happy to introduce you to Nicole Drouillard, one of my fab sponsors this month! Not only is Nicole a Canadian girl (just like me!) but she is the owner and creator of Knit Nicole Knit!, a one woman knitting production!

So let's get to know a little more about her, shall we?

Describe a typical day at Knit Nicole Knit...
Typical days at Knit, Nicole, Knit! are not very typical at all. We recently moved to a space that will eventually have a knitting studio for me to use. We're not quite there yet, but it's coming along. As of right now most of my days go like this: I wake up and feed my dog, Winston. Take him outside, and let him do his thing. I read my email before anything, and I do that while eating some kind of granola bar to hold me over until real breakfast happens. After all my morning routine is done, I set myself up with whatever knitting project I have on the needles, and start working on it. I'll do that while reading blogs, listening to podcasts, or watching Netflix or shows that I, or my boyfriend Richard, have downloaded. We're watching Breakout Kings and The Big C currently, and I am watching old episodes of Dirty Jobs, Deadliest Catch (I have a thing for Mike Rowe) and Myth Busters. Most days I knit all day. Other days, I start up some podcasts and make a hundred or so pairs of earrings in a sitting. I'm hoping to get some sort of actual routine going in the near future.


If you could describe your work/shop in ONE word, what would it be? Why?
I would choose cheerful. I have bright colours, sparkles, flowers and so much more. I can quickly look through my shop, and it cheers me up!

Do you have any advice for someone just starting up their own creative business?
Don't give up! I have rough days where I get next to no views in my shop, or craft shows where I don't break even. The important thing is to keep going. If your product has value, and is well made, it will sell. You just have to get the right people to see it. Promote like crazy without being spammy, and you'll increase your odds.

What's your favorite thing about being your own boss?
I'm SO glad I can sleep in! My days usually run from 10 or 11 am until 1 am. I like that I can stay up late and use all the ideas that come to me in the late night hours.

Where do you go for inspiration?
My inspiration comes from all over the place. I follow something like 500 blogs, so I see a lot of neat things. I also browse Etsy daily for ideas. I run a blog called I Love Etsy! that I post interesting items on several times a day. If I am ever stuck, I can go through a couple pages on there and get ideas.

 
Want to know/see more? Check out Nicole's SHOP & BLOG!
Lish