How the Holiday Sweatshirts actually made it to the shop

Allison and I have been making shirts since 8th grade and screen printing since we first started lullaby lubbock when the twins and Ella were about 9 months.


 We made these horrible hibiscus flowers and these terrible snowmen shirts for the kids.  And we hand dyed all of those babies.  We were pretty obsessed with RIT dye at that point.  And we loved how adding those buttons added to the entire look.  Its hard to say what exactly they added.
OH, we thought they were so cute.  We have since improved the entire look…
 We always want to put our shirts in the shop (looking back, I am glad some of them we didnt), but we are always a little late on it or lose steam before we actually put them up.
Thats where Sweet Tees came in.
A few months ago, my friends Jennifer and Brandie started a tee shirt company called Sweet Tees Shop.

Isn't that the cutest name ever? (You can follow them on instagram and they are on etsy too.)  I love it all- they knew they could design shirts so they found away to get them out there and created a company. It was truly the most inspiring thing for me.
They were so inspiration for me- they just did it.  They figured out all the little things and just did it. They are doing so great and I could not be more excited for them! (Go check out their cute holiday shirts!)

This was around the time I started making thanksgiving tees for my kids. And I actually made them before the night before thanksgiving, like usual.  Huge thrill over here.  I know the gizzard thing is weird, and the sweet as pie is recycled and renewed from last year, but I thought I was hilarious, and luckily my kids wanted to wear them.

I didnt sell them in the shop, but it got me excited to be making shirts before the night before their wear.
Along the way, I started dreaming about having Rainbow Roost sweatshirts and putting them in the shop.  I had bought the hello sweatshirts last year and realized that was all I was wearing this fall and winter.  I tried to find the actual sweatshirt online and figured out how to buy them wholesale with a tax ID.  So I ordered some, printed off a million ideas of how I wanted to make the logo on the shirt and then actually printed one.  I was critical of it at first, but now I love it.

I had more fun doing that than I have had in a really long time.
This summer has been a hard one for me for a few reasons and I was in the biggest creative slump of my life.  I prayed and prayed for more creativity and ideas. I lost my appetite (not weight, of course.  that would required actually not eating instead of just loosing my appetite and still trying everything just in case it sounded good once it was in my mouth), couldn't sleep, or wanted to sleep all the time, and just was having a hard time.  I loved making the leggings, but the sewing part is hard for me.  My favorite part is designing them.  So, I ended up with a lot of swatches of fabric and not enough motivation to make them into anything. Making shirts was one of the first times that I have come alive in a while.  I remembered why I love it so much and I am just so thankful for the creative outlet that it gives me.  It is truly an answer to prayer for me.
SO after the shirts came in, I just kept dreaming of holiday shirts.  I tried printing off and making a lot of different options and eventually felt like I had a few I loved.  I told Allison about the shirts, and she, of course, had tons of amazing ideas for shirts she wanted to put in the shop. My cousin Lindsey came over and made some with us and came up with the cutest ideas ever for shirts and we were all set to make them (until the screen didnt burn due to the incredible cold front that came in and warped my light that I burn screens with). It was still fun.  Then, Al came in town and we stayed up until 3 in the morning printing shirts.  We got so excited and had so much fun being together and making shirts.  It was just like we lived down the street from each other in Lubbock again, or were at our parents house making shirts again for lindsays 16th bday.  It was so much fun.
All that to say, holiday shirts are in the shop and we are so excited.  I want to add my kid leggings and headbands and am testing some patterns to see if they work, so be on the lookout for those, if you want.  You can almostttt call me stella.  I think I have almost gotten my groove back.
Thanks to Sweet Tees for your creativity and for the incredible inspiration.
Thank you guys for buying scarves from us, good kid jars, crochet hats, and whatever we have put up in the past.  We hope you like the sweatshirts!

MADE

Just a few things I have made around the house lately.  Nothing exciting.  

For Easter I made this little banner with this font that I just love.  I added some colored circles to the flower parts to add a little bit of color to it.


And though we all wore clothes on Easter, we didnt take any pictures at all, so this is all I have to remember Shea's first Easter.  #momfail
On my other mantle I got super excited and bought these letters from land of nod to stuff with flowers like this.  But it just did not look that good.  I want to try again, maybe with skinnier letters?  Or just one?  I still love the idea but it was a bust.  So, I just strung them on fishing wire.

Then I made shea a onsie out of the same fabric that I used for her sheets but in the knit.


and she is showing it off with her best rabies face.
I made her a few more dresses out of my spoonflower fabric and it is just so fun.  The knits haven't been that hard and its so forgiving with a baby.  I dont know if I could do kid clothes but I am def going to give it try...soonish.


You are welcome for the awesome quality phone pics.
I also have been taking my designs from my spoon flower fabrics and putting them up at my own page on society6.com,

which is a website for real artists who upload their work and people can buy them in prints or phone cases or pillows or shirts.  I am in NO WAY A REAL ARTIST at all, but I do like being able to make a rainbow and put it on a phone case or baby onsie for shea.  Jeff even got excited, and now everyone can have their very own silent night outdoors phone case.
I ordered a rainbow case and a few pillows too.

I am really not very good at any of this stuff- designing fabrics or phones or sewing or printing or knitting, but I just love doing it.  I guess thats what this is about, this whole blogging thing.  Getting inspired by what other people are doing and trying to make it your own.  Random tangent.  I dont know.  I just know that doing these little crafty things make me so happy- even though I am not an artist or a "creative" or anything like that. Just a mom, standing in front of a computer and editing photos of fake ikea flowers. (ok I am sitting and thats a terrible notting hill reference.  Maybe I should stand at a computer.  That would help with this baby belly I cant lose.  Sorry. I'm clearly too easily distracted these days.)

Popsicle Stick Snowflakes

Thanks to pinterest, we found our Christmas mantle decor.
We just followed her patterns and hot glued all the sticks together.  It went so fast and was so much fun!
We also cut out snowflakes out of paper and hung them up downstairs until we realized how fun it would be to hang them over the kids bed so they woke up to a snow storm every morning :)



It's a blizzard over here!
(What we didnt know is that it actually would be a blizzard the next week and we would be snowed in.  I guess you can say that we are weather predictors.  We hate to brag about all our skills, but when you got it, you got it…)

Happy Thanksgiving Eve!

Happy Thanksgiving tomorrow!
We made a little Thankful banner by gluing sticks together with hot glue and then wrapping yarn around the sticks.  Pretty simple and handmade looking, but we know I cant ever make things look better than homemade.

This year we made "Sweet as Pie" shirts for the girls and just let Ben have the traditional Turkey shirt.  I designed them, but Jeff cut them out and heat pressed them.  That guy.  He's so good.

And then after he spent all this time making the fronts absoultey perfect, I went rogue and just wrote their thankful lists on the back instead of heat pressing them.  I know, Ghetto.  I just cant help myself.
Either way, they have their thankful lists on there (for now- I think Avery's is washable marker :/).  SO there's that…
We have so much to be thankful for- Christ, Jeff moonlighting, a warm house, food on the table, healthy kids, a baby on the way and just really everything.
Hope you all have so much fun celebrating this year and eat until you can not eat anymore.  We all know I plan on it.

Shea's Quilt

So, I have kind of had a vision of making the crib sheets for the baby's bed for a while now with his/her  name on it.  My middle name is Shea and I knew that I wanted to use it for a first name if I had another kid, and since it is a gender neutral name we can use it for a boy or a girl!  I love a gender neutral name. I dont really know why. I really love a gender neutral anything.  Especially clothes.  I told Jeff I am buying Ben's entire outfit for myself the other day and he told me he really took a chance marrying someone who dresses so much like boy.  I know.  Give me a flannel and jeans any day of the week.  Do most people go off on tangents about crossdressing as a lifestyle choice.  I dont know.
 Anyway, so, Shea is the name for our baby and I thought it would be great if I could have the sheets on his/her bed that say that.
I went to spoonflower.com to make my dreams come true,

which I just LOVE, and made some different options with different fonts and spacing. I ordered lots of samples to see which ones I liked and which fabric I liked best.  They come in little 8X8 squares, and I ordered a ton of different ones.  I also made some with stars and arrows and triangles and dinosaurs, etc.  Since I had so many different samples, I thought it would be fun to put them all together to make a quilt.

I dont love that the back is two different fabrics, but I only had a yard of the back fabric and I had made that one too, so there was no way around it.

Sassy was a big help and she made a mini quilt of her own with some left over fabric.

It is def the very definiton of ghetto and the binding is-whew!-bad, but I am pretty excited that it happened and that its done.  I still haven't made the crib sheets yet, and if I know my inability to measure anything well, I do know they are going to be a big mess.  But hopefully they will fit on the bed.  Thats really all that matters, right?