Friday, September 30, 2011

Friday Finds: September 30

One of my very favorite colors is brown. I love all the beautiful fall shades in brown, from the lighter creams and tans to the deep rich chocolate browns. With that said, here are a few of my favorite browns that I have found this week:

Vanilla Soap
by sandyvern

Flower Necklace
by JayneMarie

Family Tree Vinyl Wall Decal
by offthewallexpression

Enjoy!

Friday, September 23, 2011

Friday Finds: September 23

The weather is starting to turn to fall, and I am reminded of the fun things that this season brings. My son starts soccer next week, the leaves will soon be turning, and the weather will be colder.

With this in mind, this week I bring you a bit of fall goodness with these greens and browns. Enjoy!

Dead Sea Mud with Aloe Vera Gel
from ancientoils

Bean Jar - Green
from kcdragonfly

A Touch of Elegance Bracelet
from lasfloresdelsur

Saturday, September 17, 2011

Friday Finds: Upcycle Recycle Reuse

Meet the owner of UpcycleRecycleReuse, an Etsy shop located in Colchester, Vermont. It is a place where old products are given more value not less. The goal of this shop is to prevent wasting potentially useful materials by making use of existing ones.

Continue reading to learn more:

How did you get your start on Etsy?
I wanted to build my on web store but could never find the time. Then I found an Etsy shop I liked via goggle and set up a buyers account. I was hesitant to set up a sellers account but I kept hearing good things about Etsy via word of mouth and figured I'd give it a go. After my first sale it became addictive.

What does a typical day look like for you?
I am crazy busy with my day job leaving a little time in the evenings and weekends to create and promote.

How did you get started with upcycling/recycling?
I have always looked to reuse things. The value of reusing and upcycling was instilled in my at a young age by my grandmothers. Upcycling may be a new thing but the phrase "waste not, want not" is an old adage that still rings true.

If you could be anywhere in the world for one day, where would it be?
I would love for a change to visit Greece. My family originally came from Greece and I still have relatives there.

You can also find her on her blog.

Friday, September 9, 2011

Friday Finds: Jaynemarie

Meet Jaynemarie Crawford from JewelryByJaynemarie in the San Francisco Bay Area, California.

She started making clothing and accessories when her daughters were small and decided to continue with designing and making jewelry.

Her specialty is designing for bridal parties, using pearls, crystals and gems to match many different color schemes, and makes her earrings and necklaces with silver, gold, gemstones, pearls and crystals.

Here are some of her beautiful creations:



You can also find her on Facebook, Twitter, and her blog.

Friday, September 2, 2011

Friday Finds: BabaMoon

Meet Naomi Morgan from BabaMoon in Birmingham, England. She is a mom of two beautiful children as well as the owner of two stores on Etsy and a handmade blog.

Introduction
Babamoon.etsy.com is a big focus for me at the moment which is totally inspired by my kids whom have brought out the girly girl in me! I think it shows in all of my cute designs as I tend to focus on flowers, pet animals, amigurumi and all things bright and colorful as my muse for design ideas. I am generally a crafter and artist by nature but do take my creative side into the realm of digital photography of which you can see more in my store moonangelnay.etsy.com.

Name one thing that not many people know about you.
It's funny you should ask, as I had been thinking about this regarding my blog only the other day. The fact that I go on and on about my job, my kids, my photography, and on and on and on, yet I have never mentioned much about my love for music! Particularly local music to me, classical music, world music, folk and any music that has me in fits of laughter. I actually play some instruments too. My best instrument that I learnt in my childhood is (ahem) the recorder... lol. But I am self taught on the guitar and bass guitar, and can give the didgeridoo a good old toot too. I was even in a band once!

How did you get your start on Etsy?
You know I can't even remember how I found Etsy, I only remember starting with a shop that pretty much contained all of my crafty talents, paintings, leather accessories, baby items, jewelry, macrame stuff... sheesh. If I knew then what I know now LOL. It didn't work, I believe, as it had no consistency. So it then became my photograpy store. And after a long while, my daughter was born and my second shop Babamoon came along soon after.

How did you choose your shop name?
For some crazy reason I thought I would be able to link my photography store and Babamoon together, mostly because I want to eventually go into portraiture, but I have since had to adjust those plans somewhat.

I am known as Moonangelnay in my other shop, so I literally thought... "Babies... Moonangelnay... Babamoon!" It certainly wasn't a stroke of genius lol! Not with the post-birth mom brain I had at the time anyway!

What does a typical day look like for you?
Well, it's very different every day! But that is mostly because I am a full time mum to my kids too. So I pretty much work during the night when they are both asleep as it's the longest run of exclusive time I can dedicate to the store. I do work in the day too though, particularly during busy weeks. Also when my fiance is home off work I get full days of exclusive hat time to enjoy! But there is no typical day I'm afraid.

What's your favorite season of the year and why?
I love the autumn. It's mostly because of the colors, and zipping down the road with giant piles of leaves blowing everywhere. It must be my inner child or something, I just think it's so much fun!

What was the hardest decision you ever had to make?
It may sound odd, but it's a very recent occurence and it was to see my doctor about possibly having Endometriosis.

My mom and I had a very hard time in my childhood trying to get doctors to acknowledge the problem back when it really needed to be looked in to as I suffered a lot and it started very young from when I was 9, but I used to get turned away regularly with ignorant comments like "oh she's just trying to get a few days off school"... It taught me that doctors couldn't be trusted, and it took a LOT for me to even drag myself to who I had considered the nicest doctor I've ever had. But it's something that is finally getting looked at after all these years, which I'm sure my fiance is grateful for... I do feel sorry for him at those times of the month, poor fella LOL! ;-)

What do you consider your best personality trait?
I don't know really, I like to laugh a lot and try to be quite light hearted since I do look at my life and feel quite amused a lot of the time LOL. Possibly that!

What's your birthstone? Do you wish you had a different one?
Ohhh mine is Opal and I LOVE it. The fact that you get such a beautiful spectrum of colors in the stone totally suits my fetish for bright colors! :)

You can also find Naomi on her blog, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and Stumbleupon.