The Pursuit of Filthy Lucre…

…is pretty much what keeps me busy these days.

So I announced on this blog a few months ago that I was opening an Etsy shop selling crib bedding- Dnile Design. I thought I’d put my sewing hobby out there and see if anyone was interested. I figured I’d leave it be and if I got the occasional sale, great. A little extra money coming in. I planned on having maybe a sale a monthish.

Three months later, I’ve had almost 40 orders, one side of our playroom has been transformed into my studio, my mailman knows me by name, and credit card companies have started sending me applications in bulk. There are fabric scraps and random threads constantly stuck to our clothes. My arms are covered in burn lines from bumping into the iron while prepping fabric. Most nights and naptimes find me at the sewing machine with Genius mixes of Guns N Roses and Americana blasting from the iPhone dock. Things are a little busier than I expected. I’ve had to raise my prices once already to slow down orders.

This is definitely a good thing. It’s nice to have something concrete to work with a tangible end product and feedback. I love being able to be home and raise our kids while they’re young but as any mother will attest it’s not exactly the most gratifying job day to day. It’s often dirty and frustrating and full of negative feedback usually in the form of a scream. In fact at the moment I’m alternating between typing this and stopping Rhett from swatting the Christmas tree with a broom. Being able to think and create for someone and then hear how much they love it is feels really good. And of course, the money is nice, especially with two house payments and preschool to pay for.

Now I need to look ahead and decide where to go with this. I’m right at the brink of getting more orders than I can keep up with. I’m doing zero advertising or social media networking because I don’t want to bump up sales. That’s tough because I also have this natural inclination to do those things and grow my business as large as possible. BUT I’m limited in time and production capacity so I need to accept that this just isn’t the time for it- not while I have munchkins that I love in need of my attention. I’m thinking of raising prices again but at the same time I don’t want to have a product that normal people can’t afford. We’ll see where we go from here.

In the meantime here are a few photos of recent orders:

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Finally

My mother is about to explode. She still hasn’t seen pictures of the kids on Halloween and she’s going CRAZY. Even though we have a good reason for procrastinating- our camera has been languishing in the capable but slow hands of the Geek Squad at Best Buy for the last two weeks. We got the memory card back though and I just loaded it into our old camera to upload the pictures. Behold, the Mason house turned into the wonderful world of Dr. Seuss.

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A Day at the Beach

We drove down to Newport Beach tonight to take a walk and watch the sunset. It was a perfect California evening.

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Announcing DNile Design

Finally! I’ve been toying with the idea of setting up an Etsy shop for ages now but never had the time or the focus. Suddenly all that has changed. Finn started preschool recently and the twins have realized that they have the run of the house from the playroom to Finn’s room two mornings a week so they pretty much disappear. I finally have time on my hands, something I haven’t had in a very long time. Our house has a fantastic and large playroom that doubles as my sewing room, so I can get work done while the kids play behind me. I’ve been finishing so many projects recently that I thought “hey, I can actually do this now.”

So announcing… DNile Design! I’m putting my sewing hobby to use making custom crib bedding and personalized quilts using fun modern designer fabrics. These are for the hip mama who isn’t into traditional boring baby decor. I’ll be working with customers to pick the right colors and fabrics and make a nursery set that they’ll love. Please spread the word, I’ll need all the help promoting my shop that I can get, especially in these early days. You can visit my shop here:  dniledesign.etsy.com. Below are some shots of a sample I made for Lucy in luscious autumn prints. There are a few grandkid photos as well to placate the grandmas.

Finn ready to go to his first day of school. He insisted on taking a book.

The twins having a little picnic.

Holding hands on the beach

Tell your friends! I’ll also be putting up gift certificates for custom bedding and quilts as well- great for shower gifts.  AND if you use the coupon code STATEOFDNILE, you’ll recieve 10% off!

Fair vs. Fair

Call me a skeptic, but when I, a recently transplanted Midwesterner, saw ads everywhere for the Los Angeles County Fair, I may have rolled my eyes a bit. I mean seriously, LA, with its breezy attitude, fake boobs and materialistic culture, has a county fair? Do they even know what a county fair is? Don’t they realize that some people around here may have actually been to a real (midwestern) county fair and have pretty high standards for what constitutes one? I mean really, there’s no way they could have hot dog pig races around here without being ironic about it.

But it’s Labor Day and that meant that admission to the Fair was only $1 today. Sold!

California is Rad

So contrary to the naysayers who thought we’d never make it once they heard we were planning to drive from Indiana to Utah without stopping for the night, we have made it. We are all safe, alive and Californians. We’re missing our friends in Indiana but adjusting well here. Mostly. I’m sweating like a pig. More on that later.

I’ll abridge our trip out here, mostly because everything has been so busy lately that I’ve forgotten most of it. The drive went well though. We picked my dad up in Chicago and kept on driving. The kids were so happy to have him with us. We drove for a few hours and then stopped at a parking lot in nowhere Illinois to let the kids stretch their legs. There was a tall hill that Finn ran up. Rhett and Lucy took off after him but kept slipping. Everytime they did, they’d roll a few feet down the hill before catching themselves. It was awesome.

I Am an Urban Adventurer…er

I can’t move my legs. The big toe on my right foot is purple and can’t bear weight. The rest of my body feels like one giant bruise. Liz is missing part of her knee. But oh am I happy. So so happy. Urban Adventure kicked my butt but was one of the coolest things I’ve ever done.

First things first. We biked 20.26 miles total. As Patrick said, we basically biked a marathon. Have I mentioned that Liz hasn’t biked since she was twelve and I hadn’t biked since college. Yeah. So there’s that.

Anyways, we were giddy in the days leading up to it. We were obsessing about what we were going to be packing, what our strategy should be, what we were going to wear. We were so consumed with thinking about it that we completely forget to register and pick up our packets on Friday night. Oops.

Going Out With A Bang

This is how I’ll be saying goodbye to South Bend.

I’m so excited I can hardly stand it.

Going to California

Today it finally hit me that we’re moving. Very soon. Two and a half weeks. Yikes.

It’s not that I’ve been in denial. I’ve just been purposely avoiding thinking about and planning for it all summer. I kept thinking that once we sold our house then we could get moving on logistics and everything would come together. In an ideal world.

So we didn’t sell our house.

I Survived the Sunburst 10K!

Hoo wee I am wiped out!!! But I’m here and I’m still alive and kicking (the children who won’t stop crawling up my leg).

So where to start. How about three months ago when Liz and I were commiserating on how out of shape we were and how we’d both like to be the kind of people who run for fun-except that we both hate running. So we decided to set a goal to run a 5K this summer. The Sunburst Races are held every summer here and are kind of a big deal, with races ranging from a 5K walk to a full Boston qualifier marathon. So we met at the gym on campus a few times and started running. I think we made it a full lap around the 1/8 mile track at some point but maybe I’m remembering wrong. We both felt like elephants lumbering around that track. Then we started tossing around the idea of a 10K, even though we couldn’t run a tenth of a K without falling over. I thought it sounded pretty impossible until Liz said she’d registered for it. Crap. I registered too, we both downloaded the Couch to 10K app to our various iThingies and got started on a three day a week thirteen week program. The first workout was something like run 30 seconds, walk five minutes for an hour. We were a long way away from a 10K.

Fast forward to this morning.