Christmas Stockings Giveaway

Hello and Happy Holidays! I know I'm a bit late on getting this out there but my intentions are to get this giveaway going and all entries in by the 18th, I know that only gives you a few days to enter but that's not so hard, right?! I need to put a hustle on my part of making them. The stocking giveaway rules are: 1. you need to go to my Etsy shop and tell me your favorite thing. That counts as one entry. 2. For another entry you must follow me, and this next year will have much more to follow : )so let me know you are following. 3. You need to tell me why you should win, which won't actually help you win because in order to be fair I use random.org to generate the winner. That will count as your final entry. So you can enter up to three times! Please pass this along to any friends that may need some cute handmade stockings with their Children's names on them! Best wishes and good luck everyone! Shawn @ Tulips and Turnips

Mom Entrepreneurs Vendor Faire and Giveaways

I don't know how many of you will be in the Northern California Wine Country area tomorrow BUT... Tomorrow Night The Merryvale Winery will be having our "Ladies Night Out Vendor Faire" for "Mom Entrepreneurs"! This event is also a Toys for Tots Fundraiser, in which each vendor and everyone who comes to the event are urged to bring an unwrapped toy for the donation to Toys for Tots. There will be a very elegant atmosphere with cream colored table clothes and candles as well as lots of great wine and appetizers. It will be a great place to shop for the holidays and to come show your support and party with the best of us! ; ) The event will be at the Merryvale Winery from 7 to 9pm, tomorrow, Wednesday the 28th of November in St. Helena. AND if you come, come to my table (Tulips and Turnips) and say you saw the invite on Tulips and Turnips blog, you will be entered to win a very cool Christmas gift from me that I will be announcing a week from the event date on my blog. Other ways at enter will be to go check out my new website www.tulipsandturnips.com, and tell me what your favorite item is. The site will not be up until Nov. 30th., also another entry would be to follow Tulips and Turnips, and leave a comment about why you think you should win this great prize. It's not munch but its a perfect little something for a woman who needs a special place to put her small things. Hint hint : ) Also I will be doing the christmas stocking giveaway again this year, just like last year. It will most likely be posted on here on the second Monday in December. Keep a look out for the rules for entry into the giveaway. ; )

What IS going on here??

The new website that has been under construction for many months, and has gone through several designers, but is finally going to be coming together by the middle of August. Part of why it's taken so long and why I have been absent from my blog, is how much work I've been putting into the inventory and all of the business components, but it is starting to look better each day. I have had some set backs there too however, I am very involved in my evolving career as a lactation consultant and a post-partum doula, and it's a busy business to say the least. Another very time consuming thing, but fun thing, that is part of building both websites is taking great photos for the the products and to create messages without words, and with the beautiful models I have, mothers and baby's, both websites will be so great! But first and foremost is my family, as many of you know I have two young children, my boys are three and one years old, and my sister just had her first baby six days ago. Sadly the new baby is still in the NICU but is doing better each day, he may be there several more days, I have had to be there each day to be there for my sister and give her support where she needs it. We live in Aptos, Ca and she had the baby at a hospital in Salinas, which has been a pain in the butt to drive to but it's worth it when I get there! My husband, who has been very busy finishing his paramedic training, is now officially a paramedic and I couldn't be more proud of him, not only is he one of the most hard working, caring, and sweet guys, he's a hero and now not just to me and our boys but to each person he has the honor of helping, and hopefully saving many many lives. The process has been hard and sometimes stressful because for over six months he was training on the job in the ambulance acting as lead medic, and he was gone anywhere from 72-96 hours each week, and it was just so hard to balance everything with him gone so much and so often. It all paid off and I couldn't be more proud of him! And, soon we'll be ready to try for another addition to our family, hopefully a girl this time ; ) I will be working on a second website soon after my Tulips and Turnips website is up and running, I'm not sure what to call my second business yet, so any ideas for a name would be greatly appreciated! It will be for my post-partum doula service. So, if you have any feed back for me, I would appreciate it! Thanks for hangin in with me, I know a blog that just sits for months is not fun, but I do intent for it to be so much more. ; )

This blanket is large and nicely thick with high quality cotton batting, perfect for baby to lay on and have some stimulating tummy time, with a very cute matching organic t-shirt, size small but can be ordered in medium or large. All fabrics besides clothing are pre-washed by me with Eco-friendly laundry soap and everything is created and stored in a smoke-free, animal hair-free environment. Each item is made of the highest quality, with care and love put into each and every piece, and each piece is a one of a kind because they are handmade.

This is an Organic blanket with organic onesie and is super soft and sweet, perfect for a baby girl. The blanket is nicely padded with natural cotton batting and handmade with care. The front of the blanket is a mok patchwork with flower patches, trees, wind mills, little dutch girls, stars, and lots of other cute little details, the border is a nice soft yellow dot, and the back is white with flower patches. The matching organic onesie is size small but can be ordered in medium or large. The fabrics is pre-washed in eco-friendly laundry soap and created in a smoke-free, animal hair-free environment. Perfect for tummy time or a great warm blanket for baby's crib. Matching nursery items can be special ordered through conversation. I can make items such as a matching bumper, sheets, pillows, curtains, stretched canvas wall art, bibs, and nursing covers.

My New Website

My new website is coming soon, it's currently under construction. I'll soon be very happy to get rid of my Etsy shop because there are SO many shops and so many items on Etsy now that every items gets buried unless you're pretty much constantly "refreshing" it. My website will have all of the baby things I make and a custom order option. Everything else I make like the bags you see on here will still mostly be giveaway items from time to time. The website designer I have hired is great so far and I am excited about it, the one thing that's a bit frustrating is that I wish I could be more involved in the actual building of the site. I like to do things myself so it's hard to have access to it but not be able to do much because the whole HTML thing is such a foreign language to me. One thing I'd also like to do is to get some super great pictures for it and that is something I can do, BUT how to get my kids to sits still long enough... a whole other thing!

The Overnight Bag

I recently made the bag for overnight trips, and I tried to stick to a design pattern but it's so hard for me to do that. It's just easier to design it myself. I find that making bags of all sizes is a really fun thing, there are so many possibilities.

The website nightmare

Well, I've been working on the website that will replace my Etsy shop and be the main focus for my baby product business. It's taken a huge amount of time and I have regretfully neglecting my blog once again. The hutch is finally almost finished and as soon as I get the last few doors on, I'll post a picture. It has literally taken months so get done so I'm thrilled it's this close.
I think I might be crazy but I decided to paint my kitchen myself, in all my free time, LOL! And on top of being in the midst of my IBCLC internship, I decided I needed one more thing on my plate, I signed up for post partum doula training. But I do think it's going to be a really great combination once I'm finished with it all.
A while back i bought a Silhouette machine hoping it would be easy and great for my business in so many ways but I found it to be extremely confusing, however I'm starting to realize maybe I'm just slightly technologically inept. So I'm going to get it out anyways and try making shirts for the non-profit organization that I am part of, and I hoping to convince eveyone at the next board meeting that we should take part in the Human Race.
I have a few cute things I've been working on, I'll be posting them soon. : )

Tulips and Turnips in 2012

At the beginning of the year, a month ago already, I had big plans to be posting more, having more give-aways, and more tutorials, and it just hasn't happened. Many things have kept me from this and I am trying to rush through some of them to get back to my blog and my extremely slowly growing business. I have been finishing my studies to become an IBCLC and currently work with the Nursing Mother's Counsel here in Santa Cruz, Ca. where we provide free breastfeeding support and breastfeeding classes. I have been very involved in my son's preschool too, and as my one year old is growing he is proving to be a very willful boy who needs more attention at this point. Thus I've been going to bed much earlier than I used to, basically cutting out the time I always had reserved for my blogging and sewing/crafting time. As I finish up some of the things that are very time consuming over the next month or two, I'm going to try to slowly get back into blogging! You will see more of me in the coming months : )

The GIANT hutch project

My hutch project has gone from just painting a giant hutch (handed down to my husband and I when his great grandmother passed away), to completely transforming it. It started out a maple shade of wood of some kind with extremely ugly colonial hardware and icky hart-shaped and curvy features. I took off all of the hardware and striped it down to the bare straight angle design. I bought some wonderful Annie Sloan chalk paint in two colors and started painting. This paint is so great, you don't have to strip the wood before painting it and it goes on soooo nicely! The important thing is to use nice brushes because it will make a BIG difference!
I finished the bottom just before Christmas, which was great, but the top half has been much more challenging. I decided I hated the middle shelf the other day right in the middle of painting, I had actually been painting around it, avoiding it for some reason. I knew I hated it but I just didn't know what to do with it. I decided to try and go for something I've always wanted in a hutch, a shelf rack for plates, the kind that you can display plates vertically back to back. I found a great tutorial for the shelf on Nest, Nesting, Nested. I'm hoping to finish it soon. I SO wish I had taken pictures of it through the stages of its transformation, but I will post a picture of it finished. And I might be able to dig up a before shot somewhere, wouldn't that be cool?!