Let's Catch Up!

Hey Everyone!

Well that was a nice long maternity leave! ;)

To give a brief synopsis of what has happened in the 16 months I haven't blogged:

We welcomed Willow Ozora Wales into the world on June 13th, 2013, a full month and a day before her expected due date. That day, I had been diagnosed with severe pre-eclampsia that day and was called into triage to have an "emergency" (not truly an emergency in so much as being put under for the procedure) cesarean section.

Willow was 7lbs 13oz (hugest pre-term baby ever!!) and 19-3/4" long.

She is our big, smiling, 15 month old now! She is very bald...hopefully for not much longer!

It is so hard to believe that she was born over a year ago already!

My latest crochet baby was also born last fall! I made Willow a hat last October that had a beautiful crystal button on it, and made some very cool interchangeable flowers to attach to it. I put a picture on facebook and had 7 people ordering similar hats! I was flabbergasted!

I announced to my mom that I thought I wanted to work hard and do one craft show in December. She though that doing a craft show would be a great idea, but that I pursue several shows to try and help off-set the cost of putting together a display and making hats. So, I jumped off the deep end and booked a show the very next weekend! We had a very limited selection, but we got a ton of custom orders! I think we looked pretty fantastic for our first show!

We made more and more hats, and our displays gradually got larger...

Willow and I even sported matching hats at the shows!

If I am not mistaken, we sold hats at 6 shows last fall. It was so exhilarating! My mom and I really loved producing the hats :)

This year we got all ready to start doing shows in the end of August. This was my first show at the farmers market in Janesville

It rained cats and dogs, but I still sold 4 hats!

The next weekend I couldn't believe it when I sold 10 hats. That was as great as I did at the majority of my shows last fall!

The next weekend was the weekend that may have changed my outlook on my hat business forever. I like to call it the crazy, amazing, outstanding hat day.

We attended the Oconomowoc Fall Festival. It was the first cold day of the year, and the sun was playing hooky with us. The minute we started hanging up hats in our display, the minute they started selling. And Selling. And Selling. And Selling. And MORE AND MORE AND MORE. I am not kidding you, I only got to go to the bathroom twice in 8 hours. WE WERE MOBBED. YES I AM YELLING!!! I sold every last hat that we had made this year. And almost every hat left from our stock from last year. We sold 100 hats! In ONE day!

This was a very unusually calm moment. I guarantee there were 10 people waiting for this picture to be taken so they could storm my table ;)

This was 2 weeks ago. I have been in hat recovery ever since. Our house has kind of looked like this...

Google is pretty cool. They made my booth look like art! ;)

I have been working really hard on getting my etsy shop up and running the last few weeks! If you would like to purchase a hat from me and you can't make it to one of my shows, I would really love to make you something special!

How is that for an update! I will be updating again soon!

Chelsea