New things!

Well, hello! I have been inexcusably absent. There are lots of new and exciting things in the works for my family and Bottle Tree. For starters, I found out in February that my book proposal has been accepted, and I will be writing a book for Stash Books, (a subset of C&T Publishing)!   I am wildly ecstatic and have really enjoyed the process thus far! The book is still in the very early stages, so I can't give too much away, but more to come!  

At the same time, my family of 3 humans + 1 grumpy cat have moved to a lovely house on a quiet street that suites our lives so much better. It is just around the corner form our old one, and the street has 8 boys between the ages of 6-10, so Davin is having a ball. We have a nice sized backyard that will allow us to plant a big garden and have chickens! I cannot wait-- now to build the coupe....  

Bottle Tree is also expanding into a few new, exciting areas that have kept me quite busy... I'm excited to announce those soon!   Needless to say, we've been rather busy around here; my brain has been going in 6 different directions, and I'm not awesome at juggling so many balls at once. But I'm working on it. I have learned quite a lot about myself from starting my own business: like I am really awesome at finding 12 other things to do that are more fun than that one thing that I really need to do... I downloaded all of these to-do list managers to help me create and track priorities... but it is really easy to just not open those apps and reorganize my fabric cabinet instead ;). So now I have a giant white board in my studio with all of my action items listed, and I have to physically cross items off when they are done. There are few things more satisfying than that, am I right? Meanwhile, those uncrossed items are constantly glaring at me, keeping me on task.   I have also learned that I am darned indecisive (when my husband reads this, he will give a laugh, eye-roll, and a "duh"), which this is not great when steering a business. I tend to mull things over in my mind until they are obscured and gnarled, and I forget what the original idea was-- sometimes making an imperfect decision is better than never making one at all. I shall probably trademark that sage nugget.  

So I'm learning to be gracious with myself, (but not too gracious!) this is a process, and I'm sure I'll discover 84 other things I shouldn't do, but that's life, eh?  

  I realized that I haven't blogged about many quilts that I've made in the past, so the next few posts will be sharing some of those. This is one of the first wall hangings I made for my Etsy shop. I've since made many different versions of this design.  

Here is the inverse.

Here is another favorite of mine, Roots! They almost look like tentacles to me... I've been itching to do an octopus or Kraken! Hmm...

Warm roots!

Thanks for taking a look, I look forward to sharing more!