diaper cake!

i'm still absorbed in all things baby over here... we had our first ultrasound last week, and now are waiting the excruciating 3 or 4 more weeks or so until we can find out our baby's gender. i need, i need to know whether i should be crafting in pink or blue! because i leave it in the bathroom all the time, i'm about halfway through a second reading of what to expect when you're expecting and am seriously thinking it might be time for some non-baby fun reading.

in the meantime, i found this fabulous tutorial for a diaper cake that i had to share! it's very detailed and turned out absolutely beautiful! she also used the martha stewart pattern for those gorgeous pink coffee filter roses, which she also included a tutorial for. And to top it all off, she included pictures of the unbelievably beautiful tea party baby shower that she made both of them for!

be sure to check out her blog, homemade by jill, to see the other lovely craftiness she's up to!







my new favorite fabulous little bit of inspirational eye-candy to check out is oh joy! for beautiful styles and designs for home, clothing, jewelry, and other fun stuff! she posts pictures in that beautiful blog-collage style that i love.

in other fascinating news, i have a new job! i will finally be escaping my local target and rejoining the "real" workforce as an office manager for a dental school! if you love target (as most of us do) don't ever work there, it will ruin it for you. i used to always wonder if you worked at an ice-cream shop would you eventually grow to hate ice-cream, impossible though it may seem? well, the answer for me was yes, and i'll be incredibly happy for this new job to start on monday so that target can go from a place i love to shop and hate to work back to just a place i love to shop!

and a thank you.

a thank you is well-deserved to you, dear readers, straight from me. thank you for your patience in putting up with my seldom-writing through the past few weeks of throwing a graduation party, celebrating my first mother's day both as a mom and without my mom, and the occasional doldrums when the crafting wind calms down.

thank you for your willingness to check back and visit!

around the studio.

i've been doing a bit of work here and there on some new ideas for petite bee, hoping to get some things made and up in the shop to see if there is any interest in handmade baby things. seems like there would be, right? this is what a project-in-the-works usually looks like around here:

i guess because we don't know which gender our little B will be, i've been drawn to lovely greens, tans, yellows, light browns, and neutral linen in the meantime for petite bee. i'm finding it's very hard to find gender-neutral items that are

1. truly gender neutral (aka, no sneaking in of a bit of blue here and there) and



2. still cute, sweet, and adorable despite not being permitted to scream the obvious "boy" or "girl"

i've run into this so much so in my own shopping, that i'm considering making petite bee almost exclusively packed full of lovely neutral items to fill that void (though almost anything can be easily spiced up with a pink bow or blue boat to differentiate). and wouldn't it be nice to have a go-to place to make gift-giving easier for those who are too early in the pregnancy to know yet or (ahem... crazy enough to) want to be surprised?

the other slight dilemma i'm debating is whether to open a separate etsy shop exclusively for petite bee. as of now, i have just enough things posted that it's slightly bothersome to me to have the shop in such a jumble (and i don't want it to become too difficult to navigate). however, you don't want to have to send folks too many different places to shop for fear that they'll lose interest. any brilliant input on this idea?

also currently on a halt are any attempts at organizing my studio for now. anytime i get anxious or worried at the confusion i soak in the one little corner that does actually look nice and organized:

(and yep, that's me in the red shorts in the reflection! hi there!)

the red "B" bag on the left is the one i did the no-sew monogram tutorial on, and the one on the right is a new laptop bag bought on clearance from target because of the ellebee green trim!

i am excited though, that i've applied to be in show where i'll be allowed to sell only supplies (with a bit of ellebee advertisement thrown in, to be sure!) which will help relieve some of the supplies-overload situation from the loads of things i inherited from my mom. i've done this show before, back when it was humbly called the crafter's flea market, and now it has "grown up" into the designer's downtown market. The lady that organizes it is really nice, and it usually has a great turn-out among not only people wanting to buy handmade things, but also people who make things by hand themselves (thus the high hopes for releasing some of these supplies back out into the world). so i'll have lots of work on my hands getting them all packaged, priced, and labeled!

rutville, population: me.

yes, it's true. i am in a creative rut. you'd think with the excitement of a new baby on the way, crafty goodness would be falling off my fingertips like raindrops, but sadly, it is not so. while i am very excited, i am in quite a bit of a rut at work, and it's affecting my energy level (as is pregnancy) and enthusiasm for doing anything creative recently.

i did attempt to start crocheting a new grannie square snuggly blanket similar to the one i made for my nephew last year, but i didn't get very far with it. i was working on it in the car on a day trip to the beach, and on the way home, i had a very sleepy puppy conked out in my lap. but then again, tired from soaking up the sun and the extra effort of walking on sand and staying vertical in the waves is the best kind of tired:

LOVE that sandy little nose.

also, it's hard to let the nesting instinct run wild on you when you don't know if you're creating for a boy or a girl yet, and you don't know if his or her nursery will be in this house because we don't know if both of us will be changing jobs...

sigh. rutville.