Valentine's Day!!

Happy Valentine's Day everyone!!  Hope you all had a wonderful day. I know we have had a wonderful couple of days.  Our celebration started yesterday with going out to eat and shopping, two things that we rarely do with this big 'ole family of ours.  Having two under the age of two makes it difficult to do much of either.  At least, without pulling our hair out.   ;@)

But God blessed us with a very peaceful day and we were so thankful, my husband and I.  We decided to let the kiddos pick out their own Valentine's gifts this year.  It's funny to watch the differences between our oldest, who is a boy, and the girls.  He always heads for the toy department and the girls always head for, you guessed it, the clothing and accessories!  But who doesn't get a kick out of shopping for their own gift, right?  So it was a blast!  There were almost no tears all day long and lots of laughter and silliness.  We all went home with a little something and we chose 2 humongous (is that a word?) boxes of chocolate between the 6 of us!!  Of course, the baby doesn't get chocolate and the two year old only gets it rarely.  So really, I guess it was between the 4 of us!! 

Which reminds me of why Valentine's Day is almost my favorite holiday.  I LOVE chocolate!!  I mean LOVE.  Like sometimes I think I might not be able to live without it kind of love.  That's wrong I know, but I really do enjoy chocolate more than any other kind of food.  Chocolate should be a food group.  Well, chocolate is a food group in my book. 

Sorry, got a little sidetracked.  Where was I?  Oh, Valentine's Day...I really like Valentine's Day.  It is an amazing holiday.  It's all about love, and what is better than love? Besides chocolate?  (Just kidding....)  I like Christmas because it is about Jesus and His birth and Who He is.  I like Easter because it is about what Jesus did.   But I like Valentine's Day because it is about why He did it.  Now I know that traditionally, Valentine's Day is all about romantic love.  And that is wonderful and we celebrate that.  But as a family, we also celebrate the love between each other as a family and the love that God has for us.  We are so thankful to have each other to love and we are thankful for the love that God showed when He sent His Son to earth to redeem us.  It is amazing to me that He could look at us and see who we are and still want to save us.  It is crazy and wonderful and amazing all at the same time!! 

So anyway, we spent yesterday shopping and we spent this evening exchanging homemade Valentine's and just enjoying each other.  Granny and Papa had sent a little something for all of us, so we all had fun going through those presents.  We decided to have dinner at home and we just had a wonderful day overall!  So nice to just escape from reality for a bit and enjoy the holiday. 

Oh, I forgot!  I did do some business stuff, so I wanted to show you a couple of my new designs.  I will just tease you with some pictures today and explain how they came about another day since I've already taken up soooo much of your time talking about this wonderful holiday we had ;@)

Tying the knot

Out of all the things I do as a designer and seamstress, the one thing I hate the most is sewing by hand!!  And the part that makes me despise hand sewing is, you guessed it, tying the knot!!!  That might sound silly to some, but there is good reason behind it. I have spent a lot of time trying to get a knot large enough that it won't slip through the fabric as soon as I sew the first stitch!  I usually tie a knot, then tie another, then another and eventually I get two to land in the same spot to make a big enough knot that it doesn't slip through.  Call me crazy, but I think I missed the basic element of tying the knot somewhere in my sewing lessons!!

Well, no more!!!  Heather Bailey has shown me the ultimate in knot tying.  And it couldn't be more simple.  I already use the principle in finishing off my stitching, I just never knew how to start out that way.  So I want to share it with all of those who are starting out on their own, or maybe even who have been in it a while but want to learn an easier way.  The free mini-tutorial is here.  You won't be sorry you took the time to look it over. 

P.S.  I use this little secret to finish off my stitching as well.  Nobody ever taught me, I just figured it out.  So you may already know, but if you don't - try it!!  The same method that Heather uses to tie the knot, except at the end.  When you get to your last stitch, don't pull it taut on the underside.  Hold the needle on the topside with one hand and the loop on the underside with the other.  Take the needle and push it back through the underside of the fabric taking care to run it through the loop.  Wrap the tip of the loop around the needle three to four times then pull it tight.  This will create a nice, strong knot on the bottom of the fabric.  I love this method because the knot is strong and I don't have to fiddle with trying to tie it off.  The only thing you really have to watch out for using this method is that your thread doesn't tangle.  If you take great care to keep the threads taut, you shouldn't have a problem.

Hope this helps all those novice seamstresses out there and maybe even a few pros (wow, wouldn't that make ME feel good!!!).

Oh, one last thing.  Sew 4 Home has some great information here.  This is where I found the Heather Bailey tutorial to begin with, so you might want to check it out.  They always have the greatest info!  Happy sewing!!!

Detour

Sorry guys - Hala Baby blog is under construction!  We have chaos around here right now and it might be a little while before i can get back, so please excuse the mess.  You can take a detour to facebook if you have stopped by, where you will see some new bows and i've even added a new line...soon to be adding more items to that line!! 

Thanks for your patience!!

Wow!  What a week it has been!  It's almost Christmas and we are trying to get it all done in time.  My kiddos are asking every day "How many more days til Christmas!??!!"  The excitement is in the air everywhere we go. 

Every family has traditions during the holidays.  One of our family traditions is baking sugar cookies together and decorating them.  We also enjoy driving around looking at all of the Christmas lights.  My childrens' faces light up with joy when we see a big neighborhood with all the lights shining brightly.  It's one of the joys of the holidays.  Another Christmas tradition is making crafts.  My children love to make any kind of craft - especially the messy ones.  They love to paint and cut and glue any type of material!  (My little Anastacia is the "mess maker" in the family - her favorite thing to do is draw on anything but paper.  She walks around the house saying "only on paper" as she scribbles on the wall or the door.  Yikes!  And it doesn't seem to matter where I hide the crayons or markers, she finds them!)  A really fun thing to do is to make homemade ornaments for the Christmas tree.  We like to use the cardboard ornaments that you find in the craft section at Wal Mart or Hobby Lobby.  They are really cheap and all you have to do is let your child go crazy with the paint or markers.  Let it dry, apply modge podge and then allow it to dry.  If you want it to really shine, add several layers of modge podge.  I'm telling you, it's better than any store bought ornament and you'll always have the memory of your little one making it for you with their very own hands.

I think it's so important that we have traditions in our family, it gives our children a sense of stability and unity.   I would love to hear some of your holiday traditions.  Please leave me a note tellng me what your traditions are.  Hey, maybe we could get some ideas from each other!!

Photo share

Here are a few of the bows and clips I have for sale right now.  Fabric flowers are my passion of the moment, but with the holidays I created a few cute clips and bows.  For the full selection, click on the Facebook badge to the right and look under my photos tabs.

I love comments, so please feel free to leave comments here or on my facebook fan page!  I also do custom bows and clips, so don't hesitate to comment or message me on my FB page.

Welcome

This is my first official post on my new Hala Baby blog.  I am so excited to be doing this!  I have been trying to figure out exactly what I wanted to say in this post and I decided that I should give a little history of how Hala Baby came to be.  This is just this little mama being transparent....

I am a stay at home mother of four children - age 10, 6, 2 and 6 months.  I have been married for almost 13 years.  I started out as a working wife, but when I was pregnant with my first child came to the realization that God's perfect plan for me was to be a stay at home wife and mother.  In a sense, I fought this for many years.  I struggled with letting go and letting God be number one and my husband number two in my life.  I rarely got the balance right and I always thought that I somehow had to help both of them out.  I struggled with allowing my husband to be the sole support of the family and trusting God to be our source.  I always seemed to fall back into "making ends meet" by getting a part-time or full-time job.  I found many times that this really just made things so much worse because it simply wasn't in God's plan for our lives.  So God had to do something drastic! 

Long story short, my husband and I went through a major transition in our life in 2006.  God moved us across the country and taught us a few lessons on what place He was to be in our lives and Who we were to depend on.  We learned a most valuable lesson:  God is our Source in every way, including finances. The transition was monumental and the lessons we learned sometimes painful, but God brought us through every one as long as we trusted wholeheartedly in Him. 

Nearing the end of that transition, I gave birth to child #3, a beautiful little girl.  God began showing me, through the birth of this child, the gifts that He had placed within me.  I had always had a desire to be creative, but somehow, having another little girl in my life brought out the desire to create something beautiful and different.  I started out with some pitiful attempts to make little bows for my daughters and my niece.  I look back at those and they were so ugly, but God tells us to not despise the day of small beginnings, so I cherish those ugly little creations that I so lovingly made. I did get better at making those little bows, however, and they became a passion.  

Soon after, God laid it on the heart of a very precious friend to bless me with a sewing machine.  Now, mind you, I spent the better part of my life fearing the dreaded sewing machine!!  I laugh now when I think about it, but I literally could not sew a button on.  No joke, if my husband ever had a button that needed sewing back on, he had to take it to his mother or do it himself!  Well, this wonderful friend took the time to show me how to thread the machine and sew a straight line and from there it went.  I sewed my first little baby "blankie" (as I call them).  It was an even more pitiful sight than my first bows!!  It looked like a four year old had sewn it!  But I was so proud that I had created something with my own hands.  I felt like I had wings, I was flying so high!!

Fast forward a couple of years at which time I was pregnant with our fourth child, another girl!  God moved us back across the country to our hometown once again. God began to show me that He had given me a gift that had lain dormant for so long because of fear.  He showed me that fear is a thief and it could dominate my life if I let it.  Well no more!!  I knew that I had a God-given knack for sewing & bowmaking and I knew that God had a plan for this family to have a business.  So, I began to research everything I could think of to do with sewing and bowmaking and anything to do with business.  I knew that God intended for me to be a stay at home mom, but I also knew that I had a God-given hunger to have my own business.  Yet I had no idea how to do it.  Knowing that God had given me these gifts, I also realized that I had to be a good steward of them, but where to start?

Well if nothing else, I was excited and knew that I could share that with others, so I started posting pictures of everything I was sewing and all the bows I was making for my girls and anything that had anything to do with sewing!  Lo and behold, someone saw it and asked if I would consider wholesaling to them!  Can you believe that?  Years of stressing and straining over all of the details and God does it in a split second.  How amazing is our God?  Well, I said yes of course! 

After that, it was like a snowball....I felt a release to move forward and begin a new business.  And here it is: Hala Baby.  A truly God-given business.  I don't where it will go from here, but I do know that if my heavenly Father has anything at all to do with it, it will be prosperous and it will be a blessing and an honor to His Name. And I pray that it will be a blessing to everyone who crosses the path of Hala Baby. 

For now, Hala Baby will be offering hand-sewn bows and fabric flower clips.  Soon, we plan to expand into handmade boutique-style clothing.  I hope everyone who stops by will be blessed!!