B~ Beautiful
I~ Ingenius
A~ Always there!
H~ Helpful
Our dearest Abiah Bug,
Happy 14th birthday to our little Bugsie! You are so precious and dear to us. We wouldn't trade you for all the other red heads in the world! May our Lord and Saviour continue to guide, bless, keep, and protect you forever. We're thankful God has given us the blessing of being your family.We love you, Bug!!
Love, Dad, Mom, and the Kids
Hello Everyone!!
A week or so ago we got a custom order for a brooke shopper with long handles, like the ones featured on our brooke shoulder bag. Well... here it is!
What do you think? We were really happy with the way it turned out! 
This is another great way to use the brooke shoulder bag and shopper pattern (especially if you need a bigger bag, but prefer long handles!) The only thing you need to change is....
~Use the long handles from the brooke shoulder bag
~Add interfacing to both handles
~Place the handles 2 1/4" from the center of the front/back
Viola!
We hope you all have a wonderful day~ the Long Ladies (& family!)
Finally! Here's our 'rag rug'. We saw it first at a friend's house and just loved it. All you'll need is a piece of fabric measuring the size of the place you want the rug to go and little 2" squares. We weren't particular about the square size....(translated, we eyeballed the squares and didn't measure them all)
Our bright squares piled on our work table. 
And then sewing the squares on....
After you cut your 2" squares, fold them in half, (corner to corner). Then, sew straight through the middle, (over-lapping the ends of each square) securing squares to the base fabric. Continue sewing squares in a long row down the entire length of the fabric base. When you're ready to start another row, hold the previous row back with one hand while you're stitching the next row. Your rows of stitching will be about 3/4" apart. We started the whole process with a row of squares in approximately the center of the base. Once you've made it from the center to one side of the base, you'll head the other direction. One of the nice things about this rug is that the sewing lines don't have to be perfect. Once the fabric "fluffs" up, you'll never see the stitching lines. If you want the rug to look even fuller and fluffier, sew the rows closer together. This is one rug that is made without any "perfect" way, and yet it is as cute as can be!
tada! Here's the back and front of our new rug!
One of the sweet ladies who has purchased some of our patterns recently sent us pictures of her finished product using our brooke shoulder bag and shopper pattern. We couldn't have been more delighted!! We love to see how others have used our patterns! So, we just had to get the "o.k." from her to let you all see how wonderful hers turned out....
The brooke shopper (front view on left, back view on right)
The brooke shoulder bag
Also, we'd love to hear from any of you that have made things using our patterns... and we'd absolutely love to see pictures!!
Well, well, look what we have here! We girls have been wanting a rug for our room for some time but never found the perfect thing until.....we saw a picture of a braided rug in an old decorating book.
Here are the strips (about 1 1/2"wide...the wider the cut strip, the fatter the braid) that we cut from all of our scrap fabric..notice all the bright colors!
The strips were sewn together (length-wise) and are now in the midst of being braided... I love this part! Since we're braiding our strips, we made three separate, VERY long runs...then we braided them together.
(someone had to get a picture of our cute pincushion.... find more like this on our Etsy shop! )
Once you have all the strips braided and have one long braid, you start wrapping your braid around itself and sewing it together in whatever size and shape that you want. We didn't want a huge rug and since this was our first attempt at braided rug making, we started our center about 6"in length. You need to keep your rug laying down when you're working on it, or it will have a tendency to curl up (we found this out the hard way... thanks to Nanny for helping us with that little problem) into a bowl shape. We also found that a curved needle and clear quilting thread (easily available at some place like JoAnn Fabrics) work great for this job. Once you've used up almost all of the braid that you have made, but your rug isn't big enough, stop with some fabric hanging free, and sew on more fabric scraps, braid, and then start your hand sewing again. Continue until the rug is just the size that you're wanting.
The finished product! This was a lot of fun for us girls and we're sure that you'll enjoy doing it as much as we did.
We'll try to post about our other rug that we made real soon.... so stay tuned!
For Mother's Day we are hosting a special sale through the month of May!
All items purchased from our Etsy Shop or Custom Orders will be shipped for free! Any orders totaling $50 will be given a 10% discount.
Here we are again spotting "part 3" of our wonderful vacation!
We went to Fredericksburg, Texas, one of the days we were there. We have made that something of a "tradition", just going around and looking at the all the neat shops.
While we passed the famous "Wildflower Farms" I had to snap a picture. It's been several years since we've been there, but it really was a neat place. Their weren't many flowers blooming this time though.
Here we kids are in front of the Fredericksburg General Store. We love going there (even though the majority of the things are outside most of our price ranges!). But, tradition again, we always get an old fashioned bottled pop to drink while we walk down the street. I guess Ethan just couldn't stop sipping long enough to smile!
Then, of course, we had to stop traffic (not really!) while we took our picture in front of the bluebonnets. Those are beautiful flowers. We love to plan our trips around when they are blooming!
The day before we headed home we had to go out for Mexican food in Austin with our grandparents. This restaurant was wonderful!! Open since 1952, "Matt's El Rancho" was given 2 thumbs up by the entire crew. Will have to stop there next time we're in Austin!
Heading out of Texas... look at all those roads!
One of Ethan's favorite sights... Tall Chief in Big Cabin, OK.
What a great trip! We're looking forward to doing it again!!
Here we are with part 2 of our vacation pictures! Now where were we.... it's all coming back...
About 94 miles from Austin we decided we needed a little "pick-me-up", so we broke out the sour patch kids and licorice... and the map!
the Capital...downtown Austin
downtown Austin. Unbelievable.
The day after we got there, we picked a flower bouquet for Mamie.
To be continued...
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