festival season + giveaway!

oh man guys, i'm sorry it's been so long since i've posted!  although, i always laugh when other blogs write that.  do you really think i've been twiddling my thumbs, wondering where the hell you ARE?!  WHERE?! (naw.)  anyway.  it has been a madhouse in my brain and in my sewing lair, getting our table ready for the first festival of the year, this sunday!  slangin' things we've sewn, ohhh i really love it.  i love seeing people's reactions to the things we've made, and meeting the kids who'll be wearing our capes and cuddling our monsters, especially when they get to pick them out themselves.  sitting with neesy in the crisp fall air, trading off sho-wrangling duties, running up to the gorilla gourmet truck for tacos, showing shoshi the oxen and beehives (at this particular festival), listening to music, checking out the other stalls (this time around, i'm buying that leeetle woven basket for shoshi that i hestitated too long over last year!).  i love setting up our table, hanging our pennants, and especially all the behind-the-scenes stamping, xeroxing, cutting, gluing, hole-punching, threading and pinning that goes along with the "marketing" aspect of our little biz.  i might love that side of it even more than the sewing, to be honest.  over the next few days (if i can wedge the time into my self-imposed schedule-o-madness that exists only in my head), i'll be sharing some photos of all the work that goes into preparing a little table of goods at a local art festival.

in the meantime, i'd like to give away a couple tins of baby booty balm that we made last week!  this stuff is amazing, made from beeswax and olive oil infused with comfrey leaves, calendula, lavendar, and elder flowers.  that's it.  it's really not exclusively for baby bums at all, i infused healing herbs in the oil so it'd also be good for scrapes and burns or just plain ol' dry skin.  shoshi's sweet friend keira came over last weekend, with her mama krystin and new baby brother in tow, and the girls helped me mix together all the dried herbs.  it's a good toddler project if you're not averse to a mess, and a good way to teach little ones about one of the many uses for the plants they see outdoors.

side note, when i was pregnant with sho, we took a six-week long natural childbirth class with about ten other families.  crazily enough, all the families have stayed in touch, and shoshi and i get together with a kiddo or two from the bunch every month or so.  keira is one of those kids, whom i've known since before birth!  since i have very few other mama friends living nearby, i have been thankful to have these other new mothers to hang out with from time to time.  our personalities and ways of raising our children vary wildly -- really, the only thing unifying us are the babies we all had within a couple months of each other.  but somehow, the differences are really lovely more than anything, an interesting peek into just how many ways there are to raise a tiny human, even within one culture that is itself a mere fraction of all the other ways there are to have babies in this world of ours.  (if you're interested in that sort of thing, the documentary "babies" is really fascinating.)

krystin's parenting style is really similar to my own, so she's pretty much one of the few people i can talk to (without feeling like i'm boring their pants off, and besides my mom, whom i talk to about every last possible aspect of child rearing on the daily) about potty training, breastfeeding a toddler, and the hallowed secrets of getting a kid to sleep without also putting yourself to sleep.

anyway!  to enter this humble little giveaway, just leave a comment with your email address below.  i'll choose two winners via random.org next thursday, september 20th.  and as always, thanks so much for reading (and voting)!