I’m so excited this week!  Mom and I were interviewed for a Mother’s Day special on I Am Friday, a very cool and very serene blog inpsiring it’s readers to do their best and be their best - everyday.  Neeless to say, it was an honor to be mentioned at all, let alone have an entire article devoted to us!  Here’s a little preview of the interview:

Island Girl:  What inspires you?

Leah:  Our genuine inspiration was and is Jillian.  Not only because of her allergies and the need to clean out her (and our) environment in the hope that she will outgrow some of these allergies, but also her amazingly sun-shiny attitude!  At 6-years-old, she is easily the happiest and most positive little person I know, and her bright and cheerful outlook is something we want to have ourselves and share with others.

Island Girl:  What has your business taught you?

Leah:  It is really hard to start a business.  Really, really hard. We have learned that we are persistent.  If you want to do something, it is worth working very, very hard to do it.

Be sure to pop on over to iamfriday.me to read the rest, and poke around their site – it’s full of gorgeous pictures, inspiring stories, and adorable little pups… they have a series called “The Dog Blogger,” where we meet all kids of cute and unique four-legged friends, like Samo here:

Isn't he adorable???

Our brand new baby! Literally... it's a Baby Lock Diana Serger

Most of OrganiLuxe‘s products (almost all of them, in fact) have been made out of woven fabric.  Wovens are easy enough to deal with on a regular sewing machine.  But since we’ve started our organic children’s clothing line, kiddO organics, we needed a way to quickly, easily, and beautifully sew on knits.

Now the interesting bit of information here is that sergers are notoriously confusing and difficult to thread.  A regular sewing machine uses one spool of thread - our new serger uses FIVE!  And there are a multitude of different stitches you can make with a serger, each using a slightly different set-up than the others.  So many times, you will have to re-thread the machine before moving on to the next part of the garment you are trying to make. YIKES!

This is how the threading looks! Some of the fancier machines have automatic threading. Lucky bastards.

We think we’ve figured out a plan, though.  An assembly line of sorts seems to be the answer.  Here’s an example of how we’re going to make our little girl’s leggings:

Cut out one color of leggings, 2-3 pairs in each size.

Serge the inside seams using a 3-thread overlock stitch.  (Look at the inside of the t-shirt you’re wearing right now, and you will probably see this same stitch.)

The inside seam of the shirt I'm wearing right now, actually!

Change threading.

Ummmmmmm......??????

Serge the top and bottom hems with a coverstitch. (This stitch usually has two parallel lines of stitching running across the top side of the garment.)

This is a pair of Jillian's pants. You can see the wider cover stitch on the waistband and the narrower one on the bottom hem of the pants. You can get this effect by changing the placement of the needles.

Done! More or less.  I left out a couple things like sticking the label in and running the elastic through the waistband. 

I can’t show you a finished pair of leggings yet, because we’re so new to serging, we don’t have all of our thread colors yet!  And we’re in the process of ordering our clothing labels right now, as well.

But that’s the gist of it anyway.  And unlike the sewing machine, which Mom is in charge of, I’m actually going to be serging quite a bit on this beauty!  I’m excited about it, too!  I’ve been practicing, and it’s pretty fun to slide some uneven fabric in there, and have the serger trim the egdes perfectly and create a beautiful seam. Who knew serging could be this much fun?!

I totally need this! From Etsy shop, MesaDreams.

Yep, it has absolutely nothing to do with what I had planned on writing about this week, but it’s on my mind, so that’s where my brain is going today.

I never was much of a reader before.  I would anxiously wait for my weekly People Magazine to arrive each Friday, and I’d skim the headlines in the newspaper every morning, but I’ve never been one to sit down and read a book just for fun.  I’ve read books on relationships and parenting (most recently, trying to make it through my son’s “terrible two’s” with some help from Mr. John Rosemond), but nothing just for pleasure.

A few months back, my BFF said something to me that changed everything.  “If you don’t read anything else, Leah, read the first Twilight book.”  Never one to disappoint a friend, I must do this, I thought. If not for me, then for her!  (How chivalrous, indeed!)

Well, dang if I didn’t get hooked!  I started reading the first in the Twilight series on the day before Thanksgiving, and I had it finished in three days.  (BTW, Jacob’s hot and all, but I’m totally Team Edward!)  There was no stopping there!  I eagerly read through the rest of the series during December, amazed that I had somehow missed out on this incredibly fun pastime.  No wonder my mom always had her nose in a book during her spare time when I was growing up.  I have to admit, I was always a bit of a TV-aholic.  Not that I have a TON of free time these days – HA!  But my evenings were always spent catching up with my fave shows.

Yeah, they do! Adorable Twilight necklace from the really cute Etsy shop, Aylerville.

So, now that I’ve decided that reading is like watching TV in your head (and sometimes way more fun, because your imagination can go wild envisioning people, places, accents, etc…), I’m going to catch up on all the awesomeness that I have missed out on for so long.  When I finally (and tragically, for me at least) finished Twilight, it didn’t take me long to figure out where to turn in the library next: Harry Potter. 

Halfway, baby! Books 1-3 were only half as long as 4 and 5... so I'd be done already, lol!

Thanks to my BFF’s mild obsession with all that is Hogwarts, I now have my very own HP Fan Club, right in my own home.  I’m currently halfway through “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” which is the fifth book in the series of seven, for those of you who are as clueless as I was a mere 6 weeks ago.  I’m also following each book with my own personal screening of the corresponding movie, complete with popcorn and soda (or cheese and crackers and wine, if I’m feeling fancy!).

My evening plans for tonight! Don't worry, the glass will be full... at least it will be when the movie starts!

I’m still kind of shocked at how much I’m enjoying these books, and how little I knew of them.  I literally had to Google, “First Harry Potter book,” while standing in the library to see which one I was supposed to be checking out first!  (I now know that you can easily see which one is next by checking the binding – “Year 1, Year 2,” and so on are right there in front of your face.)  I believe the first book was published back in 1997, when I was in high school.  What was I doing then that was so important?? 

I’m not sure where I’ll turn next.  A new friend of mine has graciously allowed me to borrow a couple books of hers, one of which is the second book in Janet Evanovich’s series, following “One for the Money,” which I just saw and really enjoyed in theaters.  If you’re considering either seeing the movie or reading the books, read what my friend had to say about the movie, because she and her sister have read the entire series and have done an excellent review here.

I’d love to hear from you all, too!  If you have a great book or series recommendation, let me know in the comments.  And (so far, at least), I’m not picky.  I’ve read about vampires and wizards so far, so nothing’s out of the realm of possibility. 

I started making a list of all the “green” aspects of my office, and you know what?  The list ended up being a lot longer than I thought!  Some of the things have just become second nature to me.  So much so, that I didn’t even think about it being eco friendly – it’s just part of my regular routine these days.  That was a nice surprise!

I’m going to break my list up into three sections, the three big ones when it comes to going green: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!

Reduce

• Dry Erase Boards!I love them anyway, since I have a tendency to change my mind a million times.  But they’re a really good way to reduce your paper use.  I have a collection of larger boards on my wall for my weekly and monthly to-do’s, and I keep a small notepad-sized one on my desk for my daily tasks.  Just swipe it clean at the end of the day and start over tomorrow!
  

  My handy little helper!

• Compact fluorescent light bulbs keep me from being in the dark, while not wasting electricity.
  

  And it's purdy, too!

• Naturally lit photo area.  Kind of by accident, I stumbled upon the perfect set-up for my product shots.  It’s a table in the corner of my office between two windows.  During the first half of the day, it has just the right amount of natural light, so that I don’t ever have to use lamps or additional lighting to get the perfect shot!
  

  This is where it all happens! I've got that nice gray wooden backdrop, or plain white poster board, for a clean look that really makes the products "pop!"

• Unplug!  We used to think that keeping cords plugged in was no biggie – but now we know better.  It still pulls electricity from the outlet, even if nothing is plugged into the other end.  So just unplug what you’re not currently using.
  

  The two that are unplugged are my camera chargers, and the ones plugged in are my printer and my radio - which I'm currently listening to.

Reuse

• Use the backsides of paper.  Running a home business, I find the paper piles up quickly.  Whether it be from invoices received in the mail to papers I have to print out for one reason or another, there’s always stack of paper somewhere.  If it’s blank on the backside, I put it in my “Scrap Paper” tray.  I try to only use paper for things I’ll need to reference later, but when I do need it, I have quite a bit of it handy for printing out recipes or things for the kids, or for jotting down notes.  Even my daughter knows to grab from the scrap pile when she feels like doodling a picture!
  

  As you can see, my pile of "Scrap Paper" on top is a lot bigger than my plain printer paper below it.

• Memo board.  This was a project I just did this weekend – re-covering an old memory board from about ten years ago, and making it into a stylish and functional new part of my office.  I’m thrilled with how it turned out!
  

  I'm sooooooo happy with how this turned out! It's right above my desk and I love looking at it every day.

• Shelves & furniture.  Almost every piece of furniture and all of the shelves on my walls have been used in other rooms of either this house or another house that I lived in.

Take a look at the top part of my old computer desk...

I saved it when I got rid of the poor old desk, painted it to match the cranberry accents in my new office, and brackets added to turn it into a shelf. I’m going to really enjoy this guy!

 Recycle

• Paper.  For that paper that does come into the office – junk mail, old receipts or invoices, paper that have had both sides used – I keep a small recycling bin right next to my regular trash can.  Anything paper goes right in, no matter how big or small.
  

  Toss!

• Ink cartridges.  Most office supply stores will recycle your old ink cartridges – and many will either give you money back or store credit if you do!
• Packaging & shipping materials.  Most of our items are shipped in envelopes, and we make sure to get plastic-free ones, made out of recycled materials.  And if any of our orders are too big for our largest envelope (and it’s a pretty big one!), we reuse old boxes that we receive supplies in.
  

  Our smaller recycled envelopes.

• Recycled pencils.  This was one of those happy accidents.  A couple years ago, we bought several boxes of pencils, made out of recycled newspaper – how cool! – with our logo on them for giveaways at trade shows and markets.  Well, we still have some leftover, so we use them all the time!
  

  Very "green!"

  So that’s my green office!  Tell me what is eco friendly about your office?  I’d love to hear some more green ideas and tips!  Leave them in the comments below.

I have a confession to make.  I haven’t always been living an environmentally friendly life.  In fact, until my daughter’s allergy issues, I didn’t think too much about chemicals, toxins, pesticides, etc.  (In fact, sometimes I wonder…  if I had cleaned out my environment earlier, before she was even a twinkle in my admittedly young and naive eye, would she even have these allergies??  But that’s a topic for a whole other blog, right there.)

Me with my baby, when she was about 5 months old - I still didn't know the extent of her allergies. You can see the eczema on her cheeks, poor thing. I didn't know why.

No, I wasn’t very concerned about what was in the cotton I was sleeping on, wearing, snuggling up to on the sofa.  I had no thoughts about what might have been sprayed on those strawberries I was gobbling down (My absolute favorite food – YUM!  Oh, how happy I am that it’s strawberry season in Florida again!).  I tried to minimize my trash, perhaps.  Recycle what I could, but that’s about as far as it went.

It was a slow change after she was born, and after I started researching the allergies and their possible causes.  Slow, but steady, all the while heading in a healthier, more positive direction.  It was all about her at first, keeping her away from unnatural ingredients.  Maybe that would help her severe allergies?  Then, it kind of grew on me.  I started thinking, wait a minute… what exactly is in these potatoes I’m having for dinner?  Yikes!

Jillian, at 2 1/2. Well into the eco changes in our home, we were just about to decide we wanted to start our very own green business!

I’d like to share what we do around here, in our home, because it looks a lot different than it did about 7 years ago.  It comes at a great time, because it’s a fresh new year, and I want to give you some fresh, new ideas to make easy, simple changes that add up to one very big difference.

So join me next week, when I’ll show you exactly how I’ve turned my work area at home into a truly green office!  Have a wonderful week! 

It’s a work in progress, of course, as is everything around here.  But I have a plan. (Insert evil laugh here.)

First of all, I hate chaos (HA HA HA!!!  That statement is SO ironic because my life is full to the brim with chaos at any given moment!).  But I digress… It makes me unable to concentrate, I can’t think clearly, I’m not nearly as productive, and on and on.  And with my home-based business and two small children, I need to be as productive and clear-headed as possible.

So my first plan of action is to create a space where I can write down all of my “to-do’s” in a somewhat organized way.  And then from there I can pick and choose what needs to be done on any given day, make a daily to-do list for myself, and… well… do that stuff.

Awesomely cool dry erase boards!!!

My genius plan!!!  Ok, perhaps I share my genius plan with others, since these boards were readily available at WalMart, along with tons of other cool accessories.  But still!  Here’s what I love about them – having different sizes of boards, and even different colors (two white and two metallic – how awesome is that?!), I can separate, or organize, my chaotic thoughts onto different boards, making me instantly calmer.  Like this:

Voila! All of my mental chaos - onto the boards!

One of those cool accessories I bought was a packet of days-of-the-week magnets you see there vertically lined up on the large metallic board.  What I’ve done is used the big white board for all my to-dos, in any random order, and on the metallic board I’ve sorted them out into daily to-do’s.  And if something, Heaven forbid, doesn’t get done on it’s allotted day, I simply erase it and move it to the next day.  And I’m using the two small boards for personal (not business) to-do’s, like laundry and school projects.

So far so good!  I feel more at ease already.  And it couldn’t be easier to do, really.  So that was step one.  Step two is organizing my paper madness into binders that actually keep things together and tidy.  Next week!

My kids have been really excited, too, because of the new fall products we’ve been working on… Trick-or-Treat bags!!!  Mom had the clever idea to offer eco friendly, reusable Trick-or-Treat bags this year, complete with adorably spooky appliqued characters on the front.  And what made my kids ever more excited was the fact that they got to dress up in costumes a whole month early and model them for photos!

Jillian doing her pose-y thing... Trevor trying to figure out what in the world he's supposed to do with this bag!

Now, Jillian is pretty much a natural-born model.  At least, she’s pretty sure she is.  She comes up with her own poses, and to be honest, many of them are actually better than anything I’ve told her to do (I’m very much not a natural model).

And there's Miss Model again!

Trevor’s another story…  Ahem…

If Trevor were one of the seven dwarfs, he would most definitely be Grumpy.

But overall, I got some really great shots of the kiddos, and it didn’t take too long (if you don’t count getting them into and out of their costumes, that is…).  And the great thing is, we get to do it all over again this afternoon, because Mom has finished the other two character bags – a ghost and an adorable spider!

You can find these two bags on our website right now, and the two new ones will be on very soon!

But then it got looser… and looser!  Now, some other kids would have just yanked it out at this point.  I probably would have.  But not Jillian, nope.  I firmly believe she had plans to keep that thing in her head until she left for college.  Not because she didn’t want to lose a tooth – no way, she couldn’t wait!!!  But because she’s a little, how should I say this… sensitive?  Yanking out a tooth that was not quite ready to come out was not something little Miss Jillian would do.

But, alas, we didn’t have to wait much longer.  It finally came out a few days ago!  Woohoo!!!  She was SOOOOOOO excited!  And so was I!  Although I have to admit, I’m still having a hard time looking at my little angel’s face, when not all of her teeth are present and accounted for…  it’s gonna take some getting used to!  And who would have thought that having one teeny, tiny tooth missing on the bottom would already give her a lisp!  Oh, but it has.

She was so excited to go to sleep that night, anxiously awaiting the Tooth Fairy’s surprise in the morning!  And here is what she found the next day…

Money!!! In a heart shape, too!!!

That’s right, a whole dollar… AND a quarter!!!  Wow, the Tooth Fairy is getting very fancy these days. I certainly don’t remember getting my money folded into shapes!  Hmmm… she must have found a cool origami video tutorial online.  Nice!

But that’s not all!  The Tooth Fairy left a trail…  Pretty cool!

Some Fairy Dust on her headboard... (note the missing tooth!)

Some Fairy Dust on her bed, under the pillow...

And even some Fairy Dust on the windowsill!

Perhaps… but probably not.  I love my daughter’s school.  I love the staff there, and I love her new teacher.  But all the love in the world cannot prevent an anaphylactic reaction from happening when you’re not around.  This first week of school is tough.  It was hard last year, and I think it’s almost harder this year.  There are a lot of policies and procedures to go over, and it’s almost impossible to get everything running smoothly in the first few days.

Trevor and Jillian on the first day of school!

I’ve been hanging out with Jillian in her classroom in the mornings a little longer, I’ve been eating with her at lunch and then staying a while afterwards to make sure all the kids in her class get their hands wiped off so she doesn’t have a contact reaction from someone touching her.  Everything goes pretty well when I’m there, but I can’t be there all the time.  And I want to feel confident that she is going to be well taken care of.

I believe that every staff member that comes in contact with my baby understands her allergies and will do whatever they can to make sure she’s safe.  But when you have 20, 40, 100 or more other little children running around, I can understand why sometimes Jillian gets lost in the mix.  Unfortunately, that won’t work for her.

EpiPen Jr. - Goes everywhere with her!

So we’re working on new procedures for hand wiping, new policies for making sure her EpiPens go everywhere she goes, and NEVER get left behind.  And in the meantime, her Mommy will be there.

Many people on Etsy right now are in a panic of one sort or another.  Either they are afraid that their shop is no longer showing up, or they’re worried about making all of the changes necessary to ensure that they do show up.  I’d be in the latter category.  I have over 100 listings in my shop, and I am now faced with the task of combing through each and every one of them to make sure I have appropriate and RELEVANT titles, tags and descriptions.  And on top of that, I want them to be awesome anyway, so I’ll be tweaking my photos and descriptions to be more fun and really show the story behind each item.

If you are like me, you may be slightly (or more than slightly) freaking out over all the changes. You may be wondering what on earth you are going to change your titles and tags to? Or how you will ever figure out what is and is not relevant? Well, have no fear!  One of our fellow Etsians, TangledMetal, happens to have quite a bit of experience when it comes to SEO and marketing your website.  And after many completely awesome posts to the Etsy forums, explaining some of the ins and outs of tagging, etc. he decided to launch his own blog on the subject, appropriately titled Market My Shop.

Market My Shop blog - Woo hoo!!! Help for us, finally!!!

It can be a bear to comb through all the Etsy forums and articles to try and find that simple answer to the question you’ve been asking.  So thankfully, we now have this wonderful resource to turn to in our time of need!  I’m also going to be taking his advice and putting it to good use on our main website, OrganiLuxe.com, so that we may benefit from improved search results there as well. Thank you, TangledMetal!

A very awesome Ankle Bracelet by TangledMetal

If you have a chance, check out his Etsy shop, too, where he specializes in really amazing pieces of chainmail jewelry and accessories!