Ted has been focused on two things this past week, putting his toys in his mouth and blowing raspberries.  I think that he picked up the raspberry blowing from his cousin Jack.  He started it when we got home and of course Pat and I have been encouraging him, so he does it all the time.  It is pretty funny to see him concentrating so hard on doing something so silly.  He is really perfecting his technique.

I should have posted this last week, but Ted has a new step-cousin! And its a girl!  He wasn’t the youngest for long.  Ted now has one cousin, five boy step-cousins (and another on the way), and two girl step-cousins.  There are going to be so many cousins his age to play with when he is older.  He is pretty lucky.

Pat got me this onesie for Ted from etsy.

Little Sparrows

I bought this print from The Yumi  Yumi Shop.  She has lots of prints of flowers and birds that are “giclee prints of original illustrations using pen and ink, watercolor and a little digital tweaking.”  She also has some very cool modern illustrations of owls in trees that I really like and lots of other illustrations too.

Through Light

Luminescence

These two prints are from Ola Design.  I absolutely love the colors and the style.  She also has lots of flowers and bird illustrations in her shop, but I particularly like her underwater scenes and really all of her art that uses the blue green color combination.

Peculiar Neighbors

This print is from A.T. Whim.  Pat and I both liked the comical nature of this print.  She has lots of different interesting illustrations in her shop.

Hats

And then this one came from Paula Birdy.  I love these bluebirds.  They have such personality, they remind me of someone I know.  She has lots of bird prints and a bird print alphabet in her shop.  What can I say I like birds…

Getting the mail is going to be so exciting for the next couple of weeks while these prints come in and a few other little things I ordered from Etsy.

More Yankee Visitors
Kate’s dad and stepmom came down from up north for a little pre-father’s-day North Carolina visiting action. We had a good time showing them around the house, our rapidly-expanding neighborhood, and also a visit to the Farmer’s Market in Raleigh. They took us out to eat at the Cleveland Draft House and then we got some very tasty bbq at McCall’s. Good eats and good-to-see-family.

Etsy
As we speak Kate is rocking some Etsy product using Adobe Illustrator. She’s quickly picked up one of the harder to learn design software programs. While I spent all sorts of time over the past few years learning the intricate details of Photoshop (Illustrator’s more photogenic cousin), I had forgotten a ton about Illustrator, so it’s been a learning (re-learning?) experience for both of us. Good stuff being done here, so be sure to check out MoseandZoe.com in the coming weeks for new stuff. Or check it out now, for slightly-less-new-but-still-very-cool hand-made crafts.

Movie Night
We watched The Pursuit of Happyness with The Fresh Prince. It was pretty good. Tonight I think we’re watching Running with Scissors.

Safari
Spent a few minutes this week playing around with the Windows version of Apple’s Safari web browser. Much like iTunes for windows, it’s just not as good when its not on the OS X platform. It certainly displays the pages quickly enough, but there’s no advantage to using it over say Firefox or Opera. Maybe someday, though.

I ordered some buttons from Sewing Stars, a Providence-based crafter. I am going to put them onto a new bag/pocket book I want to make. I decided one section of the bag will have a bunch of pin back buttons on it. So I started searching etsy for more buttons, which I am grumbling about having to pay more for shipping than buttons are worth, but without a big craft fair to go and scoop them up at, what am I going to do?

And then I decided to design my own! Very exciting! I ordered them from Kitty Crossbones on etsy. I get 100 pins with up to 10 different designs. I figured I would make a bunch of promos for Moses and Zoe and then the rest I will come up with designs that can sell in my shop and use for my bag.

I got out my currently very small button collection to see which of my fabrics they match.

Zoe promptly came over to supervise. I found it most amusing that she first pretended not to know that she had sat on anything at all and then was suddenly fascinated by what was under her.

What am I in the way?

On to more interesting things…

http://www.etsy.com/treasury.php?id=1180177978877U5145026

At the end of this month Pat’s parent’s are coming to visit us! Yay visitors! And not to worry we now have salt and pepper shakers. Mom took care of that while she was here. Pat and I don’t really add salt or pepper to many things. Really I only add pepper to scrambled eggs and occasionally salt to french fries if they need it. So my little stolen-from-restaurant paper packets were more than adequate. But then Chris and Gram came and I think they were a bit surprised by our salt and pepper delivery system, as they eat a bit more of them than we do. And then Mom came and began searching for salt and pepper shakers at every store we went into. We ended up getting a set at the supermarket.

Aren’t they cute?

Look at the neat thing Pat made for me and put over there on the right.

Pretty cool, huh?

I have a whole list of stuff I want to finish and get into the shop. I also received an order for a custom-made kitty pin, so I think I might make a couple more of those too. I love Etsy.

Today is a big gluing day around here. I made some new Happy Spring Cards, some new Congratulations on Your Baby cards, and a bunch of new Robot cards. Exciting. I can’t wait to get them all photographed and online!

Just another day at the Robot Factory…

I put some new cards up at MosesandZoe.com. Thank you notes this time. There are three different ones up now. One with pink birds, one with green birds, and one with pink, green, and yellow birds. Pat helped out big time with these. I gave him a sketch of what I wanted the background to look like and he used his graphic design skills to make it happen. Then I glued my little birds to the branches.

I also made some owls to put onto thank you notes. I am hoping to finish them up tomorrow.

The stuffed animal is going to be a cat. Surprise, surprise. The body actually came out pretty well… The head on the other hand, not so good. Back to the drawing board. Its not that my design was bad. Its just that my design would have been better for an expert seamstress. Which I am not quite yet. Straight lines, I’ve got down. Tiny curves on the inside of a small piece of fabric…well I still need to work on that. So for now I am thinking I need to design an easier to sew head.

Next week my Mom is coming! Yay. There are so many projects I want to work on with her its crazy. I should make a list.

Today is the last day of Owl-A-Day week.
Here’s Liam.


And here is Julian.