Friday, July 22, 2011

WINNER: 250 Facebook Fan Giveaway

And the winners are:

Item 1: Dawn Smisek and Sarah Haggard 
(Dawn was picked first, but then I realized there were two invalid entries which changed the number in the drawing pool.  So I knocked out the invalid entries and re-entered the correct max number in random.org which picked Sarah.  So to be fair, both will receive a headband)! 

Item 2: Deborah Wuest

Ladies, you should receive an email from me soon!  Thank you again, everyone, for being fans/friends.  And thank you to everyone who participated in my little giveaway!


post signature

Sunday, July 17, 2011

250 Facebook Fan GIVEAWAY

Well, dear fans, new and old, I would like to take a moment to say, "Thanks!"  Thank you to my personal family and friends for all your support and encouragement.  LolaLand Creations would not exist without you!  Thank you to all you wonderful fans with whom I've never had and may never have the opportunity to sit down and chat with over ice cream (I don't like coffee, hehe) in person.  Your kind words and interest in my creations have meant so much to me!  Thank you all for being fans!

For those of you who are less of words of affirmation people and more of gifts people, I would like to express my gratitude for you in the form of a small giveaway!  I will be giving away two different items.  You may enter to win one or the other but not both, please.

Item #1:
A sweet and soft crocheted flower baby/toddler headband, ornamented with a simple pearl bead.  These will be offered in the shop soon.  The winner may pick yarn color and headband size.  They are so light weight and gentle that even my daughter who loves to rip off headbands and play with them will leave them on!  :)


Item #2:
An adult three-strand headband with a large flower accent.  This headband pattern came from a young woman in Rome who blogs her work at CreativeYarn: Zen and The Art of Handicraft.  I made this for fun, but am still undecided whether or not I will offer it in my shop (the pattern creator has issued a generous commercial license to use her pattern).  If you would like to see it in my shop, please let me know.  I will warn you however if you don't normally have any luck wearing any sort of elastic headbands like me (my head is shaped funny and my hair is slide-y), your results with this headband may be fairly similar.

Have fun choosing which item you would like to try to win!  To enter the giveaway, please fill out the form below:
***Giveaway closed.  Form has been removed.  See winner announcement here.



post signature

Thursday, July 7, 2011

Misadventures of a Work At Home Mom

A week ago, I promised my Facebook fans a tale of my misadventures of the week.  So without further ado, here is my little account of some of my ordinary every day life misadventures:

Mondays are my grocery shopping days.  I spent time in the morning meal planning for the week, writing out my grocery list, and browsing the local ads for good deals.  As I'm sure you readers know, this type of plan-ahead shopping can be quite a bit of work!  Sweet baby girl and I get ourselves loaded into the car and head out to the store.  I'm a bit of a germ-a-phobe (ask my friends about my disgust at the thought of sharing a can of soda - I swear the purpose of the indent ring is solely to collect spit and germs) and 'green' where I can be, so I get out of the car and grab baby girl, my shopping cart cover for baby girl, and my two reusable grocery bags.

After lugging my haul into the store and getting everything settled in my cart, I reach in my pocket to pull out my carefully created list...  It's. not. there!  Ugh!  Rather than going back out to search the car or track it down, I opted to do the best I could by memory.  One of the items on my list was a plastic storage container for my inventory.  My husband really is incredibly gracious to put up with my crafts multiplying all about the house.  I thought it might be nice to try to wrangle some of my crafts and supplies into their own little storage bin homes.  Plus, I wanted something I could carry inventory in when I go to craft fairs.

If you are a horrible decision maker like I am, then you understand that having multiple choices of brands, colors, sizes, and styles of storage bins was completely overwhelming to me.  After not very little time was spent making a decision, I decided upon a green what I thought was a medium sized storage bin.  Of course, they stack them all together and cram them into the shelves so you can't just take the one off the top.  So I struggled to pull the whole stack out far enough to get the top bin out but not too far where it fell off the bottom lip of the shelf which would require me to heave the whole stack back onto the shelf.  The bin took up all the space in the body of my cart.  I figured I would put the groceries in the bin, so I wouldn't use so many plastic bags.

Groceries were acquired, and we proceeded to check out.  The cashier ended up putting the groceries in plastic bags before placing them in the bin and put only about three items per plastic bag.  My attempt at being green?  Fail.  It turns out that was a pretty good thing though as you will soon read.

I placed the lid halfway on the tub so the lady at the exit could see the bags and know that I wasn't a rebellious mom headed out of the store with stolen goods.  Apparently, it was pretty windy that day.  As soon as I stepped outside the door, a huge gust of wind blew the lid right off the top and sent it flying down the main street at the front of the parking lot.  So there I went pushing my cart after it down parking lot, praying it wouldn't keep moving just out of reach and that a car wouldn't reach it before I did.  Baby girl had herself a grand old time laughing at mama's expense.  :)

The lid was obtained and latched onto the bin.  We headed to the car.  It was then that I realized how massive this bin truly was!  It looked medium sized in the store, but it wasn't about to fit in the trunk of my car (not with the stroller back there and whatnot anyway).  So after opening the trunk and discovering that it's not going to fit, I opened the back side door to put it in there.  That's when I figured out I couldn't lift the thing with all the groceries in it - too heavy!

So what did I do?  I unlatched the lid of course.  My jokester friend, the wind, gusted again just in time to throw the lid up to smack me square in the face.  But the wind was blowing so hard I had a hard time getting it off my face!  So I'm wrestling with the stupid thing that I already chased down in the parking lot.  Fun times, right?  It's at moments like that that you really hope nobody is watching.  But low and behold, I saw a lady in the driver's seat in the car parked right in front of mine.  Wonderful...  I managed to wedge the lid in the cart, opened the trunk again, and removed most of the contents from the bin to trunk.  I went back to the side door to put the bin and lid in there and almost got whapped in the face by the lid again!

The groceries were in my car, the bin was in my car, baby girl was in the car, and I got in the car.  I took a deep breath and removed the sunshade from my windshield just on time to see that not only was there one woman in the vehicle in front of me...  She was driving a minivan with a whole family of like seven people.  They all witnessed the whole thing.  Fun times!

I got home, put baby girl down for a nap, unloaded the groceries, and showed the bin to my husband.  I shared my tale of misadventure with him, and we laughed heartily.  The funniest part...  we decided the bin was too big and that I needed to return it AND discovered I forgot some important groceries on my lost list.  Sigh.  Oh well!  Grateful to have bin drama behind me, I prepared to get back to a normal day.  Unfortunately for me, more misadventure was to be had!

Our family has chosen to cloth diaper.  If you cloth diaper, then you know you remove the solid waste before it hits your washing machine.  Yeah...  So somehow a diaper must have skipped this step in the process.  I went to move the diapers from the washer to the dryer and discovered post-processed mixed veggies and raisins all. over. my. washer.  ICK!!!  I had to pick them all out with a paper towel and kept finding them in the next few washes.

So lest anyone think I have a normal every day life or think I don't have a normal every day life, I have shared my daily life misadventures that you may judge for yourself.  All I could do at the end of the day was laugh (and treat myself to some ice cream).



post signature