Well it's been a while ...

Well it's been quite awhile since I wrote on this blog. I still love to sew, but life has been busy and so I have not kept up posting everything but I will.
 I decided to expand my horizons and for the last 4 years I have been a Health Coach with Take Shape For Life. I lost 60 lbs on this wonderful program! I used to be tired everyday after work and had plantar fasciitis so bad my foot was in a cast, twice. I had asked my Dr. if losing weight would help it? He said no, you will suffer with this for the rest of your life. I had resigned myself to probably living a short life as I felt miserable. So my husband (also over weight at the time) saw a commercial and talked me into finding out about this plan with him. We had tried several other plans and failed. He said, let's try it, and if this does not work we will just die fat! I said ok. We started on the plan in January! And stuck with it, of course there were days we were very compliant and others we were not. But we just kept plugging along. Then in April, at Easter, 2 of our children came home from College and saw us. ( We had not really told them what we were doing.) Our daughter said, " I don't think I have ever seen you 2 this small!) We both lost about 40 lbs each by then. This daughter was so impressed she said she wanted to do it. She was living in Idaho at the time and we are in San Diego, Ca area. Our coach had talked to us and said, "you were so successful on this plan, would you like to help others, and become a health coach? I at first said no, but when our Daughter said she wanted to do the plan, I decided to become a coach for her. So in may we had 1 client! Needless to say she went back up to college, and lost 60 lbs! In June we had so many of our friends that saw us lose the weight and we had 9 clients the next month. You know the best part of this whole journey is that I feel so great! I have so much more energy, I like the way I look and my feet are soooo much better!  I am 55 now and feel like I have a new lease on life! You know when you find out something that is just fantastic, you just have to share it? That's how I feel. I have helped over 80 people!

Hooded bath towels for Kids

Well, It seems like I have been off doing a lot of things and not blogging. I have lost 40 lbs since Jan of this year and that has been my high priority. I have done some sewing and here are some pictures of the Hooded towels I am making right now. I have just finished up all the special orders from the craft show I showed them at. It all started when my daughter in law told me that the hooded towels they sell at stores are not very good. I made my granddaughter the first butterfly towel, needless to say I have improved upon the first one. I think these are cute and useful. I remember how we used to go to the beach and lug all our beach stuff. These towels are made so your child can wear it when they go to the beach. I have put small loops of elastic inside so they can slip their hands thru it and fly like a butterfly or bat, or just carry it. I have made a frog, aligator, butterflies, bat, full size towel w/ hooded, or a square with a hood in the corner these have I have embroidered the designs of a duck, whale, monkey girl, monkey boy, mermaid, frog, princess and a microscope. I also embroider the child's name on the back of the towel. Very useful when your child leaves his or her towel when swimming at a friend's house, these always make it back to you. Well Happy sewing! and if you get a chance check out my Etsy store to see some of my work.  Just search Etsy and search by sellers-I am psully6 (click the dropdown arrow where it says handmade to find sellers)

Machine Embroidery and Sewing Group starting up in Poway California!

I am starting up a small group of Women who want to get together once a month or so to do projects together. You must have a sewing and embroidery machine that you can transport. It does not matter if you are experianced or brand new to this. No 6 thread machines at this group. I thought it would be fun to pick each other's brains. I would like to limit it to about 5 of us total. (That's a lot of plugs!) Email me if you are interested in coming. I plan on having our first meeting on March 20th. I will host it at my house 10:00am.
Email me if you are interested in coming. Pass this along to friends might have that might like to join us.
Happy Sewing & Embroidery! Pauline

Baby Safari Burp Cloths, Bibs and Fleece Blanket, Oh So Cute!

Hear that Roar! See That Long Neck! Listen to the chatter of the Monkey! Here is a cute baby gift set I have just finished. 3 Burp cloths-personalized, 2 bibs and 1 infant receiving fleece blanket. $40.00.

I had a lot of fun making these, and they were received well. I love machine appliques. It is just another fun thing for me to do.

How I learned to be organized.

Christmas is over and a New Year is here! This is the time I like to think about goals. I really don't want to make any resolutions as those seem to come and go. This year I have been thinking about how to plan my long term goals and then make shorter ones so I can see my accomplishments or how well or bad I am doing thru out the year. When I was a young mother I felt really disorganized and so I read many books on organization. I also read how to motivate your kids type books. I made up several different motivation games to help my kids and myself to keep on tasks and try to make cleaning, and maintaining my house fun. Then I realized that some jobs are really not fun. The fun part sometimes can be that the job is finally done. I did figure out though that how fast or trying to make a job fun was not the secret to getting my kids to clean. The secret I learned was in a book that I think is out of print, but it was called the Side Track Home Executives. This was written by 2 sisters that had a hard time keeping organized. You used a card file with 3 X 5 cards to list all the jobs in your house and filed them by daily, weekly, bi-weekly, Monthly, Bi-Monthly, 6 months, yearly. It seemed overwhelming at first but It really helped me. The big think that I learned with this system was to time a job and to see how long it really takes to do it. For example-the bathroom. I made a card for, Clean the toilet- 3 minutes, Clean the mirror-3 minutes, Clean off the counter top 3 minutes, Clean the tub 7 minutes, Sweep and Mop the floor-10 minutes. Now I put down how long I thought it would take, and then I took all the cards into the bathroom and timed myself. I can tell you these times are pretty accurate. So then I would take one of my Kids into the bathroom with all the cards and say you are incharge of cleaning the bathroom. I explained the cards and each chore ( if they can't read then put pictures next to what you want them to clean.) Have them take a card and explain exactly how to clean it. Then take a stop watch and time them doing it. You both with find that maybe it takes less time than you put on the card. I explained to my children that if we split up the jobs and all did a different part of the house then we could get every thing done in about 20 min. I found that after 20 minutes they were no good to me anyway. Then I made sure I did not make them do any more large type chores that day. My husband says that I still can clean really quick. It is a good thing since I am really good at making a mess! My Mother was not the best at keeping the house really neat but we were really good at quick speedy clean ups. As a kid I really did not watch commercials. When there was a commercial on during a show our family was watching, my Mom would say, "Everyone get up and pick up 5 things and go put them away. With 8 kids and 5 items each. the room would be clean in no time. I also use to play the same music when we were cleaning. Whistle while you work, and Supercalifragilistic. Years later I played that music when my kids were home and one of them said, why do I know this song? So let's have a Happy New Year and Make some New Changes for good in our lives. With God Nothing is Impossible! Pray for help, I came to realize that Heavenly Father knows us and our loved ones very well and he will help us improve if we want to.

Over the river and thru the woods to Pauline's house we go!

I can officially say it is the start of the Holiday Season. Now you might be one of those fuddy duddies that says it does not start until the Day after Thanksgiving but I say It's November and Yippee! I love Thanksgiving and Especially Christmas! This year try not to let Thanksgiving zip by and not even think about it. We have so much to be thankful for in this Country! We have a wonderful freedom that has been bought by many who have given their lives for us to live like we do! We have family around us, If you are lucky enough to have a Grandchild or 2 or 4 you should be over joyous. Is that correct english? Oh well that's another thing to be thankful for. Talking how ever we want! When I was a little girl I always heard about gingerbread houses and making candy and fun holiday traditions. We had our traditions but I wanted to try out some of the other ones. So now that I am grown up, Mostly! I love to have holiday craft classes. If you or your children have not come to one, then consider this your invitation. I have put together 4 classes that will happen starting Nov.20th. I always have them on Friday night, 6:00-8:00 pm (this is by design. I figure if Mom and Dad want to go out for a couple hrs they can.) Except the Mini Crafters Classes they are Fridays 4:00-5:00
Check out the pictures. If you want all the specifics, email me. I send out details about each class and all that we do.
Nov. 20th Thanksgiving Class $20.00 Candy & Cookie Turkey, Acorn Dough Nuts & Can do Turkey Soup
Dec. 4th Mini Crafters Class $10.00 Snowman gift bag, Nativity Necklace, Decorating Gingerbread men.
Dec. 4th Christmas Popouri Angel $20.00 and Christmas necklace
Dec. 18th Decorate your own Gingerbread house and Free Gift table.$20.00 (Children take turns picking a gift from the free gift table to keep or give to someone special, nothing elaborate but the kids love this!)
If you want more info email me at psully6@cox.net
Happy Holiday's and don't forget to be thankful!

More towels