A Bad Day at Skull Mansion

This is what a bad day looks like for me:

First of all, Daylight Savings Time.  I actually really like daylight savings time because it doesn't get dark in the middle of the day, but DAMN if it hasn't been harder than heck to wake up at what feels like 5:20 all week.  And then trying to get my kid out of bed when he thinks I'm playing some kind of middle of the night practical joke on him.


I'm guessing a pigeon had a bad time in my neighbor's driveway.

I had been trying for more than a week to get someone from my insurance company to help me figure out how to get insurance on a Hot Butter booth at a festival, and finally they're like "Here!  Fill out this crazy form that has questions you don't know the answer to!"  And I'm like, "Hell, no!  I'm not sure what kind (if any) of pyrotechnics will be at this festival.  Are the security guards armed? HELP!"

Then I'm putting my face on for my out of the house job, and I hear a most disgusting sound.  This is going to be a little too much information, but it was totally a wet farting poopy sound.  So I look down and see MONTY PYTHON POOPING, which I can only assume you all remember as the most horrible thing a person can see.  Snake pooping cannot be unseen!



Then I worked really hard all day.  Tuesday is my work Friday because I only work Sunday through Tuesday (makes sense, right?!), so I decide to take a luxurious and semi expensive herbal bath to relax my tired old lady muscles.  The water is hot and almost to the top of the drainy hole thing when a disgusting blast of gray water comes shooting out the faucet.  WTF?  No thanks.  That ruined the whole vibe of my bath.  I'm almost ashamed to admit that I soaked anyway because I wasn't wasting all the herb juice in the tub.  Hopefully I wasn't absorbing ancient pipe evil that whole time.

Then I posted about my unfortunate mishaps on Facebook and went to bed.  I was cocooned in blankets and finally feeling safe from the world, when I leaned over to grab my phone charger and smacked my forehead on the corner of the bedside table.  Seriously, universe?  You won that round!

This is from a completely different day, but my oven won't turn on and I have a triple layer chocolate birthday cake to bake for Felix's birthday tomorrow.  To the toaster oven!  I'm going to have to bake each layer separately, which means I'll probably have eaten the contents of the third pan by the time the first is finished.  Life marches on!



These paws make me feel better.  Pause your day to look at the paws.  Paaaaaaw!

Last Year's Adventures, This Year's Story- Moab Edition

We have some super cool friends that I totally met on livejournal back in the day who host a yearly camping party on their property, conveniently located in the Middle of Nowhere, Colorado, which is very very close to Utah.  Every time we go, we talk about swinging through Moab to check out some sweet arches, but we never time for that shit.  Last year we made time!  We went a day early and camped out in Moab, and boy howdy was that a process.



When you get off the interstate to drive to Moab, there's a gas station with The Mystery Machine.  Obviously you stop there for photo opportunities in the blazing hot sun.  Obviously.

In South Dakota, camping is pretty easy unless it's one of those crazy camping weekends, like a weekend with a Monday holiday or the Fourth of July.  You just show up at a nice woodsy or lakesy area, throw down a few bucks, pitch your tent, and get your fire roaring.  EASY.

In Moab, people have laid claim to all the awesome spots months in advance.  What I thought would be an quick campsite stakeout took hours.  Hours in which I suffered because I volunteered to keep the firewood under my feet in our tiny packed to the gills car.  We FINALLY found a spot at a park with awesome dunes that people totally drive their jeeps on like IN A COMMERCIAL.  It was awesome.  Chainsaw and Felix wanted to do some dune exploring, but I was a scaredy cat and left them up there.  Then I was terrified until they got back because Josh had both of our phones.



Felix was in love with the sand and the lizards that lived in the open air outhouse.  For reals.  It had walls but no roof and lizards for your bathroom enjoyment.  We didn't put the rainfly on our tent that night because it was warm.  This was half a good idea (because we could see the stars!) and half a bad idea (because the wind blew a ton of sand into the tent, onto my face, in my hair, mouth, nose!).



We spent a good part of the next day being seen in public with this fool at Arches National Park, which was a glorious sight to behold!







Little Felix and Chainsaw by the Balancing Rock.



And ta-da!  This concludes the Moab edition of Last Year's Adventures, This Year's Story.  I'm trying to keep up some blogging momentum without having actually done anything awesome in the past few days.  And because I didn't really blog for almost a whole year, I have stories and photos just waiting for their moment!  I worked everyday from Sunday to Tuesday, so I'm excited to spend some time in the basement with my old lady Babylock and get some thread ordered this week for my new old lady Ms. Juki.



Cat-wise I'm offering up this photo of my occasional porch visitor.  I named him Archimedes, and I haven't seen him in almost a year.  He used to come once every couple weeks to a month to torment Jezebel through the door.  He is a HUUUUGE beast and always so sweet and nice to pet.  Check out that look of ecstasy on his little orange face!

Ok Butter friends.  Be back soon with (hopefully) recent events.

New Designs and Someone Else's Cat for Once

Over the last several months I've added a few new designs to my line.  That makes me sound fancy, which I both am and am not, if you catch my drift.  Anywho, last fall I started making cases to hold your gadgets, specifically your iPad.  Check out a few of these pretty babies:





I interfaced the outer fabrics the same as all my creations, but these also have a layer of fleece in the middle for softness.  Like your iPad will be getting a nice hug always while in its case.  I love how sturdy and nice these feel in my hand.  I almost want an iPad just so I can justify keeping one for myself.



I also crafted a new wallet design.  It's fairly similar to my regular small wallets, only it's bigger, has card slots, FITS YOUR PHONE, and has a removable wrist strap!  These are great if you only want to go out with essentials or keep your stuff findable in your GIANT BAG, which I think are all the rage these days.



I'm pretty psyched about these, and I hope you are too!

I'm going to wrap this up with another cat picture because I do what I want.



This is my friend Melissa's cat Lola, whom I lovingly refer to as "Fatty Fatty Two By Four" because she's uh... big boned?  Haha!  One night I was over at their house baby sitting, and this girl just couldn't get enough of what I have to offer a cat.  In fact, she wanted more than I had to give, forcing me to put up a pillow buffer between us to protect my meat from her loving talons.

Fancy Meeting You Here

I see that you were so happy about my last post that you're back for more!  I'm only too happy to give it to you.  Just like I was so happy to give myself a new wallet last month.  Check check it:



I heart this liberty print so hard that it's lucky I'm a married woman.  When I finished these wallets, I immediately knew that this was THE ONE.  As you can see, my old wallet was looking a little sad, which is not good for when people ask you what kind of stuff you make.  I usually use my wallet as an example, so I always keep a one dollar bill wrapped about my many, many benjamins.  Ok, fine.  It's a Jackson and some Lincolns if I'm lucky.  I've been rocking that old wallet for years, and I'm pretty sure if I washed it it would look brand new again.  I just wanted one that was actually brand new.



Sometimes I get messages asking how much stuff they can actually fit into one of my small wallets, and the official Hot Butter approved answer is "Probably too much stuff will fit in your wallet."  I'm going to be honest here, my wallet snaps and looks fine, but it could probably do with a few less reward cards.  I don't want to use the tiny ones on my keychain either.  I'm not sure what the answer is to this problem.  Maybe I should get a keychain that is for rewards cards only?  Problem solved!



In other Hot Butter specific news, I've gone back to my original labels.  I used to always use ink jet fabric paper that you print your design on directly.  I got the iron on kind so I didn't have to worry about keeping it straight while I was sewing it.  Then I discovered iron on transfers were way cheaper, and have been using those for a long time now.  My original labels were on sale at JoAnns one morning that I happened to be there, and I bought some of those.  Oh my goodness label gracious, ya'll.  These are way better.  I'll be using JoAnns coupons from now on and scoring only high quality, no transferring, easy peasy good looking labels for your brand enjoyment.

Oh man, I was on blog fire and now I'm writing about labels.  I'll entice you back for my next post with this heavily edited photo of me and my sister's dog Buster making out:



The only reason this photo exists is to make my sister jealous of how much her dog loves my face more than he loves hers.  It's like using her heart as an ashtray.  Just kidding.  I love you Alyssa, but not as much as Buster loves me.  The end!

What the what?

This is like a zombie blog because you thought it was dead, but it's totally not.  Let us not shoot it in the head or hit it with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire (hi new friends who searched "baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire" on google and ended up here!), but be patient and let me warm it up a bit and see if it just needs stitches instead of beheading.

I'm obviously off to a good start already.  Some stuff that has been going on at Butter mansion while I was not updating my blog:



One unseasonably warm January afternoon, my dear friend Andrew and I found ourselves dining on a patio with this guy, who I named "Beast" for obvious reasons.  Check out the mane on this badass mofo.



He was huge and friendly and probably not clean, but I pet him anyway.  I think he's like the neighborhood cat.  There was a water bowl for him and he was obviously well fed (probs by his own hunting skills).  This was the same day that I saw a coyote in Prairie Dog Town at the corner of Arapahoe and Cherryvale, so a pretty good day for wild animals if you ask me.  After a walk around downtown I stopped back at the patio and found him napping where I left him and gave him a big beastly goodbye petting time.  AWESOME.



The days are getting longer around here, which I could appreciate wholeheartedly if it didn't mean missing out on sunrises like this.  I wake up wicked early a few times a week to get Felix ready for school, and it's been well before the butt crack of dawn for months now.  If I'm lucky I catch a sunrise as powerful and glorious as this one.  These days wake up time is after the butt crack of dawn, and I'm missing this majesty already.  No way I'd wake up earlier.  Guess I'll have to wait until next winter.  That's something to look forward to, I guess.



And last, but not least, Mr. Chainsaw helped me buy a brand new (to me!) Juki industrial machine last weekend.  That means I'm excited to take Hot Butter into the future with speedier sewing speeds (speeeed!) and heavier materials, like LEATHER.  I'm still researching what thread to buy.  Buying a big ass cone of thread is kind of a commitment, and I want to make sure I'm wasting my doubloons on the wrong stuff.  If anybody needs an industrial sewing machine hookup in Denver, let me know.  I gotta guy.  My heavy new sewing mistress used to live in a factory in New Mexico (I think, I'm not always spot on- memory skill wise) and will now be getting the cushy basement retirement it always dreamed of.

So all said, I've been petting wild cats, seeing coyotes and sunsets, and buying heavy machines that I haven't actually used yet (but I haven't had it long enough to be procrastinating, I swear).  Also, wouldn't Beast and Jezebel make beautiful babies?