New items for 2020

I knew I needed to try and find some items other than Christmas items in my shop.

I recently discovered bag and purse making. What a fun thing to do. I still look at my creations and say “Wow, I made that?”

Here are a few of the Zippy Clutches I have listed in my Etsy shop (www.calicomouse.com).

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Here it is

As promised, here is the project. 

https://www.etsy.com/listing/500088085/embroidered-stained-glass-nativity-wall?ref=shop_home_active_1

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New Chapter

Wow. Has it really been 4 years since my last post?  Well, I plan to change that going forward. My job of 17 years was eliminated last week. I think the only thing I will miss is the paycheck and benefits. So for now, I’ve more time to devote to the things I love to do. Matter of fact, I’ve got an embroidery project – almost a year in the making – that I’ve got to go photograph and get listed in my Etsy shop. Stay tuned!

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Sharing

Spent the evening last night making a new bed for the dogs. Ordered a huge bag of shredded foam and made a new bed out of unbleached muslin. Put that in a bed cover saved from an old bed. This is how we found the two dogs this morning. Guess I better get the second bed made ASAP!

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Christmas in July

Sale on all Christmas items! Enter Code XmasJuly and save 10%!

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Sock Knitting Machine arrives!so

I am now the proud owner of a sock knitting machine!

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14 weeks till Christmas!

Where has the year gone? I don’t know about you, but ….

Handmade Christmas

Stumped on what to get someone this year for Christmas? Want to support the economy? Buy handmade items made in the US!

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First week of solar

Well, in the first week of solar generation, we’ve generated 215 kW! Now if every week would be as good, we’d be thrilled. Even on a cloudy day, we still generated 11 kW. We’re waiting on information so we can install the Fat Spaniel web monitoring, and in the meantime, I’m manually keeping a daily record of our generation: http://www.desktopdesigns.net/solar

We’ve put our Kill A Watt Electricity Usage Monitor meter to use to see just how much our appliances are using. We have a 15+year old freezer that we thought might need replacing with a more energy-efficient model, but when we checked the actual energy use and cost, we found it’s only costing about $10.32 a month to operate. Kind of hard to justify a new freezer for those costs.

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We’ve got Solar!

Well, after weeks of delays, which I won’t go into detail on, we finally got our solar panels installed this week.

While our system is smaller than what was originally quoted to us (due to roof layout), we did end up with a larger system than we thought we were going to get.

We have 32 Sharp 210w panels – 22 on the front, East-facing side of the house totaling 4.6kw and 10 on the South-facing side, for a total of 2.1kw. Total system size of 6.7kw.

It is interesting to watch the panel generation as the sun changes. The front went into standyby mode about a half hour before the south side, and restarted earlier this morning.

A few pictures of the install process:

The rails installed on the roof:

The first panels:

Inverters in the basement:

3 x 3 array over the family room:

And the finished project:

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Afghan finished!

Last night I finished the 2-month+ project I had been working on for my cousin. (sorry, this one’s not for sale)

I have a Christmas afghan I’d like to make next, well two actually, one for me and one for sale.

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