I MADE IT

In less than a month I'm posting another post!

So I MADE IT in under a month!

We just returned from the beach for our annual Thanksgiving

Trip,  we spend Thanksgiving with my cousin and dear friend, and her

family.  Her mother my great Aunt passed away this past year,  and it has truly effected me in a way I didn't expect.  

I miss her SO much. She would just pop by whenever 

during the day and spend some time with me, my daughter, and my nieces. We would "dish" about things and laugh and just have a really good time.  I guess you could say she sort of took the place of my grandmother in my life. We've always been close,  but got even closer in the two years after my grandmother (her sister) passed away! Anyway Thanksgiving was not the same.  I know I've talked about traditions and starting my own with my daughter,  but I miss the ones I had when growing up very much.  I am not and never have been a huge fan of change,  but it is a part of life that I can not control. One thing I did really enjoy this Thanksgiving was talking to my cousins whom we hardly ever see anymore,  and remembering all the great times we had when growing up and talking about how much things have changed. I think I could have sat there all night and talked if this old body of mine would have let me! Nostalgia hits me hard some times and I have to cry.  I LOVE the way I grew up and feel sorry for those who didn't have as great a childhood as I had! 

I still have not got my new jewelry shop in shape!  I'm having the hardest time trying to get the pictures I want! I just can't get them like I want to! Plus I have so much jewelry I really am overwhelmed on where to start! Also the bug to make more jewelry is gnawing at me something fierce,  but I feel I must get all the jewelry I already have pictures and listed in my shop so I can sell it!

My other ventures are going well,  I have so many need to do's and even more want to do's but am stuck doing the HAVE to do's and can't seem to get ahead of it all! I guess that's part of "working" for yourself.  I haven't made much money yet at any of my ventures online yet, switching from a retail store to online is VERY HARD! However,  I have to say I am so glad I am at home because I get hugs and kisses from the most beautiful little girl i know all day long,  and I can take breaks to get hugs and kisses whenever I want toooooo! That is priceless! 

Come see what all I'm doing at:

VISIT BODY & SOUL PRODUCTS

FOLLOW BODY & SOUL ON FACE BOOK

VISIT Z BOX ~ A SAMPLER BOX OF GOODIES 4 U !

FOLLOW Z BOX ON FACE BOOK

VISIT REBECCA'S JEWELRY ON ZIBBET (SHOP STILL IN PROGRESS)

FOLLOW RWESTDESIGNS JEWELRY ON FACE BOOK

Well as you can see I have a lot to keep up with running these three businesses! I have so many ideas that fly at me I get overwhelmed and spend a lot of time thinking about what I want to do and not ever getting it all accomplished!

Oh yeah,  and here's my VOLUNTEER JOB,  I am the secretary of the Woodlawn Community,  and I take phone calls and organize the rentals of this adorable little one room school house! YES! Just like Little House on the Prairie.  I am fortunate to live beside of this wonderful little place,  it's been a part of my family for a long time.  Way back to when it was built,  my great grandfather donated the wood to build it! My grandparents taught 4-H here for a while,  and I have always lived behind it on family land growing up and now my husband and I have also built here! We love it!

Check it out at:

Historical Woodlawn One Room School House

Please come visit me at all my Shops and Places! Please check out my natural bath & beauty items,  and Z Box,  if you purchase a Z Box you will not be disappointed with all the wonderful items from various Zibbet Shop owners in it! Please check it out and get to know some of the wonderful Zibbet Shop owners! As I like to say:

Shop Hand~Made.....GIVE LOVE!

Every hand~made item has a lot of love put into it,  these shop owners work harder at making this work than they ever do/did at a "real day job" as some people I know call it!  Shop hand~made as often as you can!

Gotta go do something PRODUCTIVE!

Until next time have a wonderful week/weekend!

                  

                               ~ Rebecca

NOVEMBER ~ IS HERE WOW!!

Wow ! November is here!

Well we've had a very busy October,  got to meet my husbands long lost biological father.  They haven't seen each other in 33 years,  and were very glad to find each other and be re-united! So now we have another family to add to our circle! I think it's just great, he's a very nice man with a very nice family! My hubby also found out he has another half-sister and half-brother. So that's made this October a very exciting month for us!

Also in my last post I talked about  adding to my jobs well since then I have added another "job" to my repertoire! A sampling program that is designed around the awesome new selling venue of Zibbet!

Lots of great Zibbet shops have gotten together and submitted samples to me and I will assemble them in boxes and sell them.  Also they get me promoting their shop on my blog Zibbeters: Show & Tell

and on the face book page Sample Z Box ! They help me spread the word by tweeting and sharing these also! Come follow us,  and be sure to buy one of these awesome Sample Boxes,  it is truly an unparalleled value! It has lots of jewelry and just the neatest things in it. I am contributing from both of my businesses,  Body & Soul Products  and  RWest Designs Jewelry !  Please go to my blog Zibbeters Show & Tell to read all about the Z Box !

I have been working on my jewelry shop also,  I have an Artifre Shop and a Zibbet shop,  and both of them need lots of love,  so if you go there just bare in mind they are works in progress that may not get a whole lot of attention until after the new year!  

I have been trying to retake the pictures of my jewelry and not getting the results I want.  That is what is taking me so long! My small digital camera died on me but my wonderful mother has sent me a new one, that is my Christmas & Birthday present,  which is fine by me! So now maybe if I can get the time to work on my pictures I can get a lot accomplished with my shops. I am traveling to the coast soon,  and am thinking of taking some of my jewelry to take pictures of it on the beach!

What do you think?  I think I like the idea,  not sure the hubby would like the idea of me "working" on our vacation though.  But if you've ever tried to work for yourself,  you know it's hard to stop, and hard to vacation when all you can think about is what you need to be doing! I really enjoy what I am doing,  so it's easier for me.  But my family would like to see me once in a while without a computer attached to my fingertips!

Well need to go tuck the little one for her nap! Until next time many blessings and have a wonderful week! 

P.S.  Don't forget to go purchase Z Box!  It would make great gifts for loved ones or to treat yourself! Purchase Z Box

~~~Rebecca~~~

Wow Where Does The Time Go ??

Well here I am again,  another month has gone by,  well actually longer than a month.  I've been a very busy little bee.  My new adventures have kept me very busy....creating blogs, adding gadgets, widgets, and info to several different websites I'm doing, promoting my latest venture (s) ! Potty training my daughter, and raising her! Being a wife, mother, daughter, sister, and aunt!

Sometimes I think I'm going to get into trouble if I keep adding jobs to my day !  I truly love everything I'm doing and i have the hardest time saying NO...  even to myself!!

So I've started redoing my jewelry pictures and getting them loaded onto my new site for selling it.  Zibbet.  I already have my bath  &  beauty products at Zibbet,  and I thoroughly enjoy this selling venue and I believe in my heart it will surpass Etsy as a popular place to shop hand~made.  There are lots of talented Artists selling their items there.  

I've already purchased several things from there myself.  I got this adorable little Octopus named Flambe.....you can see how he got his name....  with all his beautiful colors!  He will be in my daughters stocking for Christmas!  

Flambe Came From Slothmuffin on Zibbet

If you haven't been to Zibbet yet,  you should go and look around.

You can start with one of my shops!

Body & Soul Products

If you feel like you might get lost in the sea of shops, you can go to my blog

where I feature different artists ,  and there are pages on the blog where some of the shop owners have posted links to their shops,  or to items they are promoting for October!

Visit Zibbeters Show & Tell Blog

Soon I hope to have my jewelry shop up and running and some new items

to be posted for your viewing delight ;o}  !

Until next time have a safe Halloween if you celebrate it!

~Rebecca~

What I Have and Haven't Been Up To....

Well, things are forever changing, and I am not a person who loves change. I like things to stay steady and familiar, however that is not realistic. Well, I didn't "cook" my way through my recipe book, but I did start the soap business, which is one reason I haven't posted in 4 months!!

I haven't left the earth, only I can't seem to find the time I need to do everything I want and need to do, and still take care of my daughter and husband!!

I've been a little down lately, okay a lot down lately. Which is not my normal self. I have lost and am loosing people I love dearly to sickness, it's been three in the last month. I have a sadness lately that I'm having a hard time shaking. So I haven't been very creative or social either.

But I have been up to a few things ! I have been making soap and natural products like crazy. After reading some pretty scary stuff about the things we put ON our bodies, I got busy. I want my daughter to start her beauty regimen with natural products. I have many health problems and sometimes I wonder if all the gunk i used to put ON my body contributed to that...so I'm trying to change things for my daughter.

I am selling these items on Zibbet, a wonderful place to set up shop. If you have time please go by there and check it out!

http://www.zibbet.com/rwestdesigns

I am currently trying to get new pictures of my jewelry taken, and re-do my Etsy page. It needs so much help!! So if you've been there lately please excuse it, I hope to have it all revamped soon!

New RWestDesigns Jewelry coming soon, I finally got my "studio" in better shape (with the help of my WONDERFUL MOM) and am hoping this will spark my creative side once again!!

Come follow our Body & Soul Page on facebook to keep up with the natural bath products we are making!!

http://www.facebook.com/bodyandsoulproducts!!

Until the next time ~ hope everyone is having a GREAT start to "Back to School" month!!

To cook or Not to Cook

DANG !! I must get better at posting to this blog. A month since my last post uuuggghhhh!! Sorry to anyone out there reading this!!

Well yesterday I "took the day off" so to speak. I went to my recently laid off brother's house ( which also put me out of a job, since I usually babysit his three beautiful girls!!) well any way spent most of the day at his house which btw is just down the driveway!! I watched the cutest movie about the girl who cooked her way through Julia Child's cookbook. This is the cutest movie and reminded me of why I started blogging, to become famous !!! Haha just kidding. But as I watched I wondered could I ever do that, am I tooo lazy to accomplish something like that?? I do like to cook. However buying all those ingredients and having a husband who thinks Taco Bell is the best place EVER to eat, and having a two year old , I just don't know that I would have the stamina to blog and cook everyday!!

Speaking of cooking I have been cooking up some luscious goodness here lately to bathe in. Hoping to come up with a product line I can sell on Etsy or Artfire or Zibbet or all three or just online and all that that entails!! I don't want to go into great detail yet, but they involve essential oils. I used to "play" with essential oils back in my twenties , can't believe I'm old enough to say that now, in my mind I still feel 18!!

Anyway enjoying getting to know them again.

I realize this post has nothing to do about jewelry, and I am still creating jewelry, I'm just branching out in my endeavors!! Jewelry is a very hard hobby to sell solely online!! When I had my stuff in stores it sold very well, now it's hard to be seen in the wide wide web. I'm not going to stop creating, or trying to sell it, so if you like my jewelry don't worry it's not going anywhere!!!

Having said that, I'm thinking maybe I could cook my way through my recipe book for natural beauty products and blog about that. What do you think??

Life

Wow ! 21 days since I've updated!! We've been so busy around here, not all of it good things, but all of it very important!

I want to send out prayers for one very loved friend of the family who is dealing with the nasty "C" word : Cancer. This family and person has been a part of my life for a very long time, and we love them dearly. I grew up with their children and them and we have shared tons of great times.They have helped me and my husband through some rough times and we have learned a lot from them. They are a very special family and They need all the prayers we can give them.

I also want to send out prayers for my favorite Great Aunt who suffered a massive stroke and has a long recovery road ahead of her. She is not much older than my mother and has alwys been a wonderful part of my family. Growing up she was the coolest great Aunt anyone could have ever asked for, she still is very cool don't get me wrong, but her daughter and I were very close, and I spent as much time at their home as I did at my own. She has this amazing outlook on things and I've learned alot from her over the years. I love her so much and we all need her to recover from this stroke.

If you pray ~ please send up a prayer for these two very loved people and their families.

Also I have been working on items for a new shop I want to open on zibbet ~ I've already "opened" the shop I just haven't been able to fill it with items as of yet. I am working on this it's been a rough couple of weeks, and my creative time and mood has been very limited these past couple of weeks. In my zibbet shop there will be nothing over $25.00 these items will include jewelry, and eventually other things I wish to dabble in. Something that has been on my mind like crazy is bath & beauty products. My cousin that I mentioned above and I "opened up" our own little shop in my grandmother's basement where we had "made" lotions and perfumes by mixing up beauty products that my grandmother gave us to play with. I think one of our other great Aunts bought a couple of items, and maybe our moms and grandmother. So even as a young girl I always wanted to open shop and sell things. maybe bath products will be on the way soon. I've been looking at supplies and there are so many choices and things to think about. It's slightly overwhelming, but I'm definitely interested in starting!!

Also we have been busy planting seeds to hopefully plant in our container garden for the back deck. That was fun ~ just wish me luck on getting them to grow! I did not inherit my grandmother's green thumb, but I'm hoping I can pull this off!!

It's been a long and COLD winter and I am hoping the sunshine will bring us lots of good days ahead. I am more ready for Spring this year than I have ever been in my entire life!! Another giveaway is coming soon our facebook fan page is VERY close to 800 fans!! I've got to come up with something Springy to give away!!

Easter and Mother's Day is coming up quickly remember to check out our shops to see if you can find some gifts.

550 FANS GIVEAWAY

Well.....didn't think I would see this number for a long time!! However ~ thanks to a wonderful thing called "link love" I have hit 550 fans on my facebook page and surpassed it!! I see 1000 fans on the horizon, I thought this would be years away.

At first I was a little skeptical about doing this "link love" because it seemed okay to "FAN" people who are doing the same thing as you (with me it's JEWELRY) the Internet marketplace is flooded with jewelry makers/designers, and I thought "Why do I want to be their fan?" What if their prices are better than mine, what if people like their work better than mine, what if I'm showing my customers their jewelry, and they quit buying from me? Well, as I am going through linking up with all these wonderful artists/crafters/designers of many many different things as well as jewelry .....I find myself filtering through their pages and finding many more interesting pages, and I find myself buying from some of their FANS and even some of the pages in link love. I'm finding all kinds of neat artists/crafters/designers that I never would have known existed.....THEN it hits me if this is happening to me....then it must happen to them also. So now I GET LINK LOVE.... it's the exposure of your links and pages and shops, it's meeting other people doing the same thing you are....trying to make a business out of their hobby or craft or talent, helping each other out in this tough economy and the tough world of cyber selling. So if you are afraid of a little link love .....DON'T BE!! Embrace it ....everyday I try to spread some link love, and I'm getting it back just as I spread it!!

I'm thankful for all of the new FANS and all of the "LINK LOVE" being spread. To thank all my new fans .... I'm giving this bracelet away to help remind us SPRING is on the way, and to keep spreading the love.

Become my FAN on facebook to see how to win this bracelet.....tweet this too, because when we reach 800 FANS there will be another giveaway!! Find our facebook badge on this page to FAN US!!!

Keep spreading the love and I'll see you in the links ~~~~~~~

More Snow!!

More Snow !! Wow where was all this snow when I was working outside the home? The best thing about snow here in the south is getting an unexpected day off from work, because the roads are too bad to drive on!!

Well..... when you are home everyday, snow is just that... SNOW!! No free day off!! However I am still in this mode of "goof off " when it snow's!! I also have this overwhelming urge to EAT JUNK FOOD!! Luckily today I have no junk food in the house, because I haven't been to the grocery store for this week yet!! I could make some sausage and gravy, but the sausage is frozen and I'm not that motivated!!

I'm going to use today to catch up on some things that have desperately needed my attention....my 'studio" is in desperate need of some cleaning, my "filing" is two feet tall, my treadmill is covered in cloths, and I have nothing clean to wear, so I guess my snow day is taken care of. It's gonna be tough because I am in goof off mode!!

Maybe I'll take a break later and make some snow cream!!

Have a great day!! I'm off to make me some hot tea and get to work!!

I need to feature another Etsy artist , I have my eye on one, and I've tried her product, so I need to sit down and introduce you to her. Look for this early next week!!

Winter Block

Hi all ~ I have been in a winter block.....I can't seem to make any jewelry and I can't seem to update my blogs!! I guess all the things that come with winter have kept me busy enough!! So far me, my husband , and most of all my sweet little girl have been sick with the virus that's running rampant around here, bad thing is my nieces, brother, and sister-in-law, and my mom & dad have all had it and I think we have passed it around for a month and a half!! YUCK!! We are ready for spring!!

We had a blizzard this past weekend, and they are calling for more snow this weekend and early next week!! I love the snow but it makes me want to take the "day off". Wish I could be like my friend who uses her snow days to get stuff done!! it's just not in me, I'm a bit lazy I'm afraid!!!

My grandfather's been in the hospital ( he's at home now), we had a great Uncle pass away, and I sprained my ankle!!! I'm not complaining but all of this has just left me wanting to go to sleep until Spring....do you think I could get away with hibernating for the rest of winter???? Probably not!! But I could use the sleep!!

Today the sun is shining so I'm going to test out the camera my brother just brought me, it's his old digital camera, but it should be better than the one I am currently using !! Gotta love my brother. When he upgrades he passes down his older one which is always newer than my newest one!!! This is with everything he buys, tv's, dvd players, camera's, now if I could just get him to pass down his cars I'd be right!!! Thanks little brother!!!

Hopefully I can get some good pictures of some jewelry that I had made before Christmas and gets pics posted , it'll be new to you right???

Also if you haven't yet checked out my new shop please go see the new jewelry there, it's different jewelry that is not on my etsy site!!!

http://www.rwestdesigns.artfire.com/

If you get a chance stop by my facebook page and become a fan, and if you have an Etsy or Artifre or any shop where you sell your crafts/arts, leave your links in the discussion tab under links to Artisan Pages. I think I'll go start one for blogs too, so you can leave your blogs if you don't sell anything!! I love to read blogs, if you have a cool one I'm not already following please go leave your link, become a fan of my facebook page also, you can get there by clicking on my FAN BOX on the right hand side of this blog!!

Also follow me on http://www.twitter.com/rwestdesigns

Follow me on my blog, fan me, and follow me on twitter, I'll return the favor!!!

Soap Giveaway!!

Wow!! Can't wait to try this soap...after I've done all my entries to win some soap from http://www.artifre.com/users/soapdeli or her etsy shop!!http://www.etsy.com/shop/soapdeli....... I'm going to her etsy shop to purchase some BIG SALT LICK BAR SOAP ...hoping it will help to ease my toddlers few spots of eczema and my extremely dry skin!!

Go to http://www.naturemanipulated.com/ to learn how you can get on the giveaway.