Summertime...

Summer. 

It's the time of the year when I get to eat my body weight in ice cream & watermelon, I wear my hair in a pony tail 24/7 and switch from wearing yoga pants to running shorts. 

Pretty much bliss.

Summer also means flowers are in full bloom, nautical designs are everywhere and I reach for simple jewelry that won't be hot and heavy in the humidity and heat. 

1/ Lemon Yellow Rosebud Earrings

2/ Green Lily Earrings

3/ Light Coral Chrysanthemum Earrings

4/ Fuchsia Chrysanthemum Earrings

5/ Red Rosebud Earrings

6/ Mint Dahlia Earrings

1/ Gold Seashell Necklace

2/ Emerald Green Leather Wrap Bracelet

3/ Light Vitrail Swarovski Crystal Necklace

4/ Vintage Seashell Locket Necklace

5/ Gold Sand Dollar Necklace

6/ Light Amethyst Leather Wrap Bracelet

7/ Teal Sand Dollar Necklace

8/ Olive Green Swarovski Crystal Necklace

9/ Emerald Green Swarovski Crystal Necklace

These are only a few of the new items that have been added to my etsy stores over the past week. 

Now if you will excuse me, I need to go eat some cappuccino fudge blitz ice cream. 

~ With Love, Ashlee ~

Tax Sale!

Hey Everyone!

So I currently have 2,478 excel spreadsheets open on my lap top and mounds of receipts all over my office floor. 

I am doing my accounting and taxes for 2012. 

Hooray!!

Worst thing about being a small business owner (besides having to deal with health insurance) is the whole accounting/taxes aspect of it all. I am terrible at it, I put it off and I beg my husband for help with creating various formulas that supposedly calculate things for me.

I have a busy two weeks ahead of me with trying to figure out this stuff so I decided to go ahead and have a sale in both of my etsy stores while I sit here, eat some dark chocolate and cuss to my puppy about how unfun math is.

I recently added a lot of new things to my stores, and right now you can get the new items as well as the rest of the items for 15% off!

First up - some bright, hand painted, color block brass earrings in various shades of spring and summer.

Find them here!

I have some new chan luu inspired wrap bracelets which feature some fun new buttons. Is that elephant not adorable?!?

Find them here!

Lastly, some sweet cameo lockets. Blush pink, cornflower blue and classic black are all available. 

Find them here!

Check out both 'My Sweet Nomsa' & 'Nomsa' on etsy to see all of my items that are 15% off. 

Everything is on sale right now, so if you have had your eye on something, now is your chance!

Have a great evening everyone!!

~ With Love, Ashlee ~

Spring Cleaning!

God. Doesn't the term spring cleaning just make you ill??

Me neither!!!

I love it and all the fun reorganizing, dusting and cleaning your walls that comes with it. I get a thrill when I bust out my Mr. Clean Magic Erasers and start scrubbing coffee stains off my cabinets (that is all my husband's fault fyi).

So to celebrate the spring cleaning season, I have two things to share with you. 

1) I have a lot of jewelry supplies. Like .. a lot, a lot. Every January when it is time for me to do my inventory, I curse at myself for two weeks straight as I meticulously count the tens of thousands of beads I have (no joke. Tens of thousands!!) So, I am trying to make a lot of jewelry right now to condense my stash. 

What does this mean for you?? 

Massive sale. MASSIVE. 

I am having a 15% off EVERYTHING sale right now if both of my etsy stores. It is lasting until Midnight on 3/28/12 and a lot of jewelry in my store is the last of that design. 

Click on the photos below and if you see something you like, grab it now because once it's gone, it's gone!

2) I am trying my darnedest to get reorganized and focused. I feel like lately I have had a lack of focus when it comes to my business (and life. Who am I kidding). So what helps one get focused?? 

That's right, a ginormous bulletin board!

Huzzah! Floral fabric, a flag bunting and pink everywhere! It's perfect.

So I thought that I would share how I made this guy and write out a little tutorial for you if you find that you need a little organization in your life as well. 

First, start off with a large size bulletin board and enough fabric to cover it all the way around each side with a few inches to spare. You also need some fabric pins.

Lay your bulletin board in the middle of your fabric with the back of the bulletin board and the back of the fabric facing you. Start folding and pinning your fabric to the back of the bulletin board. Go in with your pin with at least a 45 degree angle, and slide the pin in parallel to the bulletin board. You don't want the pin sticking through to the other side at all.  Go around all the edges and make sure the fabric is being pulled taut on all the way around.

 Easy peasy right? Now onto the fabric flag bunting. I made mine out of felt and yarn. I made a triangle shape out of cardboard and just started cutting bunches of triangles out of various colors of felt. Once I had enough triangles I laid them all out to decide on my color pattern.

Once the pattern was decided on, I laid my triangles out in a row, and applied a small strip of fabric glue onto the back, just near the top. I then pressed my yarn into the glue. I just keep doing these two steps until my bunting was enough to wrap around the sides and the top of the bulletin board.

Once it was the right length, I just stick it in place with a few pins. 

After I finished with the main construction of the bulletin board, the rest was easy!

 I divided my board into three sections with little bits of yarn pinned to the board. I also made headers for the different sections with various pieces of felt and paper. Lastly, I cut up strips of cardstock to use as the notes for my board. I can just write down what I have to do, pin it to the appropriate section and viola! 

Well....I still have to actually do the things I wrote down, but at least the tasks look beautiful in their new home. 

New Items In Stock!

As many of you know, I have been having a 20% sale for the past few days. The sale officially ends at Midnight tonight (EST), so if you want to get take advantage of these never-before-so-low prices, you better act quickly! The sale is going on in both of my etsy stores - www.mycellardoor.etsy.com & www.nomsa.etsy.com.

I added a bunch of new items to both of my stores. I have oodles of new designs that I still need to add, so check back often in the next few days for a lot of new items! If you want any more information about any of the items below, just click on the photo to get all the details!

No.... I am not Pregnant. Sorry.

Goodness.... I really need to get pregnant soon or I need to stop saying things which lead people to assume that I am pregnant. Things like, "Guess What" or "Hello!"

Anywho, today is a big day. I had a feature story published about me in the paper. Here is a link to the article....

http://www.onlineathens.com/stories/121210/liv_755161133.shtml



I have been waiting for several months to announce to everyone about my top secret work with Anthropologie stores. In case you don't read the article (even though you totally should), here is a brief rundown... a buyer from Anthropologie contacted me about supplying their stores with 3,000 of my fabric flowers back in September. After much discussion and design alteration, the colors and styles for the flowers were finalized in October. They needed the flowers by the beginning of November, so I hired ten lovely local ladies to help me with the production.  After making 3,000 flowers in three weeks, I finally got them all mailed out. Three days later, they called me and asked for another 2,000 flowers by the end of November. Back to work we went! After weeks of little sleep and burned fingers, I finished the last of the flowers for them right around Thanksgiving. I am still recovering :)

Anywho, check out your local Anthropologie store and find my work there. I am very flattered to be included in their amazing collection of items and couldn't have picked a better venue for my work to be sold. Here are pictures of the flowers that are currently being sold by them.

Remember, don't forget to read the article and check out my stores on etsy!

www.nomsa.etsy.com & www.mycellardoor.etsy.com

Bad Dreams

For about the past week, I have had some crazy dreams. The kind were you dream about going to school on the day of the final and then realize that you haven't been to class yet that semester. Those sort of wake up in a sweat, filled with anxiety dreams. Not to say though that there hasn't been a little bit of awesomeness here and there which may or may not include Don Draper from 'Mad Men.'



I think though that the reason that I have been so stressed subconsciously is because tomorrow, I am having an article published about me in the newspaper. From what I understand, it is going to be a pretty long article and will have a few photos of me and my work. I did an interview about 6 weeks ago with a lovely lady from the Athens Banner Herald and ended up talking for three hours. Over the course of that long conversation and with the weeks that have passed, I now have no recollection of what I said and I keep having dreams that I said terrible things! Like how I always want to pinch people's bottoms or that I secretly stash chocolate bars in my sock drawer <sidenote: I do not want to pinch people's bottoms and yeah, I have a bar or two of excellent chocolate in my sock drawer. Don't judge>.

This article is going to be about what I have just spent the last three months of my life working on. It is pretty awesome and I am super excited to finally be revealing it to the world! Definitely check the blog out tomorrow, because I will be posting a link to the article! <unless I find out I did say something terrible>.

PS...My husband and I signed up at church to buy Christmas items for a needy child through Salvation Army. We got a little 2-year old boy named Dontavious who needed clothes/shoes/socks/undies. I went to Target to buy these items the other day and my ovaries practically exploded! I swear I started ovulating right there in the middle of the baby sweaters. I contemplated buying clothes for my future children, but resisted the urge. And by the way....2 year old boy underwear is so freaking adorable!

Sweater from The Gap. If you wanted to buy it for my unborn children, I would be alright with that.

Best Blogger In The World

First off, I love my husband. Dearly. He is the sweetest, most wonderful man ever. But goodness gracious, when he gets an idea in his head, he doesn't let it go. At all. So here I am, back to blogging, since I am apparently the 'Best Blogger In The World.'  My husband is the biggest cheerleader ever for this blog and so after five months of silence, I am back in action on the world wide web. He puts this intense amount of peer pressure on me to blog and even comes up with blog ideas for me, but alas, I don't do them ever, so he brings them up again, and again, and again. So I have caved.

I, Ashlee, have declared that for the next three months, I will blog every darn day, so help me. Right now, I apologize for the inane comments, pointless observations and all around silliness that will be sure to occur. Now....on to the blogging.

I really appreciate that my husband finds me so hilarious. I think though, he finds me way more humorous than anyone else. He loves whenever we watch movie previews together and after the preview ends, I usually subconsciously give a one-sentence comment/review of the movie. Even though these statements are boring, not that insightful and probably have no merit whatsoever, he adores him. Reasons like these are why I love him so. But....he thinks that these reviews would be absolutely hilarious/fantastic idea on the blog. I disagree, but as stated earlier, he is an elephant and never forgets an idea. So here we go.... a brand new feature on my blog..... One sentence movie reviews!

Black Swan: "Despite the fact that Natalie Portman is my Arch Nemesis, I really want to see this movie."

Ta Da!!!!  I can already hear my husband giggling .....
Don't worry, I will make this blog better. Promise.
PS.... I had cuban food for the first time tonight and I think I am in love. My husband, grandmother and I went over to a friend's house for dinner and she gave us a 3-course home cooked cuban meal. And then hired a magician for after dinner. For reals. A real magician. Sweet!!