Monday, December 16, 2013

Remember that time Mom made your dress?!?

There has been a slight delay in production. We are waiting for our labels to arrive. They need to be sewn into all the garments during assembly and are currently held up due to bad weather. 

So while I was waiting around today I  thought I'd kill two birds with one stone and try out a new pattern while making my daughter a Christmas dress. Oops...kind of forgot about a dress for her!

I found some holiday fabric I bought when she was almost 1 1/2 years old. The plan was to make her a Christmas outfit. (She's now almost 3 1/2!) And since I didn't have the items on hand to make her the Ninja Turtle Christmas dress she requested...this will have to do! I used the holiday fabric for the skirt and thought I'd experiment with jersey knits for the top (bodice) of the dress. 

I'm not gonna lie, I love this crazy little number! However, I have a feeling that this will forever be known as...."Hey, remember that time mom made your Christmas dress?!?!" 

Thursday, December 5, 2013

A layoff leads to Zulily and the rebirth of Lions & Lily Pads......

My name is Cheryl and I co-own Lions & Lily Pads with one of my best friends, Lindsey. Our oldest children are 2 months, 2 weeks, and 2 days apart. And now our youngest children are less than 2 months apart! (Awe....I know, right!?!?) I make the clothing and Lindsey handles the business side of this operation while trying to keep me focused. Here's our story in a nutshell........

We were both pharmaceutical reps and after we had our daughters I started making clothing for them and one day Lindsey said, "We should turn this into a business!" and just like that Lions & Lily Pads was born! (Ok...there was more to it than that, but you get the gist of it.) 

We both continued to work full-time while I managed our etsy orders with the help of my husband, Wayne, who has a Fine Arts degree. He would help me with appliqued and monogrammed items while we all continued to work full-time. The balance of our etsy site/real jobs/and family life would sometimes blur, making it hard for us to keep up at times. 

Fast forward to today.........the pharmaceutical company I was working for recently laid off our entire salesforce. HOWEVER, nine minutes before I got on the conference call that would ultimately lead to my layoff, Zulily called and wanted to know if we'd be interested in putting our items on their site! 

Making children's clothing has always been my passion, but I've never been able to dedicate myself fully to Lions & Lily Pads the way I truly wanted/needed to. So we are putting it all on the line and decided to move forward with Zulily. I will SOLEY be making 1200 items for our Zulily debut while documenting our journey through our blog!

So here goes nothing.......