Craftlovers.net and my life turned upside down.

 Hello, for those that have followed my blog in the past you will most likely be shocked to see a post from me it has been way too long.  I have to admit I have been out of touch for a while.  The past year has been Crazy at the Healey house.  My oldest daughter was engaged.  Then she was not.  Then she was and then she was not.  She has also totaled 2 vehicle's in the last year.  Once her fault, one some one some one else fault with a car that she had for less than 6 weeks.  Needless to say a run of bad luck for her.

I have done some quilting.  I started to make a purple and gray quilt for her wedding and then got distracted making these grannies squares.  But all of that got pushed aside.  With the wedding off, the desire to finish the quilt is lost and well the project is just sitting on the table in one of those disgusted piles of why did I buy that much purple fabric piles.

Well I do have to say I do love purple, so I do guess I will make great use of the. I do enjoy cutting things up into 2 1/2 inch squares so it will be fun to dice and splice it into them and then turn it into quilts.  But then again that is not really why its been sitting in a pile.

In February, we found out that we were expecting, only for it to be short lived.  In March, we found out that we were pregnant with twins, only for them to find no heartbeats. Not our first miscarriage, but still hard none the less. 

Last April was Tanya's and  mine 25 wedding anniversary and to celebrate we went to Arches National Park in Moab Utah.  When I was a kid this was one of my family's go to vacation spots.  For our first wedding anniversary, I took Tanya there. 

Only to find out that the Jeep Safari was held that same weekend and it also rained the entire weekend.  Any way she hated it so bad and never got to see the Arches at all and it took me 24 years to get her back to the area.  After 3 days there. I think she loves it and can see why I loved it and will come back with me again.  Any way after a fantastic weekend, I was on a complete high.



I came home from vacation and went back into work the following Tuesday morning and to my total amazement got let go from my job after working for the same company for 11 years.  Needless to say this ended the high from my weekend and sent my life into a tail spin and I have spent the last couple months reevaluating what I find important in life.

The funny thing is that it only took my previous company 8 days after they let me go to realize that they did not know what I did.  They contracted with me to fix a problem with their system.  This happened a time or 2 more,  until 3 weeks later, I was back working full time as a contractor for them.  I am no longer a "Full Time" employee for the company and I work from home, but I still do the same job and well I get paid more money as a contractor then I got paid as a salary employee.  Though I do have to pay the Cobra insurance which at $1500 a month, about made my mouth drop.  Though now I have to figure out how to pay my own taxes at the end of the year, which is going to suck.  I have no paid vacations or sick pay or any thing of the like, but well my commute to work is great. I walk across the hall and I get to see my wife and kids a lot more.

Speaking of the kids Julia graduated as they say from kindergarten this year.  My baby is growing up and getting big.  As part of my seeing the world in a new light I have decided that I need to get serious with the other big love of my life and that is programming.  I am a programmer by trade, but my job has sorta slowly lead me away from truly programming and I am more an analyst and trouble shooter now.  So to learn my skills and polish up my skills I have decided to build a new site and learn better my trade of programming.  For those that know anything about programming I program in C# .NET using MVC which is a web development language. 

Any way I have created a website called http://craftlovers.net/ this site is a place where I can show off my quilts.  But not only can I show off my quilts the design of the site is that others can also showoff their stuff as well.  What I would like for you my friends to do is go give my site a test drive.  You can go look at the items already listed on it.  If you desire you can Create a "Company" which is just a profile that you list your own items under and then add your own inventory to the site.  The site is intended for any kind of craft or art.  The above picture is a picture my Daughter Julia wanted to add to my site.  She tells me it is for sell for 6$ its an original art work by Julia.  My site is still under construction and is changing slowly day by day and adding new features.  What I would love is for you to add a company.  Add a few items.  Then send me an email at my home email address rhealey101@gmail.com and let me know what you think.  Any suggestions, comments,  ideas for features, improvements, even things you hate are fine.  My wife tells me I need to change the picture up-loader to allow more then 1 picture at a time (future plans).  Any way please go check out my site.  And if you create an account and add at least 1 item I will send you one of my pdf patterns of your choice if you would like for free.  You can pick from any of the patterns we have listed on Craftsy or Etsy the links should be here on the blog. http://craftlovers.net/