the reason behind it all

I guess it is time to share the reason that I started my etsy shop! Besides the fact that I am really enjoying making so many lovely things and would do it with a shop or not (which means eventually we would run out of room in our apartment for things like me or my husband), I am saving up all of the extra pennies earned here to help pay for a wonderful adventure! My husband and I have been planning and scheming, for quite awhile now, an amazing journey including at least a couple continents and a whole bunch of countries.

Here is what we've got in mind so far...
My husband will graduate from Long Beach State in 2012. At this point we will sell most of our furniture and move back to San Diego. Blake's parents have been lovely enough to allow us to crash with them for the better part of a year while we both work and save and enjoy time with both of our families.
Then we set out! We're gonna start our trip in either New Zealand or Australia in February (when it will be THEIR summer).
From their we may visit Japan... Blake's cousin is currently in Okinawa with her husband who is in the Air Force and it would be amazing to visit them!
Then we will hit Europe and we will hit it hard! We started to make a list of the countries that we'd like to visit and the trouble is that we would like to visit them all. It is a good thing that we still have a couple years of planning left. We need to prioritize!
We are hoping to take advantage of a really neat community called CouchSurfing. Hopefully we can start hosting people from other countries in our home to get established and help others feel more comfortable about letting us into their homes.

We love adventures and were lucky enough to spend New Year's Day visit the Grand Canyon!

In the mean time we are slowly making lists of places to go and things to see and experience. In order to help us save money we aren't really going out much and instead have date nights that include researching countries, cooking dishes from the countries we hope to visit and watching films that come from the same countries. We started awhile back doing a country each month. We would look things up in travel books and online and watch Rick Steves videos when possible. And then at the end of the month, as a sort of celebration, we'd cook a meal from the country, have a bottle of wine or beer from the region and pop in a movie to watch that either came from the country or was starring someone from the country while we enjoyed the tastiness.  We kinda got out of the habit. Life got busy. But I am very motivated to start again. And I may even want to start over and redo the countries we're done in the past. Perhaps I will even share what we do and come up with here!

So this is what the dollars saved and earned through etsy will help to accomplish! I was looking up prices for flights to Australia and for my husband and I to even get over there will cost some where in the neighborhood of $2,000. Yikes! That is A LOT of headbands... After doing some seriously complicated calculations I have determined that  I would have to sell about 90 headbands to get that far. So far I've had 10 sales through etsy. I suppose that isn't a bad start. I've only been open for just over a month! I think that with Etsy and maybe a craft fair or two I can make this happen!! Woo! Well... I better go make more stuff!!