Hopscotch Designs

Too Cute In Her Charlotte Dress!

Send us photos of your cutie pies in their favorite Hopscotch Designs creations and we’ll post them here.

Yeah!

The Jane Dress in Cranberry for Fall 2010

My 9 year old daughter Gracie is a girl of many talents… or maybe just interests….  She loves horseback riding, painting - really art of any kind, soccer, reading, dancing, making up songs …. the list goes on and on.  A few of these interests she does seem to have a talent for.  One of those is art.  When she grows up she wants to be an artist and art teacher who rides horses on the weekends.  So, this summer she asked if she could teach some art classes for her friends… she thinks one a week would be good… hmmmmm… I think one period…. we settle on two and invite 20 of her closest friends. 

We just had the second class and it turned out great!  Birdhouse painting 101 was a huge success.  You should gather all your kids and their friends and go for it.  Seriously, Michaels has these adorable little wooden birdhouses for $1 each!  Look how cute they turned out!

In fact I tried to keep them all… but the kids wanted to take home their works of art.  So, I’m off to Michaels to buy a couple dozen more so my back fence can always look this cute!

We’re off to Vegas for the tradeshows and couldn’t resist giving you all a sneak peak at what’s in store for Spring 2010.

A little bit about our inspiration:

Who hasn’t fantasized about running away to live with gypsies?

Late nights by the campfire, guitars playing, children dancing, songs being sung, fireflies flittering… and the bright, beautiful, swirling skirts of the gypsies.

Our Spring 2010 line is inspired by the wonderful vibrant colors of the gypsy campfire.  As always, we add our special Hopscotch twist and combine the gypsy spirit with a vintage silhouette.

Hope you love it as much as we do.

Let us know what you think!

So, I woke up this morning with a niggling thought in the back of my head that something cool just happened that I should blog about.  Hmmmmm….. what could it be…. back to school shopping?… no… inspecting orders?…  no… Oh right, I played poker with Phil Hellmuth and Chau Xiang! 

Wait, no I didn’t!  Hmmmm…  That’s right, I had a dream, that was so real, I mean real, real, like I remember every detail real, that I played poker with poker superstars Phil Hellmuth and Chau Xiang.  See, I was playing in this tournament and ended up at a table with Phil and Chau (we’re on a first name basis now, you see) and all three of us ended up going out in the same hand so, we decided to start a side game.  I was really nervous because I’m an amatuer and they’re major pros and how am I possibly going to play against them… for cash!  And I really wanted to take a photo with them but didn’t want to be the goofy stalker fan.  Arg!  It was all so exciting and stressful!  …. and then… damn, it was only a dream!

How good do we look together?

I’ve never come across a bigger misnomer… Clearlake is decidedly, unequivocally, inarguably not clear.  I mean not at all!  It’s green!  Bright, mossy, monstery, can’t see the bottom green! 

So much so that last year when we went up for a family vacation I didn’t get in the lake once all week.  This year the kids conned me in to going in “just one time”.  Being me, I ran full speed (about 1 mile/hour) off the end of the deck and did a canonball!  Splash!  and hit the bottom… this year Clearlake is not only not clear but it’s quite shallow.  Ah well.  Once in, it is a little creepy with all the muck floating around and the bottom feeling like moss filled sponges.  However, it’s kind of nice!  I mean if you don’t touch the bottom, which I managed to do by staying out somewhat far and treading water for the entire 30 minutes I was in (and occasionaly hanging onto my husband!)  And it was really neat that the top 18 inches or so of water are about 85 degrees and then at the 18 inch mark it immediately drops to 65 degrees.  It feels great!  And you can mix the water up with your hands and have the cold swirling around you with the hot!  Very fun! … at least for about 30 minutes… then it’s a disinfecting shower and a giant glass of wine!  You sure can’t beat the view!

Speaking of wine… Clearlake is surrounded by wineries.  So, when you’re not busy disinfecting from your last swim you can go winetasting.  It’s no Sonoma (or Napa for you snobs) but it’s actually pretty good and the wine is way cheaper.  They’re not so snobby here about wine having to be $40 a bottle if it’s good.  In fact, on Sunday during their Wine Adventure (food and wine pairings at all the wineries) there were some amazing case deals!

So check out Clearlake some time.  Take a swim (watch out for the fish!), a shower and have a glass of delicious local wine!

So what happens when your hobby becomes your business?…  You find a new hobby of course!

I still love to sew but… it’s work… fun work! but work!!!!  So, Jenn and I came up with the bright idea to take an upholstry class!  I mean we have so much free time, why not tie up 4 hours every Thursday night?  Here’s how it works - we go to estate sales on Fridays (oh, hmmmm, that’s a hobby too I guess… well no one says you can’t have more than one hobby) and sometimes we come across great chairs dirt cheap.  Sometimes we even are just driving along and find them on the side of the road!!!!  How could anyone throw away a perfectly adorable vintage chair!  If nothing else you can just sit it on your patio to look at.

Anyway, so we’d both started to accumulate a certain number of chairs that our husband wouldn’t let in the house due to their supposed stated of disrepair.  Then - tada! - we remember hearing about this great upholstry class offered through the local adult ed college.  We sign right up.  Show up on night one with our ragged chairs and high hopes.  Supremely confident that with our finely honed sewing skills we’re going to tear it up in class.  Tony, the instructor, gives us tutorial on the industrial machines.  Yikes!  You could lose a finger on those.  Well, we’ll just do the machine sewing part at home.  Okay.  “So, Tony,” we ask brimming with confidence “how many classes do you think it will take us to re-upholster our chairs?” ……  What!  At least two sessions?  That’s 20 classes!  Hmmmmm.  On the way home that first night Jenn and I regroup and regain our confidence.  Tony’s never seen the likes of us.  We will rock these chairs out in one session of classes.  No problem!????????

Hmmmmm.  One year later - SUCCESS!!!!

Isn’t she pretty!  I even popped a bottle of champagne to celebrate her completion!

So, we weren’t a fast as we thought we’d be and sewing skills don’t necessarily translate to upholstry skills and Thursday nights have a surprising number of school and family activity conflicts.  But we loved it!

Here’s the next project I have lined up. 

A great old chair from my husband’s Uncle’s house and I’m re-upholstering it in vintage ties!  That can’t be too hard can it?

I’ll let you know in a year!

LOL

Madigan is up there on the stage and she won’t smile!  She drives me crazy!!!!!

Here I sit at her 5thGrade Promotion (that’s graduation gone casual) and the child is up on stage receiving awards and accolades and she won’t smile.  As I watch her I suddenly realize I’m making giant smiley faces at her in an effort to get her to mimic me.  You know, like when you’re spoon feeding a baby and you find yourself opening your mouth wide to get the baby to open their mouth…. c’mon, we’ve all done it!  Finally, at the very end she looks over at me and gives me one smirky little smile just before the tall kid in front of her stands up and blocks my photo!

Then it’s time for the slide show - a look back at the last six years from kindergarten through today.  Okay, you probably know by now, I’m not the weepy mom but this made me come close.  Just to see how much these kids have grown is charming.  I’m sitting there looking at a giant slide photo of my Madigan’s first school picture and she just looks like such a baby! 

It has me walking down memory lane in my head.  Flashing back through mental photos of the kids over the years.  As always, when I think about my kids, I can’t leave out my last baby…. Hopscotch!  So, as soon as I got home I started digging out the old photos from our first photo shoot.  We took all four of our kids and every other cute kid we could get a hold of and headed to the corral at Jenn’s. 

Madigan was 6, Megan 5, Gracie 4, Cameron 3 and Hopscotch 2! 

WOW!!!! How they’ve all changed!  The kids have lost their baby faces and Hopscotch has become so much more refined and funky!  I can’t wait to look back again in 5 years and see what’s the same and what has changed.

Hope you enjoyed the walk down memory lane with Hopscotch, the kids and me!

Mayberry… La Mesa… sometimes I think it’s all the same thing.  Even surrounded by the massive sprawl that is San Diego County, our little town of La Mesa always feels like a small town.  I can’t walk down the street, get a coffee at Cosmos or even hit the local Vons without running into people that I know… from the girls’ school, from estate sales, from high school?  I love it!  The one thing that screams small town like nothing else is the annual tradition of The Flay Day Parade! 

Last weekend we walked down the hill into town for The Flag Day Parade, an annual tradition that never disappoints.  Marching bands, politicians, clowns (eek!), Girl Scouts, the local trash company, horses, pug puppies, solo aging batonists…. too many things to mention… I’ll let the photos speak for themselves.

go Kaimilani!

an annual tradition

GO CHARGERS!!!!!!!

nothing cuter than pug rescue

love that car

(don’t tell anyone else but…. clowns scare me!)

martial arts?

and to sweep up after it all… the trash truck!

If you’re in town next year make sure to join us for a walk and an hour of non-stop fun!

I love Disneyland!!!

I mean, who doesn’t? … other than my husband!  (He was”sick” and went home after the first day!) 

Really, I think half the reason I had kids was so I’d have a valid excuse to go to “The Happiest Place on Earth” twice a year. 

We always start with the Matterhorn!

Lots of sugar is a must…

… a good scare in the haunted house!

Followed by a minor disaster when aforementioned children got stuck in the middle of Thunder Mountain when it broke down… in the dark… alone.  Pubescent Disney employees, while nice, have very little understanding of crazy Mom who has no idea where her kids are or if they’re hurt.  “Don’t worry, they should be off in 10-20 minutes.”  ARE YOU KIDDING ME!  Anyway, all’s well that ends well.  The girls were fine, we got a ‘go to the head of the line’ pass, we didn’t use the pass because it was late and the kids were a little scared, we did make a group of teenagers happy when we gave them the pass to use on Splash Mountain (in the cold), we had a fun story to tell, and there was cold chardonnay, microwave popcorn and a warm bed back at the hotel.

And on day two… the answer to the age old question “How can they call it ‘The Happiest Place on Earth’ when you can’t even get a cocktail?!?”… California Adventure!  Nothing says California like a margarita and a rollercoaster ride!

and at the end of the day, the girls are exhausted and my nephew is still going strong….

Which is why they invented Downtown Disney for one final good meal…. with cocktails… before the long ride home!

Okay, that was our weekend in a nutshell.  Now my parting words of wisdom (drum roll please… )  Two words - SINGLE RIDER!  If you know about it you know it’s even better than a fast pass, if you’ve never heard about it ask around, it will change your life!