A very happy New Year, 2014 to you all!! I thought I would start out my new year with a blog hop that I happened to stumble upon in one of my Fiber Groups on Facebook. This blog hop, Grow Your Blog, is hosted by Vicki of 2 Bags Full and is intended to help connect bloggers from all walks of life all over the world. What a great idea! So without further ado, let’s begin, shall we?

My name is Heather, and I am the writer, creator and editor-in-chief for The Crafthopper. I started this blog to share my adventures through the amazing world of art and handcrafts, with a special interest and focus on the ancient crafts of jewelry making and fiber arts. I am lucky that I share a passion for the arts with my children who are very content sitting by my side lost in their own creative journey as I test a new pattern, wire wrap a new stone, or spin a new yarn. With this blog, I am able to fulfill another passion of mine: writing. Writing has long been a way for me to express myself without interruption and a form of therapy for me, a safe place to share emotions, failures, triumphs. An outlet for the words that build up in my head and get lost along their way to my mouth. That said, I don’t share much in ways of private, personal life on this particular blog now, given that I have very limited time on any given day in which to do all the things I love. This blog allows me to write AND share my crafting fun and experiments.

Currently, I live out in the boonies of central Texas with my husband, our four children, two cats, two dogs, and a slew of fiber animals-llamas, sheep and angora goats, as well as a lovely flock of egg-providing hens and their roo. Three years ago, I quit my high stress job as a labor and delivery RN to stay home with our then three children. My husband, known as The Muscle, is a Renaissance man who usually surprises most people he meets: a tattooed, bearded, kilt-wearing metalhead computer geek who enjoys spending time in his homemade blacksmith shop, or shearing sheep, planting a garden, learning to knit, petting a spoiled llapaca (technically a huarizo, as they are referred to in South America-the offspring of cross breeding a llama and an alpaca), I could go on and on about the unexpected habits of my Other Half! Together, we get up to all sorts of shinanigans-I create jewelry, he builds a half horse power buffer so I can polish it quickly and almost effortlessly; I find a tool I need-he goes out in his woodworking area and produces it. We make a great team! The kids are just as “bad” as we are-the older two have interests spanning both my and The Muscle’s interests and then some, but even better, because to everything they do, they bring the freshness and resourcefulness found only in children that one tends to find slipping from them as logic roots in the brain and whimsy becomes more forgotten and less trusted…

Please take a gander all over my blog. You can find my contact info link at the top of every page, as well as a few other links that share a little more about who I am, what I do, why I do it. My hope for this blog hop is to not only gain new readers, but together with new readers, share in the incredibly positive energy that our shared love for All Things Crafting generates. Together, we can lift each other up and make our world a better place. And that much prettier.

Thank you, thank you Vicki, for the effort and energy you put into creating this blog hop. What a wonderful gift to share with your fellow artists and handcrafters! I look forward to seeing everyone’s blogs. =^..^=

 Please Click Here to see Vicki’s own post, and the Entire List Of Nearly 600 Participants!