Friday Feature No. 38 -- Featuring Happy Haven

It has been since January since we've had a Friday Feature! WOW! Time flies when you're havin' fun, right? Well, hopefully we are going to get back in to the swing of thing, starting with Becky, from Happy Haven.


I love to randomly take little jaunts through Etsy to find new shops that I like, or haven't seen before. I happened upon "Happy Haven", and loved the bright colors, and great photos, so I contacted the shop owner to see if they wanted to be featured on our blog. Becky wrote me back, and here is what she had to say, in answer to my questions:

TDB: How did you start crafting?
HH: I was bored and depressed and needed something to take my mind off my twin sisters failing battle with cancer. I had already lost my older sister and grandma "my best friend" to cancer and now my twin sister Barbara "Bubby" was dying too. It was more than I could wrap my mind around. I started with scrapbooking, putting together my sister "journey" pictures from the beginning of her battle up to date. My mom is a Breast cancer survivor, diagnosed 2 months after Bubby was diagnosed with breast cancer, and it was a rough Fall that year to say the least. So I was making my mom a journey book too. I became obsessed with it. I have always been a talented writer but thought that was were my creativity ended. I learned with the journey books that I was actually creative in other ways too.


TDB: What made you choose to start creating your pendants?
HH: After the books I needed something else to make as I was sad to see the books end. I made all together with mom and Bubby’s about 10 journey books. Then I made my son some books then I couldn't come up with anything else to scrap so I had to find something else. I started making picture frames, not sure why though. That lead me to scrabble tiles, I was decoupaging the frames I thought the tiles would be a cute thing to glaze. I found the instructions on line gathered the material and was off again on another obsession. Fortunately this one pays for itself. I sold a few frames but not nearly as many as I made. I have a few boxes of them here in the house collecting dust. Not sure what to do with them.


TDB: Who has been the most positive influence in your life and why?
HH: My grandmother because she loved and liked me no matter what I put the family through and no matter how much she disagreed with me she never let it interfere with her ability to listen and take interest in what I had to say. She ate up my words like candy and it felt so good. She liked to hear me talk about my life and experiences and I needed that. She has this way of making you feel like you were the only thing that was on her mind and for someone as insecure as I was that was fulfilling. She believed in me and made it a point to let me know. She thought I was amazing and that made me feel amazing. When she died it was horrible, I felt like a part of me dies too and I never fully got over it. I don’t think we ever do.


TDB: How do you balance your Etsy shop and being a single mom?
HH: Not so well. I spend way too much on my shop and not enough focus on my son. At least I am aware of it and making changes to better it. For example, abut a week ago I started “family hour” It starts at 7 every night ad we do whatever Keegan wants to do, within reason of course. Mostly he wants to play connect four but we have made pendants together and fixed the VCR as well. One night I had several orders that I needed to work on as I fell behind, I made the mistake of canceling family hour thinking he would rather play with the neighbor boy anyway. He started crying and I realized that family hour was very important to him, more than needing it, he wanted it. I did not know he wanted to spend time with me like that. It hurt so badly and I felt like such a horrible mother. Of course I put the shop on hold and we had family hour that night and I will never do that again.


TDB: If you had three wishes, what would they be?
HH: To have more time, to be a better mother, to have a cure for all cancers.

TDB: If you could spend a day with anyone in the world, dead or alive, who would it be, and why?
HH: My grandmother because there are some many things I never got to ask her. I want to know more about her. It pains me when I think of all the time she took to listen about me and I never matched her time to listen about her. I will credit myself with listening more than the average person does to their grandmother as I ate her words and history up too, I loved this woman so very very much, but I never matched her time and that I would like to do.


TDB: What is the best piece of advice you've ever been given?
HH: The best advice I was ever given will easily have to be to “Fake it ‘till you make it” -that means to imitate confidence so that as the confidence produces success, it will generate real confidence. - Wikipedia

Thank you Becky, for sharing a piece of your life with us. And thank you for having a giveaway for us to give away!

Becky is giving away the winner's choice of any one premade pendant from her shop ($5.50/$6.00 value--excludes photo pendants or custom graphics), along with a 16"/18" petite silver ball chain.


To enter: Simply visit Happy Haven and then come back here and comment on your favorite pendant. Please make sure you have a valid email address attached to your comment or Blogger account. You do not have to have a Blogger account to enter.

This giveaway is open worldwide. Deadline to enter is Thursday, April 30th at 11:59 PST. We will draw the winner on Friday, May 1st.

To earn an extra entry, please blog about this giveaway. Leave a separate comment with the link to your blog post.

To earn an additional extra entry, please tweet about this giveaway on Twitter. Please include "@dwntownboutique" in your tweet.

Have a great weekend!
Angie