At the end of another Junior high school day Tracey & I were making our way out of the building, eager to be on our way home we said our goodbyes & parted.

Safe in the knowledge we would call each other in a couple of hours & see each other the next morning...as always. 

My steps were fast & sure, head down as I made my way to the bus (never make eye contact with crazy, mama always said & I was sure almost everyone there was crazy) when a small surprisingly strong hand grabbed the sleeve my leather jacket. 

Startled, I turned & there was Tra, her hair tousled from running after me. The red bricks of Marietta Junior High behind her dull compared to that beautiful red hair. 

She wanted to tell me that there was a song & it was OUR song, she said. 'Sister' from 7Seconds,she said. 

She looked so worried that I wouldn't get it that I assured her I would listen to it soon. 

 I didn't look up the lyrics until after our Tracey was long gone from us. I never told her how much it meant to me that she shared her feeling about this song with me. I never hugged her tightly, looked her in the eyes and told her that she meant so much to me. That her friendship made me feel whole. That meeting her in 5th grade honor band (I was 7th chair flute, Tracey was 6th...always a step ahead) is forever a huge event in my life. 

I never told her that she was my Soul Friend. I think she knew, but I regret not taking the time to say the words.

And now 18 years she's been gone..it is both an eternity & the blink of

 one brandy colored eye. 

Sister by 7Seconds

Please believe me, I'm on your side
Though I know I can't feel what you do
Can't see what you see
But my respect & love is deeper than you'll
ever really know
& I know it may be hard for me
to ever really show what's here inside

Friend, sister, see through hungry times we see the most
You're my family, I thank you for
the time you chose to be part of my life
You help me fight against the pain
I'll see you on the other side.

It never matters even when it's strained
Together we can make the world seem like the place it could be
& though the hate & anger come & goes
We'll walk along this road
Down a path where walls fall over
& fall down upon our heads & wakes again

We gotta cross this crazy bridge again

January 2012 Lumplings released!

Release the Lumplings!!

We have a lovely bunch of Lumplings waiting for you in the 'Amy Rue's Lumplings Etsy shop'. They are ever so hopeful that someone will adopt them into loving homes.

I know I always say that my kitty cats don't like to play with the Lumplings, however, my little baby cat, Sookie, decided to make a liar out of me!

During the Lumpling photo shoot this week she wanted to be in the pictures and let us all know that she is so much cuter than any ole stuffed cat.

Sookie & Lumplings

Lumplings are like snowflakes...

It's snowing great big gorgeous snowflakes here in Georgia today. I've been hanging out next to the cozy fireplace with my rat terrier, Ollie Blue, watching a Lark Rise to Candleford marathon on PBS and listing new Lumplings in my Etsy shop.

http://www.etsy.com/shop/amyrue

Later on, my husband, Hans, and I will begin baking my Grandma Grace's special holiday cake for the Christmas orders that are coming in from our December Woodbridge Inn Newsletter. We have this recipe in Hans' cookbook & Hans came up with the idea of offering a fully done cake to our customers this year. I hope everyone loves the cake's orangey goodness as much as we do!

Don't forget to follow us on Facebook...There's a link in the sidebar there!

xoxo,

Amy Rue

Gingerbread Lumplings looking for Holiday Homes!

Goodness...So I know it's been forever & a day since I posted. Sorry about that!
However, we have 6 little GingerLumps looking for forever homes in the Etsy shop! http://www.etsy.com/shop/amyrue

✵You CAN catch me, for I am the GingerLump...
desperate for my own forever home,
Hopefully, it's not a dump!
No more shall I roam!


So, click click click!
As fast as you can...
I'll be there before Old St. Nick,
Cause he's a slow, old man!


Just, uh...keep the foxes away,
Mmm-kay?✵

A note from Amy Rue: GingerLumps are a Holiday tradition in my family. I usually make them for my children for our Winter Solstice & Yule celebrations.  Last year,  I was so very very proud as my little girl, age 6 at the time, sewed her very first Lumpling: a GingerLump that she calls Gingy. All of her little friends adore Gingy & I thought I should share our GingerLumps with everyone if they can bring more smiles out there!


GingerLumps have a fleece front, crisp cotton back & plastic safety eyes. They have buttons or tiny jingle bells down their bellies. The buttons are a mix of new and vintage.

I post more frequent updates over on Facebook where there is a Lumplings fanpage. I'd love for you to join me there & say Hello! Facebook has been great for posting pictures of Lumplings as I make them so you can have sneak peeks into who will be coming up for adoption soon.

Speaking of soon...We will have a small herd of bunny & kitty Lumplings making their way into the Etsy shop this next week! I'll update here when it happens!

Lumplings up and looking for homes!

Alrighty then, the Lumplings are in the Etsy shop and looking for good homes.

I've tried emailing the mailing list, but there is some glitch with the server so I'll try again later.

New Lumplings, website redo and Facebook

There are new Lumplings on my Etsy site!  I will be adding a few more on Friday, September 11th.

Also, today I created a facebook fanpage for the Lumplings.  You can see the link and how to join on the left side of this blog page.

I will be updating on the facebook page when I'm sewing and whatnot.

Also, if you'd like to ask any questions of me the Facebook page will be perfect for that!

And last, I've been reworking amyrue.com lately.  Simplifying it really.  The front page will be tweaked some more with some adds and a picture change and then it should be completely done!  

Now, when you click on 'shop' at amyrue.com it will bring you straight to my Etsy shop.  Etsy has made the Lumpling adoptions much more sane for me and I'll keep it for now!

And now for linkage:

ETSY shop! 

Amyrue.com!

small Herd Of Lumplings

There is a small herd of Lumplings at my etsy shop!

I'll have to post pictures tomorrow, but here is the link:

Amy Rue's Lumpling Land

eh? Wot's wot!

"And I know 7 months is a long time...but I think that you will find, Lumplings are basically the same..."

-Song from Yom Yom Lumpling, with apologies to Depeche Mode

We have a new herd appearing on etsy:

Amy Rue's Lumpling Land

http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=295

I put some up tonight and more will pop up tomorrow (July 2nd)

Very sorry about the length of time that it has taken me to get this herd up for adoption. It's been a helluva a year!

I'm almost terrified of what this second six months will bring with 2009.

Wait, there isn't any "almost" about.

I might need diapers if I think about it too much.

If you follow my husband's blog/story then you know what I'm talkin' about.

If not...well, it's a sordid story of hospitals, brain lesions, cancer, not cancer, bleeding, more blood, children seeing blood, children thinking daddy was gonna die, mama thinking the same, and oh yay, the doctors also thought that...nice to be on the same page and all...ugh... shuffling sick husband on planes, husband doesn't know how old he is, how long have we been married? How did we get here? How old are the children? At least he always knew we had kids, small blessings, fitting for whole brain radiation, dear god the side effects, scans, more scans, living in the hospital again, again, brain biopsy, pain and more pain for him, no I can't effing eat or sleep, how could I? but then a light! A beam of hope in the form of infection (yes), strep?? In the brain??

Did you get all that? Yeah, me either. But it sure has taken up our year.

There has been good though... Hans' book came out and everyone loves it. We are all quite chuffed and proud of him. He is making a nice recovery, still in pain, but better all the time.

We are enjoying our summer with the kids and finding our rhythm in life again.

Holiday Herd

Here come Lumpling paws! Here come Lumpling Paws!

Right down etsy lane!

Marzipan & Kringle & all their fuzzy friends

are all looking for the same!

Tiny bells ringing, Lumplings singing

Hoping for new homes

Get mouses ready, check your paypal!

Cause Lumplings are on the way!

Heya everyone!

I'm so excited to bring the newest herd to you!

We have a baker's dozen looking for new digs

They are all in my etsy store

I'm slow at getting them all there today....so there are about four that will go up later this evening.

I'll send out the bulk email this evening letting everyone know the Lumps are loose. I always let the blog know first!

Oh, a Lumpling we will go!

Hey hot stuff, wanna come look at my singles profile?

I like long walks on the beach, champagne and peanut butter.

Yeah.

If you have a look see at my etsy spot you'll see the newest herd of Lumplings.

We have 10 looking for good homes!

I'm adding them right now, so there are only a few up.

The Lumpling stories come as I go along and sometimes they are hard to get information out of.

As always, I give the first heads up to adoption time here on the blog and I'll be emailing the Lumpling email list later.  I still have a whole bunch of new names and emails to update it with.

Hop on over and see if a Lumpling looks like 'the one'!

amy rue's etsy shop

sneaking in

It's been a great long while, but I'm back with offerings of Fuzzy wee Lumplings.

We have ten lonely Lumplings looking for new homes over on my etsy page.

We've been so very busy in the Rue household,  that it would be impossible to list it all.  But school is back in and I've more time to devote to the lumpling adoptions.

So here we go again!

Giving Etsy a go

Since I'm still learning to get around on the mac here and I really want to get these Lumplings out there for everyone to adopt, I'm going to give Etsy a try.

So as my test, the Lumpling seen above has just been put up for adoption on Etsy.  I'm sure that I forgot to include a million things, but hopefully it will work!

A new Amy Rue shop is up at Etsy

and that should link to it... I hope.

or

http://www.amyrue.etsy.com

I don't know if this will be how I do all adoptions in the future, or just for now.  If it makes life easier here in Lumpling land it might stay!  For right now, the regular amyrue.com is stagnant and I need to learn how to update it from this new system very soon.

Gubble & Bum are up right now and I'll probably add several more Lumplings later this evening!

hold your breath & let go....

Over the highway and through the woods we went to Grandma Grace's.

The one time of the year that I see my paternal side of the family.  We've all flocked to Grandma's every year for that one special day of Grandma's cooking.  

Grandma doesn't cook anymore.  She looks confused and Aunt B told me that she had tumors near her brain.  

But I made her famous orange cranberry cake and  even though it wasn't as good as Grandma's I was proud to see everyone attack it.

And my kids got to play on the rope swing.  I spent hours and hours of my childhood whirling on the rope swing outside of Grandma's.

See those blue stairs with the big E behind Finn?  Crumpled now, but still strong when I was a child, we would climb to the top and jump on the swing.  A cousin or uncle would grab the hanging rope and pull me high enough to kick branches.... sending spanish moss and acorns into the air.

The kids were so excited and once I was assured that the alligators had vacated Grandma's pond they jumped into the water fully clothed.

Their incredibly smart mama packed clean clothing for just this reason.

I never missed an opportunity to get in that pond, smooshing georgia red clay between my toes and catching minnows with my hands.

Grandma used to beg me not to leave...holding onto our arms and making fake crying noises to make us laugh.  But this time she accepted our hugs and didn't really seem to have the strength or clarity to protest.

It was a strange way to leave.

But oh how lucky are my kids that they know their Great Grandmother?

always in motion

Life has been hectic in Rue land, and I apologize to everyone waiting to adopt a Lumpling that it has taken me so very long to make a new herd!

I have a new herd almost ready...about a dozen of them.  I'll get pictures ready of them next week.

 I've just switched to a mac and I'm still learning all of the quirks.  The amyrue site is about to be overhauled, but maybe not in time for this new herd to launch. 

One of the obstacles in my way is that I haven't been able to transfer all of the email addys on the amyrue mailing list to the mac as a separate list!  So at this point I really don't know just how I'm going to email the list with the adoption news.  I might end up putting all of the names and addys in by hand.  Er, there are over 500 names on there!

We are hoping that switching to a mac will end all of my email woes.  On my pc I was getting about 800 spam emails a day!  It was overwhelming.  So if you have emailed me in the past six months and never heard from me...it was probably lost in all that crazy spam.   

Oh! We took the kids to see Mr. Magorium's and unfortunately didn't spot the Lumplings.  Well, Hans claimed that he saw one, but I didn't!  But we waited around to the very very end of the credits and saw a wee thank you to Amy Rue which was pretty neat.  I know that we will get the dvd and comb through the shop scenes in slow motion!

Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium

The trailer is up for Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium!

Although I looked & looked I didn't see even a hint of the Lumplings in the toy store. But Lumplings are very small and I'll be first in line to see the movie at the theater just so I can strain my eyes there while looking for a familar Lumpling face.

Even if we never see one of the Lumplings... we know they're there!

Lumpling Love & Junkie Mumpin!

A great big ole thank you to everyone for coming to check out the newest herd of Lumplings today!

We'll get those birth certificates printed up this weekend and get all the Lumps on the road to their shiny new homes! My preschooler was hanging out with me during the adoption, reading her books and singing

"Five little Junkies Mumping on the bed..."

And I'm typing like a crazy person, but came to a screeching halt when I heard her song. Took me a minute to figure out what she was really trying to sing!

Dang, what do they teach in preschool these days?

Junkies mumping on the bed indeed.

Lucky Junkies!

Time to adopt a Lumpling!

The next Lumpling herd will go up at amyrue.com

this Friday at 2pm eastern!

As always, I will post full instructions on how to adopt a Lumpling when the herd shows up.

hot weather go away, cool weather come to stay!

Even though the weather here in Georgia is still hot as hell, I'm daydreaming of crisp fall days under a new quilt.

These sweet fabrics from American Jane for Moda are coming together in a disappearing nine patch quilt.

Last week this panda fabric came in from Repro Depot fabrics, and it's so cute I'm scared to cut it. But I'm seeing in my head a dress for my little Ella that will make her the envy of all the other preschoolers...and me!

I look at my cardigans each day and with a sigh promise them that they will be worn every single day very very soon.

Amy Had a little Lamb....

Amy had a little Lamb, it's fleece was white as snow...

& then that sweet little lamb found out that Amy Rue

turned an absolutely obscene age (eh, we can still say "early thirties" for the next ten years or so) today and that poor little lamb had to go...

Check out my hysterical gift from Hans. I was still rubbing the dreams from my eyes this morning when he gave me the Dead Sheep Head here, and I laughed and laughed!

The lamb is from Cherrybox Studios, where they have all sorts of other wonderful critters like Unicorns and Pink Pony heads on display. Absolutely brilliant job!

Another wonderful sheep painting came in the mail later in the day from our friend Don Bertram in Houston. I'll have to take pictures of it tomorrow!

Feeling oh so lucky and loved today,

and I have new laugh lines to prove it.

pussy cat wussy cat...

Mama! There are kittens underneath the Woodbridge!

Yeah? That's nice, sweetie.

One followed us here...can we keep her?

Uh, nope. Unless you learn to scoop cat poo.

She's so cute and black, Mama!

A black kitten? Uh oh.

Oh Dear.

Are we suckers?

Please meet little Miss Dibley, the newest member of our family, and our third black cat.

Dibley has a small white patch on her neck, like a Vicar. So we immediately named her after the Vicar of Dibley show that I love so much.

Our oldest cat, Tiggy, doesn't give a rat's ass about the new kitten, but Neko is out of her mind. Neko has been walking around pissed off at the world and growling at all of us.

Dibley is super sweet and just thrilled at having a bowl full of food in front of her. Tomorrow she goes for her first Vet visit and Ella is already worried about that thermometer going up the kitten's hoohaw.

Even though this has interrupted some Lumpling sewing time I still expect to launch a herd in about two weeks!

There are still three of Dibley's siblings living underneath the restaurant if anyone is local and looking for a new fur baby!