Guest Blogger! Molly shows us some of her favorite local crafters at SLCitizen

SLCitizen is a great boutique at the beautiful downtown SLC library.  Owned by our dear friend Meg Griggs (who is also the driving force behind Craft Sabbath)  the shop is run as a co op, featuring all local artists & crafters.  With the shop-local movement becoming ever more important, it is a wonderful place to stop and shop for everything from all natural soap to hand crafted jewelry, and you know that 100% of the money earned is going directly to the craftspeople/artists!


Once every couple of weeks we watch the shop.  This last week our 11 year old had a great time "window shopping" and picking her favorite things.  (My mom and I used to play this game with catalogs ~ "if you had a $1,000 what would you buy?)  Here she is, our first "guest blogger" with her picks!

Note: many of the artists @ slcitizen also have etsy shops or webpages.  Molly is providing links where she can  but if you're local, be sure to stop by the shop!  SLCitizen will be having an official "grand re opening" shindig on the 30th, with sales throughout the store and an opportunity to meet some of the artists.  check their facebook for details and updates

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Hi I'm Molly and here are some of my favorite items from SLCitizen.


One of my favorite shops: BabyGgear! Ruthann at babyggear makes awesome sock monsters, baby onsies, and hats. Featured item: Owl hat! Made from re-purposed sweaters, these hats definitely hit in my top 23 items at SLCitizen!

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Another one of my favorite shops is Easily Amused! Dallas makes tons of neat stuff, including embroidery patterns, hair clips, t-shirts, and much more!

Featured: hand embroidered strawberry pillow, owl t-shirt, and pillow pal!!!





 I love her stuff because of her sense of color and style.
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One of my other favorites: Sorry Clementine! Suzanne Clements takes old shirts and sweaters and other awesome fabrics, cuts them into pieces...
And makes awesome new clothes. yay!


 Featured item: medium Sorry Clementine tank top



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Favorite seller: My mom and Dad!!!

 Grimmleighs (as you already know if you read this blog often) puts a slightly sinister twist on traditional amigurumi. First Rachel (my mom) crochets a one of a kind original body out of acrylic yarn and sews a blank cotton face panel on. Then, Leigh (my dad) paints a silly face onto it.

 Some are cute, some are scary, some are creepy. It all depends on what mood my dad is in!


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 Another awesome shop: Peach Treats makes one of a kind polymer clay earrings for gauged ears or for fakers.  Most are like octopus tentacles, but some are just crazy loopy things. The ones for fakers are two pieces that have a plain stud back in between the two halves.  If I ever get my ears pierced I for sure want to get some of her earrings!




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Another one of my faves is Carrie Poulsen of the Big Brown House. Carrie takes old wool sweaters and felts them. Then, she cuts them up and makes garlands, pillows and more.

featured item: felted pillow

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Flytryss is another one of the crafters at SLCitizen. Aimee Clements (Sister of Suzanne Clements) makes lots of headbands, and she does pit bull rescue.

I chose this cupcake headband because I LOVE yummy cupcakes!

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My "best-smelling" favorite is Chelsea @ SoaperHero.  I love her stuff because it all smells so good (like the one in the picture:  Cadburry Cream Egg!!!)  and she has super-cute packaging!  I also love her (not pictured) lipglosses, especially white chocolate which smells like an almond joy candy bar!

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I'm not sure who makes this, but I love this yarn! So many different textures and colors, in a perfect blend of yummy 100% merino/alpaca wooly goodness. Can you not love this yarn?

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My absolute favorite business: Mine! Molly's workshop is a collaborative effort between me myself and I. 

I make cat toys, pincushions, eyeglass cases monsters, and much much more! please check out my shop. Thank you

Stay on Target… STAY ON TARGET!

I have a serious problem with staying focused. It’s not the outside distractions that cause me the biggest trouble; it’s the internal ones. My mind races at about 160,000 miles per hour, and if I were to stop and pay attention to any one stray thought, the entirety of our little business would come crashing down around us.

I really don’t think Rachel would like that much. And being that her staying happy with me is a pretty large part of what gets me through the day, I try and stay focused.

But it’s so hard! I’ve had about fourteen ideas for things we could do since I started writing this! And they’re all really good ideas! Monster nesting dolls? Genius! Back up the armored truck and let me swim in all that money!

Better get it in check. In the past year alone, I have managed to convince myself that we should branch out into ACEO cards (trading card sized original art), greeting cards, customized coloring business cards, downloadable paper environments for Squidleighs, finger puppets, and monkey versions of every pop culture icon we have ever loved. Keep in mind that all of this was supposed to happen while we increased production levels, enhanced our website, and maximized our internet footprint. Oh, yeah. We needed to do all of that while we work our day jobs.

I am a rational(ish) person. I am aware that we all have limits, and I married a woman who will remind me of just that when I forget. With a frying pan, if necessary. And it’s not like all of the brilliant ideas that slipped past the “filter” set the world on fire, anyway. The ACEO cards were fun, but they might have been too weird. No one seemed to want to buy a trading card of a hammerhead on a tricycle. The greeting cards were great, but Santa in a tutu might have been a bit much. The downloadable environments were cute, but they took a really long time to design so production started to suffer. The coloring business cards have been a hit, and so have the finger puppets, so we’ll consider those a success. And we’re still pushing our production limits. One of us even managed to keep the day job!

After the smoke clears from each of these little “experiments”, I realize the same exact thing. That energy should stay on target. We make a lot of people happy selling our creepy little monsters, and we should focus on making even more people even more happy doing the same. That means more production. Sure, we need to keep enhancing the website and maximizing our internet footprint, but that all comes with time. The big picture is in staying focused on what the picture WAS in the first place!

Of course, that’s easy to say right now. I’m tired and optimistic after a weekend of shows. The future is wide open, our prospects are bright. All we have to do is keep on the straight and narrow, and all we can do is succeed.

Of course, that would be a lot more fun if we had a Grimmleigh’s comic strip…

Backdrop? We Don't Need No Stinking Backdrop!

We'll call those famous last words. This past Saturday (the 9th of July, for those of you from the future) we were set up to sell our creepy little dolls at the Downtown Farmer's Market. We have been doing this show every other weekend since the beginning of summer, and we really dig it a lot.


The show had been going fairly well; we had met a bunch of new people, and quite a few Grimmleighs had founf new homes. We had about half an hour left before we could tear down the tent, when a gentleman walks up to the back of our booth from the street. My finely Kade-senses start tingling immediately. (In case you are wondering, a Kade-sense is what you get when you are bit by an irradiated Czech).

The guy just stands there next to Rachel for a second, looks her straight in the eye, then flips up the lid on our cash box. He says "I just need twenty dollars" and books it back to the street. Rachel was somewhat stunned, and I had about 15 minutes of reactions go through my head in about .5 seconds.

I may be a big man, but I am not a slow man. Watching me run is a bit like watching a charging gorilla. I caught the guy about the time that he hit the street. I grabbed his shirt, then put him in a head-lock and dragged him back to the park. At this point, he was screaming and carrying on that he didn't have the money any more, that he threw it, you name it. For the sake of our more sensitive readers, we will skip over the explosive nature of the exchange between us as I put him oh-so gently on his face in the park. We can say that some sailors may have learned a few choice new phrases for what one can do with one's maternal line and leave it at that.

After gently wrestling for several minutes (keep in mind, the creep was about 5'10" and 180 pounds, I am 6'3" and clock in at 240) the police arrived and took my new friend into custody. At this point, he was screaming that I was going to kill him and that all he wanted was a business card. The cops cuffed him and questioned him. Turns out he had hit a couple of other booths earlier in the day, and no one had been able to catch him. While checking his pockets, the police realized that he had lost control of his bladder while I was dragging him around. (He was sobbing to them that I was trying to kill him).We never found the money, he either threw it or shoved it down the front of his jeans, which takes a search warrant to go after. No thanks.

Rachel spent the whole ordeal like a veteran of a dozen grab and dash scenarios. She grabbed the cash box and ran straight to the information tent to get some help. Her quick thinking meant that we got to keep the rest of our money, and that I didn't have to sit on my little buddy for too long. That woman is a trooper!

The police let the guy go. Without finding the cash, and without him being able to actually move his arms enough to hit me, there was nothing to charge him with. We were out 20 bucks, but we had a cool new story to tell to our kids. We will be making some changes to our booth, though.

We never had a backdrop on our tent. There was never a need for it, but after this week, we will have one put up. That should limit this kind of  situation in the future. We are also getting rid of the cash box. No need to make it easy for someone to get their hands on our hard work.

I've had some time to reflect on this. I had a pretty extreme reaction to this idiot taking 20 bucks. I make nearly that an hour at my "day" job. 20 bucks is never anything that I will blow my nose on, but it's not like it would break the bank to lose it. It was WHAT that 20 bucks represented that got me so fired up. My whole family works on Grimmleighs. My daughter helps paint, my wife makes the bodies and runs the business, our son takes the photos. Not only that, but when someone decides that what we make is worth buying during our current economic climate, that 20 bucks becomes something sacred. It is tangible. It has meaning. It wasn't money that was earned punching in to a time-clock for some company. This was money given to us because someone was moved in some way by what we make.

That is worth wrestling someone to the ground for.