About Me and My First Blog Post here!

   Hi! My name is Helen and I live in Ohio and was raised by a mother from the mountains of south west Virginia  (up in the hollars!)  This blog is my place to share my Heartland Heritage with a focus on crafts, cooking, and anything that relates to my life.  The majority of the blog will be dedicated to crafts as I intend to share tutorials and pictures of things I am working on and offer items I've made for sale.
   I'm wife to Greg who had a kidney transplant last year after about five years of dialysis and mom to the cutest and sweetest little boy on the planet named Evan who is autistic and the joy of my earthly life (you'll see and hear plenty about him no doubt), and a cute mini dachshund named Rudy. You can see more about me at my personal web site at http://www.shadesofsafhire.com.
    I'm a conversative evangelical Christian and I will use the Proverbs 31 woman as a guide to what a share and discuss.
   I'm one of two bloggers from Heartland Heritage Crafts and my partner in crime is Morado.  Morado is a long-time friend of mine who just happens to live in Virginia and as a sad coincidence is now also on dialysis herself after experiencing kidney failure.  We are both crafty girls who love to create and hope to make friends together through our online efforts while attempting to supplement our incomes (which as you can expect are packed full of medical bills).  My husband's anti-rejection medication expenses are astronomical!
   This is my first post and I'm in the midst of working out the graphics and template and whatnot, so bear with me while I move into my new cyber home :)
   This blog is called Shades of Safhire because I have been online since 1995 and started out on a local BBS by the name of Sapphire.  When I got on AOL (way back before it went unlimited and you had to pay by the minute!) the name and spelling of Sapphire was taken and my online identity became the spelling of Safhire and it's stuck.  When trying to decide on a name for my blog here, Shades of Safhire seemed to make sense as I am pretty eclectic and there are a lot of shades to my personality (and blue being my favorite color helps ;) )
   Any true crafter doesn't only crochet or only scrapbook, etc.  She (or he) dabbles in a variety of things --or shades of crafts.
   Morado and I share Heartland Heritage Crafts and we branch out to our own blogs and come back together at HHC together as well as our Facebook page here:  https://www.facebook.com/heartland.heritagecrafts .  We will each have our own Etsy shops (which we will be setting up shortly) but you'll be hearing plenty about Morado and her creations here as well.
   Say a prayer that I do this right and that God blesses my little corner of the web.
   Now on to design my blog!