Category: Celebrations

The Eye of the Senior Year Storm

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It’s been a couple of weeks since I wrote up a beginning of the week homemaking post! The amount of time that is needed to make ballgowns is surprising, even to me. With that being said, home management fell by the wayside in order to free up time to sew, so I’ll be swinging the scales back towards cleanliness and order for the next couple of weeks, and then it will be time to start prepping for Renaissance’s high school graduation festivities!

Cooking

This week’s meal plan:

  • Monday: Tacos
  • Tuesday: CP Picadillo Tostadas, Lemony Quinoa Salad with Radishes, Avocado & Basil, Veggie Slaw
  • Wednesday: Rhubarb-glazed Pork, Crushed Red Potatoes, Spring Beans, Peas & Zucchini Ribbons, Rice Pilaf
  • Thursday: IP BBQ Shredded Chicken Burgers, Broccoli Slaw, Lemon-roasted potatoes with oregano
  • Friday: Spaghetti, Normandy Vegetables, Caesar Salad, French Bread
  • Saturday: Barbecue
  • Sunday: Thai Spicy Chicken Enchiladas, Peas, Green Bean Salad with Mustard Seeds, Herbs & Baby Chard

Clothing

  • Laundry will be a priority this week, along with folding and putting away everything (It’s pretty bad in here)
  • Wardrobe rotation from cold weather clothes to warm weather clothes
  • Wash Rachel’s choir dress
  • Nathaniel needs new clothes, especially for church

Cleaning

*silent screaming* There’s so much to do that I can’t even pick a place to start. I might just work on whatever the Tody app tells me is the most overdue and work forward from there. Oh! I do want to spend some time cleaning up the prom dress sewing leftovers, just for the sake of closure. Feels like that’d be a nice thing to do.

Caring

  • Get Nathaniel signed up for summer school so he can free up space in his regular school year schedule
  • Driving practice with Emily & Rachel
  • Help the girls start looking for summer jobs
  • Replace batteries in smoke detectors
  • Make checkup appointments for everyone
  • Create FHE schedule
  • The girls need haircuts
  • Decide if Nathaniel is going to YM camp

Creativity

I will be taking a break for at least a week, if not two. The craft room definitely needs a good cleaning and decluttering, but that might have to wait until after graduation festivities.

Gardening

  • Direct sow 4th Week of April seeds:
    • Cosmos
    • Sunflower: Autumn Beauty
    • Impatiens
    • Zinnia
    • Cucumber
    • Summer Squash
    • Viola
  • Direct sow 1st Week of May seeds:
    • Alyssum
    • Marigolds
    • Sunflower: Jua Maya
    • Cabbage
    • Green Beans (Bush)
    • Lettuce
  • Direct sow 2nd Week of May seeds:
    • Zucchini
    • Sunflower: Sunshine
    • Melons
    • Carrots
  • Plant petunias
  • Assemble hanging baskets
  • Research lawn feeding and weed killing and make a plan
  • WEEDING
  • Ramp up slug killing endeavors because the little demons are eating everything

Celebrating

  • Breathe a sigh of relief that prom season is over, clean up the mess, and engage in some well-deserved recovery activities
  • Clean up the errant Christmas items that I’ve noticed but told myself to ignore while working on the prom dresses
  • Do a wrapping paper/gift bag bin purge
  • Renaissance’s Graduation Party:
    • Address & mail out invitations
    • Check that everyone has appropriate clothing
    • Decide decorations
    • Decide menu
    • Decide activities
    • Decide party favors
    • Purchase serving items

Community

  • Church:
    • Check in with this week’s upcoming special musical number
    • Check sacrament meeting topics for June and pick hymns
    • Enter hymns into Gospel Library app
    • Set up/confirm special musical numbers for June
    • Check in with newly-assigned ministering companions
    • Reach out to newly-assigned ministering sisters
    • Taskify ministering reminders
  • Band Parent Committee:
    • Prepare agenda for meeting, print
    • Print mailing list signup flyers
    • Parade logistics

Top priorities this week:

  • Summer School Registration
  • Garden
  • Laundry
  • Cleaning
  • Graduation party planning

Hopefully I’ll get the blog posts written for each of the prom dresses, too. The weather is going to be really great this week, so I’m looking forward to spending time outdoors after so many weeks toiling away in the craft room. Happy homemaking to you all!

Prom 2024

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The big day has come and gone and Renaissance’s dress was finished the evening before and Rachel’s backup dress actually fit. Success! Oh, they looked beautiful. My baby girls went and got all grown up.

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They had a great time at prom, and it was wonderful watching them be excited for and enjoying the evening. My heart is full.

I’ll post details on Renaissance’s dress in the next few days.

Well, That Was Unfortunate Timing

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Nathaniel was sick for the entirety of Spring Break, and on Saturday I woke up feeling…off. Michael took Ren to the school for Daffodil Parades so I could get my energy up and meet them at one of the later parades, but within a few hours it was very clear that I had caught Nathaniel’s bug and was out of the running for anything beyond laying on the couch and watching television through bleary eyes. And so it went for the remainder of last week. And this last weekend. And today. I am having a heck of a time with this illness.

I’m hoping the exhaustion and relentless coughing starts to fade this week because I was supposed to finish Ren’s prom dress last week and this was the week to start working on Rachel’s dress. Stress levels are high.

Cooking

This week’s meal plan:

  • Saturday: Chicken Shawarma
  • Sunday: Cheesy Ham and Potatoes for Nathaniel’s birthday
  • Monday: Dino Nuggets, French Fries, Mixed Vegetables
  • Tuesday: Crockpot Chili & Baked Potatoes
  • Wednesday: Cheeseburgers, Spiced Braised Rhubarb
  • Thursday: Crockpot Honey Chicken
  • Friday: Salad Bar

Clothing

Catching up after missing all of last week’s laundry.

Cleaning

Catch up, basic upkeep.

Caring

  • Renaissance passed her driver’s license test last week! There’s still a lot of paperwork to get her driving legally on her own, and it is a high priority this week. I am really looking forward to this development.
  • Rachel is taking her driver’s license knowledge test later this week, so helping her study for that.
  • Emily, possibly spurred on by the success of her younger sisters in the driver’s license department, has finally renewed her driving permit and is now legal to start practicing for her own driver’s license, so I imagine I need to start making time for her practicing, too.
  • Need to figure out a way to get the bridal shower and wedding gifts to the young woman who got married last week. I was too sick to go and she and her husband have headed back to school already.
  • We need to sit down with Renaissance and figure out her post-high school plans. She’s received news of the various scholarships she’s been awarded, the FAFSA is taking forever to process, and we just need to sit down and crunch numbers. Her high school is having their Decision Day soon where they celebrate kids’ post-high school plans, so it’d be good if she knew what she was doing by that date.

Creativity

  • Prom Dresses: I haven’t touched either of them since I got sick. So much work needs to be done this week. The extra yard of silk for Ren’s sleeves arrived safely last week, so we’re good to go there. I have two weeks’ less time to get Ren’s dress done because last night she got a text to look outside:

How cute is that?!?! Why weren’t Promposals a thing when we were young? He had good timing; we were just getting ready to have Nathaniel’s birthday cake, so he walked away from the incident with a prom date and birthday cake. On a frenzied prom dress-sewing note, though…the high school prom is two weeks before the church Spring Formal, so…I really need to sew faster.

  • Van Crafting Sessions™: I think I have a full schedule of music lessons this week and I have no idea what I’m going to do while I’m at them.

Gardening

  • The rhubarb is growing fast! Gotta start using it.
  • I didn’t do any planting last week, so I need to do both last week’s and this week’s planting and seed starting. We’re getting into the thick of planting season!

Celebrating

  • Nathaniel had his 14th birthday yesterday! I can’t believe my youngest child is starting high school next year. Where have the years gone?!?! Renaissance made him a Sherman Tank cake this year, in homage to his interest in World War 2.
  • Upcoming celebrations include:
    • Mother’s Day, which I don’t have to do anything for
    • My birthday, which I generally don’t have to do anything for
    • Memorial Day, which just means grilling some hot dogs and doing yardwork
    • Ren’s graduation, which is going to take a ton of work
    • Father’s Day, which I will also have to do work for.

I’m going to wait a bit before I get going on anything so I can focus on prom dresses.

Community

  • Band Parent meeting this week, with all the requisite paperwork and follow-up that goes with it.
  • There’s a Ward Potluck on the calendar from the email that the bishop sent out at the beginning of the year, but I’ve not heard anything else about it since, so I’m thinking it never materialized.
  • There’s a Relief Society activity this week about simplifying our lives, but it’s happening at the same time as a music lesson, so I probably won’t go.
  • Band performance for the seniors.

Alright, a big week with a lot of catch-up and I’m not feeling that great to begin with. Wish me luck! And look at this great photo of Renaissance in the Daffodil Parade, taken by a friend of a friend:

I Dream of Muslin

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It really is unfortunate that prom dress sewing lines up with getting the garden started. I’m still trying to figure out how to make both of them work together, with preference leaning towards the dresses because I can always come in a little late on the garden. This week will see that preference leaning towards creating the muslin for Ren’s dress, and hopefully more than that.

Cooking

This week’s meal plan:

  • Saturday: Beef Stew
  • Sunday: Cheeseburgers & Fries
  • Monday: Spaghetti
  • Tuesday: TBD
  • Wednesday: TBD
  • Thursday: TBD
  • Friday: TBD

Clothing

Stay on top of the laundry. I was looking at Nathaniel during church yesterday and I think he needs a new wardrobe because he grew again. I had to buy him a new pair of running shoes, two sizes larger than the last pair I bought him in JANUARY. I don’t know how he is not in constant pain with the rate at which he is growing right now. Also, he’s now wearing the same size shoes as Michael does. Maybe one of my children will actually end up taller than me.

Cleaning

Basic upkeep because of the prom dresses.

Caring

  • I need to buy a wedding gift and a bridal shower gift for one of Emily’s friends who is getting married in the next few weeks. It’s incredibly weird that my kids’ friends are starting to get married. Wasn’t ready for that.
  • Need to figure out what Emily’s plans for the next school year are so she can apply for things at the right times.
  • Driving practice for all three girls so maybe they can take their driver’s license tests over spring break.
  • Might meet a friend for lunch.
  • Parent Teacher Conferences this week. I don’t know if I should even bother going, especially after hearing what quite a few teachers had to say about parent teacher conferences while I was doing my student teaching—the parents whose kids are doing fine are the ones who show up and there’s little to say to them, and the parents whose kid are not doing well and who really need to talk to the teachers don’t show up at all. Conflicted.

Creativity

  • At Home:
    • Renaissance’s Prom Dress: As I write this, I have just finished altering the pattern and cutting the first (and hopefully, only) muslin for Renaissance’s dress. That is the hardest part of the entire process, so I’m feeling good about things today. I taskified the dresses last week and, according to the schedule I have planned out, I’ll be on-track to finish on-time if I’m able to finish sewing up the bodice completely this week, which is totally doable if things go as they should. I didn’t know what to do about preparing the silks for sewing, and the internet had very conflicting information on that subject, so I just gave Silk Baron a phone call and had a lovely, candid chat with whomever answered the phone that just made my day. They convinced me to not prewash and just stick with dry cleaning the silk, and to also really consider using dress shields, so I think I’ll follow their advice on that.
    • Rachel’s Prom Dress: I think we have everything we need, materials-wise, for the dress. We picked up the oh-so-pretty fabric on Saturday and had a lovely girls’ morning together. I love that bonus of sewing for the girls—we have to hang out together to do it right, and it inevitably leads to more hanging out. I have also preemptively ordered some crinolines for her so I can see ahead of time if they’ll be complimentary to the gown as I’m making it up.
  • Van Crafting Sessions™: Not really feeling the wedding shawls at this time. I have more time this week for van crafting, so we’ll see how I feel about stuff at the end of the week. I did feel a pull to start working on the Smitten EPP quilt in the past few days, though—I might head that direction.

Gardening

  • I do not have time for this! Usually I can pop in and out of the house and plant this and weed that, but with most of my time being spent on the prom dresses I’m worried about getting dirt on my hands that could potentially transfer to the dress materials. Maybe I can work to get ahead on the dresses this week and use any free time to go get stuff done in the garden.

Celebrating

  • Renaissance received her acceptance letters from both Pacific University and Linfield College! Now to wait for scholarship decisions. The late FAFSA has been such a headache.
  • Easter’s this Sunday, and I have no plans whatsoever. I don’t even know if I’ll get to the point of making plans. We have a ham and we’ll cook it. Maybe I’ll put Easter treats on the girls’ radars and they’ll take care of it.

Community

  • Band Festival
  • Choir Contest
  • Engagement Party for a lady at church that conflicts with something else that I hope ends up being cancelled so I can go to the party instead. Why is there always something responsible that you’re signed up to do when a party comes along? However, having been on the receiving end of RSVP back-outs because something better came along for the invited guest, I stand firmly on the hill—nay, am willing to die upon said hill—of honoring your previous appointment commitments despite how enticing a later invitation may be because it’s really rude not to.
  • Church Easter Brunch: I’ve signed up to bring fruit. Michael wants to sign up to bring biscuits and gravy, but I am going to leave that entire project to him, rather than commit in my name and have it potentially fall through and embarrass me.

Top priorities this week:

  1. Prom Dresses!
  2. Garden
  3. Easter
  4. Girls’ driving practicing

Cake, Silks & Pi(es)

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I feel like it was a really productive week, which is always nice. My little routine of writing these goals vs. outcomes weekly posts is helping me stay on-track with what I want to accomplish each week. I’m really glad I’ve reinstituted these. Not only are they keeping me focused, but I really enjoy writing them and re-reading them, like a journal. I rarely re-read my handwritten journals, so I don’t learn as much from my writing in those. Blog posts can actually be searched by keyword, for cryin’ out loud. Wonderful.

Top priorities this last week:

  1. Michael’s birthday
  2. Garden
  3. WREF Scholarship application
  4. Prom dresses
  5. Resurrecting music practice time

Celebrating

  • Michael’s birthday went well, there was an adorable “Among Us wedding cake” made by Renaissance, and each of the kids remembered to get him a gift this year. We did not have steak and potatoes for dinner, as I predicted; he requested fajitas.
  • The potentially brewing project died a sure death this past week. I’m bummed because it would have been a cool thing to do, but I’m also relieved because it was going to take a lot of time and effort to pull off. Many lessons were learned from this experience that I can apply in the future when such a situation inevitably pops up again.

Gardening

  • Trellises are in my house, as are some other gardening items.
  • All seeds needed through the month of April have been secured.
  • Rhubarb is still small.
  • I did sow the cabbages, some alyssum, but nothing else.
  • My sweet peas are just barely starting to sprout! You really have to look for them, but tiny little tendrils are pushing out of the soil!

Community

  • Renaissance did indeed submit her application for the WREF scholarship! Oh gosh, the arrhythmias…she submitted it yesterday at 2:15pm or so, and the pop-up that came up to confirm submission stated that it was due by 4pm that day. We had planned to work on it that evening, but something came up and we moved the time to earlier, THANK GOODNESS.
  • Band Parent meeting went well and many things have been scheduled for this last push of the school year. I still have a few office-y things to do for that.

Creativity

  • At Home:
    • Fat Quarter Shop upcoming quilt: Sneak peek video was posted on Friday on Instagram and I’m aware that my videography skills/software need an upgrade. I had planned to finish piecing the top on Saturday and even cleared my whole schedule for it, but some of my children decided to mutiny against their Saturday chores and much time was lost on this quilt because it went towards dialoguing and disciplining. I’m still confused as to why that day went so sideways. As it stands, I’m about 2/3 of the way done with assembling the blocks.
    • Prom Dresses: The fabric for Ren’s dress has arrived and I am so in love with it. It’s GORGEOUS. The contrast fabric isn’t as flowy as I would have liked, but we’ll just have to make do because it was the only kind of silk they had that came in the color we wanted. FYI, Shantung silk is not flowy. Tell your friends.
  • Van Crafting Sessions™: Designing wedding shawls: Newsflash: I’ve not done this before and I’m not good at it. Yet. (#growthmindset) Time was spent wrapping my head around how to actually do this.
  • Resurrecting music practice sessions: Did not happen because I’ve had them scheduled for the evenings, but now that it’s light outside again we’re actually outside during that time as a family. I’ll need to figure out a different time of day for this.

It was a really, really busy week with a concert on Thursday, which was also Pi Day, so Emily made three pies and because we had three pies chilling at our house I invited Ren’s band friends over after the concert and we all ate pie until 11:15pm. Ha ha. I’m generally an introvert who really appreciates a solid sleep schedule and bedtime, but sometimes you just gotta spend some time with friends. It was a good choice, despite how tired it made me the next day.

Fresh Start Monday/Tuesday

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Post may contain affiliate links. When you purchase something from a link in my post, I may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. I only recommend materials and tools that I have personally vetted.

Happy Monday/Tuesday, friend! I had planned to post this yesterday, but my Monday turned into a very long day with no time for blogging, so a Tuesday post it is!

What are your plans for this week?  How are you faring with the weather and the season?  I’m seeing a lot of evidence of the February blahs all around me here, so I hope you’re doing what you need to do in order to feel as well as you can during this time of year.

We were blessed with an unusual bout of mild weather last week and I made a point of going out into my garden and getting some sunshine.  I didn’t accomplish much out there; I mostly just looked at what sort of work was in store for me in a few weeks, but it felt good to connect with that space and allow myself to do some dreaming about what spring and summer holds in store.  The rhubarb is starting to grow, and I was excited to create my first recurring garden reminder of 2024 to check the garden for some homegrown produce in the weeks ahead.  I normally just make rhubarb crisp—do you have any great ideas or recipes for rhubarb?  This plant is prolific and I do not use as much of it as I could, which I’d like to improve upon this year.

We celebrated Emily’s 20th birthday over the weekend with too much food and, at her request, a big bunch of Dungeons & Dragons, so I didn’t make much progress on crafty things, which is totally fine: People are what matter more!  She created a quick-play campaign based on Greek mythology, and it was the first time I’d play the game since I was in elementary school, so I was agonizingly slow at understanding what was going on, but we were having a grand ol’ time by the finish. My character is Penelope O’Paca, a Tyrian purple llama centaur cleric who is a member of the weaving guild. I had a blast healing everyone, using my downtime to collect plants for dyes, and weaving magical garments for my party of warriors.

The Baa-ble Hat is coming along quickly.  It’s become my watching-TV knit, and it’s February, so there’s many moments to work on it, even with the unexpected milder weather.  I’ve mostly just been making socks in recent years, so it’s nice to zip ahead with such a small project.

I’m a little leery about whether or not it’s going to actually fit me, because 1) The circumference of my head is 2 inches larger than the average 21 inches that most adult hat patterns strive to fit, and 2) It’s stranded color work, which, even though it’s my favorite thing to knit, is usually less stretchy because of the carried strands.  In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever made myself a stranded colorwork hat that ever fit.  I’m trying to keep the floats loose, but…you know, it usually isn’t enough.  This is such an easy knit, however, that I would be willing to re-knit it on bigger needles if it doesn’t turn out the size I need it to be.

I’m not sure if I love how the white and blue yarn are creating a wispy cloud effect, or if I don’t like the lack of contrast between the sky and the clouds.

Looking at the week ahead, I’m hoping to:

  • Finish the Baa-ble Hat
  • Start or pick up another knitting project for on-the-go crafting—there’s a lot of dental check-ups this week, which means a lot of sitting around in waiting rooms. Knit Picks has a sale on their Swish yarn this month over at crochet.com, so I’m thinking about starting a project with that yarn because it’s machine washable and easy to care for.
  • Make a dent in the quilting of the Rainbow Coin Strip quilt, and maybe even finish the quilting—I think I only have the borders left to do, which is quite possibly my least favorite part of quilting a quilt, and I’m really stuck as to what I should quilt in the borders.
  • Put some time in on the Chatsworth Block of the Month.  The fabric is almost prepped, so it should be easy to pick up and start.
  • Start prepping fabric for Nathaniel’s birthday quilt.
  • Start working on a new pattern from Fat Quarter Shop.

There’s so much more I’d like to be able to say I’m going to do, but that list alone feels like too much, so I’ll stop there. 

I hope you’re able to find time this week to pursue some creativity and restore your spirits! We’re beyond the halfway point between the darkest day of the year and the Spring Equinox (when the days become longer than the nights), so we’re almost back into Sunshine Time. You can do it! February isn’t forever!

Quick Check-in on a Wednesday in August

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Hello lovelies!

Y’know, I like to think of myself as a well-organized person, but every now and then I realize that my well-organized persona thinks a little too much of itself and has once again bitten off more than it can chew. Which then stokes the fires of Organizational Ego, and I sharpen my gaze and get to work even harder than before. It’s what’s going on right now.

It’s time to get ready for back-to-school, which means paperwork, shopping, and driving kids to campus for registrations (all scheduled at different times on multiple days…argh). We’ve got an activity-packed year ahead of us!

We’re also prepping for a fun-filled evening later this week, complete with lots of this:

While also dealing with this new development, which is the main reason I’m behind on posting:

And, you know, when you’re a flute player and gearing up for your senior year and have grand hopes of it finally being the year you make it into the All-State Band, and you break your freakin’ arm right before it all, you deserve an epic birthday/Happy Senior Year party. There were birthday party plans before the fractured limb, but they got bigger once we found out her ability to audition is severely hampered by the timeline of when that splint/cast comes off. We are massively sad.

So, SHINY SQUIRREL! Carnival birthday time! Make lemon drops from lemons!

Understandably, I won’t be online a lot this week because I’m gearing up for Operation: Make Renaissance Smile.

An Organized House: Thoughts on the House & Holiday Plan

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Years upon years ago, I discovered the Houseworks Holiday Plan, which would later be renamed the House & Holiday Plan. It was originally published on the OrganizedChristmas website, which has since shut down. Since I’d printed out all of the schedules, checklists, and printables in 2011, I was still okay to continue with my tradition of following the plan each autumn, which I’ve attempted to do every year.

I’ve never completed the entire plan. I think I’ve been attempting to complete it since 2005 or 2006, and I’ve never made it all the way through because there was no way to complete those room-specific decluttering and cleaning tasks in the one week allotments when you’ve got four children and you’re dealing with back-to-school activities. I was thinking on this predicament during one of my planning periods during the last week of teaching school this year and realized I could just start the plan earlier and schedule extra time for decluttering the kids’ bedrooms. Don’t you just hate it when you have such a simple idea that really should have occurred to you, like, a DECADE ago?!?! Ugh.

The house is destroyed, which was the expectation after spending a year studying and student teaching, so at least things aren’t worse than originally planned. Regardless, there’s a lot of work to do to get things back in shape around here. I hit the “go” button on the House & Holiday Plan this last week and will use the extra time to get things reorganized over the summer. I’ve allocated two weeks to each kid bedroom, my bedroom, and the craft room for a total of ten weeks of decluttering, deep cleaning, organizing and, hopefully, a little redecorating and prettying up.

I started with Nathaniel’s and Emily’s shared bedroom this week because: 1) It’s got the most stuff in it, and 2) We never did a thorough clean out/declutter when Emily went off to college in the fall because she decided at the last minute to live on-campus and I actually packed up her stuff while she was at class before dropping it off that evening. Yeah, I packed up my kid in less than twenty-four hours. (Last summer was super stressful!!) I was too busy to deal with the leftovers and it’s been waiting for me for almost an entire year to get back to it. Well baby, I’M BACK FOR IT.

I like to completely gut a room when I’m doing a deep clean–take out every last thing, physically touch everything à la Marie Kondo and decide if it’s going to be kept, donated, or thrown away. This means that my living room is currently holding every physical possession of Nathaniel’s and Emily’s. So, another mess in order to deal with the original mess. *mirthless chuckle*

But, man, does it feel good to empty out an engorged room, rearrange the furniture, deep clean that sucker, and then judiciously bring things back in. *satisfied sigh*

So that’s what I’m up to right now, and I plan to come back next Friday/weekend and show you some pictures of something organized. I do much better when I have deadlines, so there it is–let’s get a bedroom put back together and prettified.

And then I got a Master’s Degree

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Hello Lovelies!

Yes, it’s been particularly quiet here on the blog for a long while.

Yes, there was a good reason:

There were a few days when I thought I would be able to handle completing the requirements of earning a Master’s Degree in Teaching on an accelerated schedule and still keep the blog running at the same time, but then I read through the syllabi of my first quarter’s classes and knew that something would have to give, and it would most definitely be the blog.

It was a good trade: I’m now one Master’s Degree smarter! Ha ha ha.

I’m hoping to come back to a regular schedule of blogging sometime this summer, but it might take until autumn if it turns out there’s a lot more messes in my house to clean up than originally thought. There were many trade-offs to make time for studying and student teaching, and we’re now a full year from when I had to give up on a steady housecleaning routine…there’s definitely some messes that need attending to that have been piling up since then. Once I get them all taken care of, I can unearth the craft room from its current designation as the landing spot for everything that didn’t have a place and get back to some good ol’ crafting!

But yeah, MASTER’S DEGREE, baby! Woo hoo! But not woo hoo for the outdoor commencement ceremony in SEATTLE that rained all over my parade. Graduation pictures will definitely NOT be this year’s Christmas card photo! *sigh* I try so hard, y’all, I really do!

Progress: Nereid Fingerless Gloves

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In my last post I pondered the idea of publicly sharing any handmade Christmas gifts that weren’t done yet, in a last-ditch effort to follow through on their completion because publicly talking about said unfinished gifts will keep them at the forefront of my crafty brain. And then…ugh, I made a really, really silly mistake on these mitts and every fiber in my being wants to throw them atop the hibernation pile and ignore them for another year, and NO THAT WILL NOT BE HAPPENING.

So here we are: I was hoping to finish up a pair of fingerless gloves for my bestie for Christmas this year, but I got sick for most of December and didn’t make the deadline and darn it, these are getting finished NOW. There will be weekly progress posts on these things until they are done because I started making them in August of 2012, people! It’s been almost TEN YEARS! They are beautiful and they deserve to be out in the world making my friend happy.

One mitt is done, and the silly mistake was that I didn’t start the thumb increases during the third repeat on the second mitt, so I have to unpick half a repeat and do it all over again and I was so close to being done but now I’m not and it was a very low moment for me. BUT…public pressure to continue on and persevere…hopefully I can show you much progress next Wednesday!

And, then…there’s another project that didn’t get finished for Christmas, and I’ll tell you all about it when these gloves are done! The anticipation builds!