I promised that I’d check back in by the end of January, so here I am! I apologize for the long absence—I was finishing up my last two classes for my master’s degree, and with the start of the school year and all the craziness that accompanies getting three non-driving teenagers to their practices, rehearsals, lessons, and games I knew I wasn’t going to have any time for much else. I hope your autumns were lovely, and I hope this winter isn’t treating any of you too shabbily.
So, yeah…master’s degree officially completed, and I even have the physical diploma to prove it! I am not teaching full-time; in fact, I’m just subbing a couple times a week at my kids’ schools because the process of pursuing my master’s degree really opened my eyes to the enormity of what I do in our home each day, and how important that work is. I’ve always been a huge champion for full-time homemaking, but somewhere along the way I lost sight of my enthusiasm for the endeavor and thought my family would be better served by extra funds. Unfortunately, to have me working full-time outside the home meant a whole lot more unexpected expenses that I hadn’t thought to include in my budget workings, while at the same time cutting down on my time to provide a lot of the domestic labor and relationship-building that is the key to our family being able to survive on one income and have our children feel loved and supported. It was a very eye-opening experience and it has me scrutinizing the thought process that led me to believe that we’d be better off with me working. I’m trying to be more intentional regarding the media I consume because I was heavily influenced by various discontent voices throughout the pandemic, and I regret many of the decisions I made as a result of listening to them. It just goes to show that being an adult doesn’t mean you’ve figured everything out, eh?
So, I’m home again and trying to figure out how to go forward from here. I’d like to pivot with my master’s degree into some sort of creative education sphere, but I’m stumped as to how to make that happen. I am also eyeballs deep in parenting at the moment, so all of those aspirations might just wait until my empty nest phase, which is slated to begin in just four and a half years. Such a bittersweet milestone on the horizon! My life has been kids, kids, kids for almost twenty years now—I foresee considerable difficulties with adjusting to an empty nest existence! Goodness am I glad to have found Michael early on and dedicated everything to building our family. It’s been such a great journey.
I want to blog more because I enjoy it, it doubly serves as a record of what we’re up to throughout the years, and it’s been AMAZING to spend time in the craft room again! However, I’m incredibly without direction at the moment—my back injury improved immensely over the course of my master’s degree program due to the adoption of a yoga routine—so resuming my pre-pandemic levels of craftiness might not be feasible, as I was crafting so much back then largely because I was literally incapable of doing much else around the house due my severe muscle atrophy. Please have patience with me as I figure out healthy levels of housekeeping versus creativity! (The age-old dilemma, yes?) I wholeheartedly believe in the importance of consistently including creative endeavors in one’s schedule to maintain sanity and an enthusiasm for life, but too much of a good thing can create other problems if you’re irresponsible about it!
Happy January, and I hope you’re finding time for some creativity every day during these cold months ahead. I’m looking forward to writing more and hope to give you more posts soon!
(Note: I wrote this yesterday [Sunday] because my weekdays are super busy and I’ve no time for blogging on Monday mornings.)
I came across the Happy Homemaker Monday link-up last autumn and earmarked it as something I wanted to do once I got done with grad school because I’m still a homemaker at heart who loves to make my home comfy and beautiful. I love reading through Sandra’s thoughts and her enthusiasm for taking care of her home and family, and it’s hard to find blogs like that these days. So here’s my first, of hopefully many, Happy Homemaker Monday posts:
The Weather:
We have some lovely summers here in the Pacific Northwest, and we are in the middle of some great weather right now. It was pretty warm last week, so this little bit of cooling is welcome. It will make our afternoon activities much more bearable.
As I Look Outside My Window:
We are “allowing” the garden “to lie fallow” this year because I was too busy with school to get out into it during the spring, but it’s making me a little squirrelly to see it be so fraggly. The kids have their weeding chores and the weeds are slowing being eradicated, so that’s good. I just have to keep telling myself that this is a not gardening year. ((shudder))
I did go buy some basil plants and a tomato plant because it’s just not summer if there’s not basil and tomatoes in my garden. I now visit them every evening after Michael and I get back from our after dinner walk. Makes me happy.
I missed the window for harvesting my lavender. I was going to try my hand at making lavender wands this year, but alas. Oh well, it’s still very pretty to look at.
I love our super shaded front porch so much. The kids and I have been spending a lot of time out there eating ice cream, drinking drinks, working on hand projects…it’s a great little spot that doesn’t get sunbaked and is hidden from the view of people walking by on the street.
Right Now I Am:
Waiting for my Lime Curd Bars with Coconut Crust to cool on the counter so I can bring them to church for our “Linger Longer” after meetings are done. Michael is giving one of the talks in sacrament meeting today, too, so I’m thinking about ways to make it better.
Thinking & Pondering:
Renaissance’s birthday party
How to explain/teach goal-setting to teenagers
I’d like to throw a Mother/Daughter Halloween tea this autumn
How in the world will I organize Rachel’s bedroom after I gut it this week?
Do I just quilt the Patriotic baby quilt on my regular machine, or do I go forward with cleaning off my cutting table to make way for the Big Boy sewing machine with the super throat that I bought last summer? I think a cutting table clean-off would require gutting the craft room, and I can’t gut more than one room at a time or my house will burst into flames and weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. The kids’ bedrooms are the priority right now, so I think I have to quilt on my regular machine, which I’m not very excited about.
Listening to:
My main man, Claude Debussy, as I try to keep the energy chill in the house on this beautiful summer morning.
How Am I Feeling:
Last week was a huge disruption to my routine, as most holidays are, and I still feel a little off-kilter. Sleep hasn’t been great for various reasons. I’m hoping this all evens out in the upcoming week. I’m excited about the improvements I’m making in the house. I wish it wasn’t such hard work, but it is definitely worth it.
On the Breakfast Plate:
I used to be much cooler, breakfast-wise. Now it’s just a protein bar, pills, and caffeinated water before yoga, followed by a protein shake after yoga. Renaissance makes me an egg sandwich on the mornings that we work out together.
On the Lunch Plate:
I still hate lunch. Dumb lunch, interrupting my work flow. However, I’ve been grilling up a few chicken breasts every other day so the kids can add chicken to whatever they’re eating and up their protein intake. I’ve been noticing that they are ingesting very carb-heavy meals and I’m trying to curb that tendency.
On the Dinner Plate:
(Sunday) Michael will make tacos tonight!
What I’m Wearing:
My favorite pink gingham shirtwaist dress, which I wear to death and will eventually need to reverse engineer to recreate a million more.
Hopefully nothing; I like to keep my television watching to bad weather days. I did binge-watch some Clarkson’s Farm last week when I wasn’t feeling well.
On the Menu:
I meal plan on Saturday mornings, so my plan started a couple of days ago:
Saturday: Italian Sloppy Joes
Sunday: Tacos
Monday: Spaghetti, Green Beans, Caesar Salad, French Bread
Tuesday: North Carolina Pulled Pork (new recipe!), Corn on the cob, Broccoli Slaw
Friday: Cedar Plank Salmon, Baby Potatoes, Caesar Salad, Rolls
Looking Around the House:
We’re in the midst of decluttering the kids’ bedrooms. I’m pretty much finished with Emily’s and Nathaniel’s room, but some of their stuff is randomly strewn about the house. Everything’s messy after a year of grad school, but this summer is the antidote to that messiness and we’ll crawl out from underneath the weight of the clutter by the time school starts back up.
To-Do List This Week, beyond the obvious laundry and like:
Start gutting and deep cleaning Rachel’s room. Oh, this is going to be a BIG job.
Move forward with plans for Renaissance’s birthday party
Go to the DOL and renew Renaissance’s driver’s permit
Driving practice sessions for both Renaissance and Rachel
Maybe plant some seeds in the garden for autumn crops?
Get graduation cards and thank you cards sent out
Devotional:
I’m experimenting with a new spiritual practice of choosing a word each week and pondering on what that word means to me, character-wise and in practical application. This week’s word is “energy.” I’ll report on what I came up with next week.
This last week’s word was “sunshine,” and I didn’t spend a lot of time with it because I was feeling crummy. But I do love that it’s a word that describes something tangible and also can be applied as a positive adjective.
What does it mean to me to embrace sunshine in my life?
Physically: Getting as much of it as I can during these summer months and being oh-so-grateful for it because I know I’ll miss it dearly come January, February, and March. Being careful with it because too much of a good thing can be very harmful indeed.
Emotionally: Making the choice to look on the bright side of things. The last few years have been an interesting experiment of watching people become what they fixate upon. I am more and more convinced that focusing on the negative just breeds more negativity in one’s life. You don’t have to scream about all the bad things in the world all the time in order to change them. Better to stay calm, be cheerful and cordial, strive to make things beautiful and lovely, AND work the proper channels to fix what’s wrong. Screaming doesn’t help things, but writing letters, voting, and contributing funds to important causes does. Better to do those things quietly and live your daily life gracefully so you can be a bringer of sunshine to yourself and those around you, rather than making people dread interacting with you and avoiding the causes you’re passionate about because you’ve soured them towards them with your ranting and seething. I accomplish much more positive change when I’m calm, collected, and cheerful, and our home is such a lovely sanctuary from the stress of the world when Mama is content. My husband and children deserve a safe place to land each evening.
Well, that’s everything. What a delightful exercise in noticing what’s going on around me and contemplating my actions for the upcoming week. I enjoyed writing this post! I wish you all a beautiful and productive week ahead!
The weather has done its thing where it finally shifts from dragged-out summer to definitely autumn, and that always puts me into a reflective mood. Another year is beginning its spiral towards completion, while at the same time being in full-on chaotic upswing due to the steady hum of a new school year and the holiday season sneaking up behind us. It’s a weird little time in the calendar year: A constant pull between calming down and ramping up.
I’ve not posted much this year. I made a decision, many years ago, to not post while feeling overly emotional or snarky, and every time I’ve broken that rule, I’ve regretted it. So I heeded the wisdom of a lesson learned the hard way, multiple times, and kept myself to myself and focused on my children. It seems to be the most winning of strategies when I’m working through difficult phases of life. We had a quiet spring, a quiet summer, and were ready and refreshed to tackle what autumn had in store for us, and wow, autumn has not held back on amazing moments. I’m so glad we were in prime form to go with its energetic current of events.
But then the rain (mercifully) started up this morning, and I decided to take a pause on this Friday and still myself after so much rushing. The kids are doing so good right no; it’s so great to watch them blossom. That blossoming comes with a lot of driving them around and last-minute schedule changes, but remember how two years ago there was nothing for them to go to? This frenzy is evidence of life being lived. I’m so grateful that we’re in this moment of time, moving on from what was a very difficult couple of years.
I don’t write a lot here because I’m not creating a whole lot of stuff these days. I don’t know what to write about to you all anymore. I struggled with this same conundrum years ago when I shifted out of homeschooling–what do you write about on a homeschooling blog when you’re not homeschooling anymore? I tried to morph into a homemaking blog, but readers abandoned me in droves, so I packed it up and called it good. Thankfully, I was getting going with the crafty stuff, and that created this blog. But here we are again, with no crafting happening, and me wondering about what to write about now?
I am busy with my children. I am busy with cooking, laundry, and cleaning. There are blogs enough out there that talk about those topics, and they’re not really topics I feel like I have much to write about–we all need to eat, we all need to not be naked, and we need to keep ourselves and our homes clean enough to stay healthy. It’s not a calling in life–it’s just life, regardless of your relationship and parental status. Everyone eats, everyone wears clothes, everyone cleans. I don’t know how to craft essays about those topics that will make us feel better about them.
But maybe I’ll try. It’s nice to have a written record to read in future years. (I go back and read through my homeschooling blog once or twice a year because I dearly love reminding myself of the cute things the Brookelets were doing during their elementary years!)
And maybe I’ll find time to craft again in the future, but it’s not looking like my time will open up anytime soon. I knit a little when I watch TV, and I have a knitting bag in the van for when I’m waiting to pick up kids, but it’s slow progress and nothing like when I was actively trying to create content for this blog and Instagram. (It’s so nice to take a break!) Most of my favorite craft bloggers admit they now have teams helping them produce content, and I refuse to try to keep up with it all. We have so many quilts in our house, and the kids no longer want new winter hats each year–there’s just no demand in our home for most of what I craft anymore, and that’s ok…it was fun while it was desired. What is needed from me right now are the basics and the logistics and they are all-time-consuming. We are making hay while the sun shines on these awesome teenage years!
It’s a great time of parenthood, and I do not resent how much of my time it is taking to help my kids flourish. This is what we’ve been working towards all these years and it is Go Time now. All the preparation, all the lessons, all the learning…it’s all coming into play as they start taking their very own footsteps out into the world and start showing up for themselves at the things they’re choosing to continue…and I am the woman behind the curtain, making sure they show up on time in a clean, healthy, and calm state. It’s just so much fun to watch it all come together in these precious moments.
So that’s what’s going on here, and I’ll share what I’m comfortable sharing when I have the time, but it’s hardcore busy around these parts right now, and I have very little knitting to show for it.
I hope you are all having a fantastic autumn season (spring for you southern hemisphere folks!) and I wish you a beautiful season of joy and contentment to help refill our precariously-drained wells after so many years of isolation and suffering. Enjoy living life again!
I wrote a few days ago about how I’ve been hit by the February ennui that tackles me every year, and how I’d decided to just give in to every new project that flitted across my radar in an attempt to give myself some happy chemical boosts and weather out the rest of this gray month. I published my post, went off to continue working on the new Linen Stitch scarf, and as I was knitting away the day, my mind wandered and I remembered something I read about in the The Twelve Week Year called the “Emotional Cycle of Change,” which comes with a handy little visual in the book:
I recalled the first time I worked The Twelve Week Year system, way back in the summer of 2020, and how much impact that little image had on me because I absolutely identified with it. When I was putting in the work on that cycle’s goals, I hit that nasty wall of despair right around Week Five and it stuck with me for a good two or three weeks where all I wanted to do was give up, give up, give up. But, thankfully, I was aware of it, I had people to talk to about it who encouraged me to keep going, and yep, I kept at it and eventually pulled up and out of that funk because I didn’t give up and I didn’t shift my focus onto something else. I got to experience the high of sticking with that project until the end, even though I really wanted to just die for a few weeks whenever I thought about another stupid day of doing this.
And I think that’s what’s going on right now. I started the new year with the idea of doing good on crafty goals, and I’ve been going forward with all the energy and zeal of an optimistic goal-getter, and it’s now hitting really hard that progress isn’t an overnight thing and I am smack dab in the Boring Middle of it all. The answer isn’t to quit or switch focus, because when I get to the end of this twelve week cycle (in the last week of March), I don’t want to look back and regret that I stopped working on these goals. Honestly, it’s a bit of a weird goal cycle because I don’t have anything huge going on because I just couldn’t come up with anything except “take a break from striving all the time,” because I’ve been striving hard for eighteen months straight and just felt like I needed a break. So I’m only doing some low-key stuff to help prep me to do bigger things come April, but it is important to me to tie up a lot of these loose crafty ends, if only to “close the circuit” on these open/unfinished projects.
So the answer right now is that I’m having a normal reaction to change. I’ve been really good at showing up to work on these crafty goals; it’s become my routine and it’s no longer a new, exciting thing, and I’m jonesing for the high of a new project…but that’s what gets me into this mess of having eighty-seven UFOs cluttering up my craft room and driving me crazy all the time. The answer is to just keep showing up and doing the work, even if I need to grit my teeth somedays, and remind myself of how good it’s going to feel to get that pile of quilt tops completed. In a few weeks’ time I’ll start seeing the results of that consistency and I’ll start getting excited about the dash to the finish line, and the high of finishing a big goal is way bigger than the high of starting a new project. Lasts longer, too.
Another thing I might to watch out for is the impulse to indulge in retail therapy–it might be one of the first signs that I’m approaching Stage 2 or Stage 3 of this cycle. That being said, there is a still an ungodly amount of yarn currently making its way to me in the mail because…well, I didn’t figure this out until after I’d already ordered it. Guess I’ll be making a lot of socks and fingerless mittens for the foreseeable future, even though I know I’m only capable of about seven pairs a year, given my “comfortable knitting” calculations I just figured out.
How many skeins of sock yarn did I order? Nine. *sigh*
I do have a finished project post to show you, but I also keep procrastinating driving to the post office and actually mailing it off to its intended recipient, so…I could spin it to sound like the USPS is sucking at its job, but it would be an absolute lie because it’s really just me.
Although, the USPS is taking its sweet time getting a package of yarny goodness to me that was supposed to be delivered last Monday, but then it disappeared from their radar for a couple of days, and magically popped up at a regional distribution center yesterday. Hmph.
As predicted, February has cast a grayish pallor on everything in sight, and I’m feeling it, hard. I keep telling myself that it is a temporary feeling, that life really isn’t just cold and dreariness, and that spring will be here soon with sunshine and birds twittering and flowers, but then you have to stop thinking about spring and re-focus on what’s in front of you and…it’s February. Usually there’s some crazy weather going on to distract me, but not this year. Just cold and drizzly rain, and a lot of fog, which is just unsettling. There’s not supposed to be fog when you’re driving to the school to pick up your kids in the afternoon. It gives me the heebie jeebies.
We are having a couple of nice days right now, but I absolutely do not trust them at all and I refuse to allow them to get my optimism engaged, only to have it crushed and ground into the asphalt next week. No. This is fake spring. I’ll try to get outside and soak up some desperately needed sun, but I’m not going to let my heart get carried away. It would be a great time to do some clean-up in the garden, though…
I think the fabric and yarn companies have figured out this February sloggy feeling, because geez, the sales and deals coming out of ’em right now are incessant. It’s been bad, people. But oh so good. But I may need to set up a temporary email filter on any incoming messages from the crafty stores because this past week has shown that I have no known defenses against their February sales. Dear goodness. Cara, it doesn’t count for much if you’re trying to reduce your stash and UFOs, only to then gorge yourself and bring in more stash.
The Yarn Harlot wrote up a blog post in recent days that echoes my sentiments about February, and she admitted that she’s just giving in to every “start a new project” impulse that rises in her heart. And I kinda sorta love that idea, because I am in desperate need of dopamine hits at the moment and indulging in some Startitis to achieve the effect is far friendlier to my bank account than retail therapy.
So I’ve started making wild promises to my kids about knitting them things and I will probably regret it in a month’s time, but whatevs. Michael’s socks are finished, and I was looking through my Ravelry project page to figure out which family member has gone the longest without receiving a handknit from me, and it turns out I’ve not knit a thing for my boy since he was in the first grade. (That’s five years for those of you who are also experiencing the Februaries and don’t want to do the math.) I called him over and we perused the Ravelry pattern database, and he finally decided that what he wanted his dear ol’ mum to knit him was a pig hat. Because he’s sad that his monkey hat doesn’t fit anymore.
ca. 2010
Guys, I knit that monkey hat for his first winter of his life. He’s worn it ever since, and would probably still be wearing it except that I outlawed it because it’s simply too small. I don’t care that he can technically stretch it over his noggin…it’s too small. The boy is knitworthy, to say the least…but only if it’s an animal hat, apparently, because I made him a fair isle hat in the first grade, and he dutifully wore it that year, but then reverted back to the monkey hat in the second grade and I don’t think I’ve seen the fair isle hat on his head ever since.
ca. 2015
The pink yarn listed in the pattern for the pig hat? I ALREADY OWNED IT. Can the Universe be any more clear on what a great idea this project was?!?!
Except, when I went to go unearth it from the stash, I couldn’t find it. I scoured the stash from top to bottom three times, went through the knitting UFO bin twice, and then looked around in every other UFO bin just in case it randomly got put in them when we moved, but alas, none of the perfect pink yarn could be found. I think I got rid of it when we moved? It’d been sitting in a partially-knitted state for years because I bought it to make a vest for Nathaniel when he was little, but it turns out that he gets heat rashes from wearing vests, so I never finished it, and I was trying to cull crafty supplies and it wasn’t a shade of pink I particularly liked to begin with…so, I think I got rid of it. There’s no notes in my stash listing on Ravelry, but I can’t find the stuff, so I’ve now marked it as “given away.” But I honestly have no idea what I did with it.
Undaunted, I hunted down various shades of pink bulky-weight yarn, screenshotted them all and cropped them into a grid, then texted the image to Nathaniel and asked him to pick one, and he picked one of the most brightest shades of bubble gum pink and he is thrilled that it will be adorning his head in a few weeks’ time. I love it that he loves pink, it’s adorable.
Since I was paying for shipping anyways, I figured I’d throw in some more yarn to my order and looked up which family member was next due for a handknit, and it turned out it was Renaissance, who I last crafted for three years ago. She wasn’t terribly interested in anything, but then I had a bold flash of inspiration and reminded her that football season will be back all-too-soon, and wouldn’t a pair of fingerless gloves with fold-over tops just be amazing during the outdoors flute-playing season? She immediately agreed, and I added in some maroon superwash merino to my order. I did also add two more projects’ worth of yarn for things for myself, but then got rid of them because knitting season will inevitably wind down come spring and gardening and English paper piecing time, and most of my stash is comprised of these kinds of orders–the extra skeins I buy because I was paying for shipping anyway. If I’m still interested in the projects for myself come autumn, I’ll buy the yarn for them then.
Sooo…not exactly “knitting from the stash,” but I am excited about two new projects. And while I was rifling through the stash, trying to find the perfect pink yarn, I noticed that I had a lot of blue & green sock yarn leftovers in the yarn scrap bin, and I thought they’d probably go together fabulously in a linen stitch scarf. And since my yarny goodness package fell off the radar for half a week and I finished Michael’s socks and I think I may have knit them on the wrong size needles but won’t know until he finally tries them on but it’s a busy week and we’ve really only seen each other as we turn off the light to go to sleep, that hasn’t happened yet…and I don’t want to start another pair of socks for him from the stash because I don’t know what size needle to use anymore, but it’s February and darn it I need a project, so I cast on for a linen stitch scarf with those sock yarn scraps:
I think the scraps go together a little too well, actually, so it will lack that fun contrast that I like in this pattern when you use colorways that don’t match perfectly, but it’ll still be a pretty, analogous scarf. It took me a year to knit the last linen stitch scarf I made, so I’m not expecting a quick finish with this. I think it will be my couch knitting project.
And, just for fun, I’ll finish with another picture of the Monkey Hat of Yore:
Hopefully he’ll love his pig hat just as much, minus the yarn-chewing. Good luck surviving the rest of February, however you choose to do it.
Getting close to the end of these, which is good because I may or may not have fallen prey to a yarn store-closing sale that is now shipping seven new skeins of sock yarn to me as we speak…sorry/notsorry.
As I’ve been knitting on these, my brain keeps trying to make me feel bad about how far behind I am on these, and it occurred to me that I might have a faulty sense of how long it actually takes to knit a pair of socks, thereby dooming myself to always feeling like a failure whenever I knit a pair of socks. As it stands, it feels very comfortable to knit a stripe’s worth of yarn each day on these, and so I counted up the stripes in the completed sock, and it’s 23 stripes. That’s a little over three weeks’ worth of knitting at a comfortable pace. Multiply that by two (because two socks in a pair) and you get 46 days, which equals 6.5 weeks to make a pair of socks for Michael.
In my head…I thought it took four weeks. So of course I always feel like I’m behind when I’m knitting socks for him. It’s good to figure out the numbers on stuff, because numbers generally don’t lie, and I like knowing exactly how things are going to go and numbers are the way to figure that stuff out. It takes seven weeks to knit up a pair of socks for Michael. No wonder I can never finish the “started in December” pairs I always try to make for Christmas. This timetable has been noted in my Christmas preparation notes.
…to let you know that I am still here and I haven’t abandoned blogging. My back went out last week, and then there was another thing that I don’t want to talk about on the internet, and then I went to the doctor yesterday to talk about the thing I don’t want to talk about, and he was like, “Hey, you didn’t get your flu shot this year, would you like to do that now?”
And I was like, “Yeah, sure, that’s probably wise.”
And then he said, “Do you need a COVID booster, too?”
And I was all wide-eyed with disbelief and said, “You have those?! I haven’t been able to schedule one online.”
“Yeah, we’ve got them, you want one?”
“Um, YES.”
So now, on the day that I thought I’d finally get back to doing some sewing or knitting after way too many days of not sewing or knitting, I’m nursing a very sore left deltoid and feeling slightly sick and feverish as my body figures out how to deal with the injected germs. Which is the absolutely best way to spend today, but it infringes on my crafty goals and I feel a little panicked that I’m totally going to miss the mark on a few of them, but then I remind myself that they’re just benchmarks in the air that I thought would be nice to achieve and nothing bad will actually happen if I don’t finish them on time, and geez, calm down.
I might try knitting a little today, just to try to work some of the soreness out of my shoulder, but I might not because it’s boring knitting that I’m really bored of and geez, I need a new knitting project. So many people are making awesome sweaters right now and I want to be like them. But noooooo, I’ve decided to be responsible and stuff and finish UFOs and dumb stuff like that. (It is so hard to keep that commitment when you feel like crap and decide to do a little online window shopping because you’re too worn out to really do anything else.)
(I may or may not have fallen down a retail therapy rabbit hole at a certain online fabric store…the anticipation of receiving a package in the mail is pretty much the only thing that has brought joy into my life this past week. #selfcare)
Alright, head on off to your lives. I’ll just be here, doing that greasy sick sweating thing and stalking people’s crafting-in-progress photos on Instagram. Leave a comment if you’ve got some good in-progress photos for me to look at. Tell me how to find them. I beg you.
Good morning, lovelies! Hopefully the new year is still treating you well and you’re making progress on the things that matter most to your heart. This week I’ll be (hopefully) finishing the Cat Lady quilt. The quilting is finished, and it’s trimmed; I just need to get going on the binding and label. I’m thinking I’m going to use the loads of C+S Bluebird scraps I have on-hand from when Denise made a dress for Em out of that fabric, which means I’ll be doing a scrappy binding construction because the scraps are very weird shapes–there’s very little yardage that will work for WOF cutting. BUT…it’s C+S fabric, and I have loads of it that I’ve been trying to sew through for years, so this will make a significant dent.
I had hoped to finish the Cat Lady quilt last week, but geez, what a week! Washington got a lot of snow and ice and rain and it just threw everything off kilter all week long. My kids had a two-hour late start for school four days out of five, the roads were flooding over…you don’t realize how stressed you’re feeling about stuff until you get past it and realize that you’ve been holding your shoulders up to your ears for days. And now we have to deal with rescheduling all the stuff that got cancelled, and adding it on top of all the regularly-scheduled stuff…I just wish that people would let things go when they get cancelled? Like, it’s too bad it didn’t happen, but let’s try again next year, rather than trying to fit it into the next couple of weeks that are already booked? Please? But alas…that’s a rare outcome.
Once the Cat Lady quilt is complete, I’m hoping to start work on Rachel’s birthday gift, and I can’t show you anything about it or she’ll figure out what it is. Which also means I have to clean it up everyday and not leave it lying around on the cutting table or the ironing board. Let’s see if I can actually remember to do that everyday…who else thinks that I’ll forget and Rachel will know what her gift is before it’s even finished? It also just occurred to me that I can’t work on this over the weekend days because she’s somewhat of a constant fixture in my craft room on the days that she’s home. So I guess it will take twice as long to stitch this up because I really will only have two days a week that I can work on this. Awesome.
I’m still working on the Nereid Fingerless Mitts for my bestie, and hopefully will have good news to report on them soon. This “tell people you were making them a gift if you didn’t finish it before Christmas” idea has been the perfect motivation to keep me working on those gifts. It might add extra incentive to get things done before Christmas in future years, too: I’m going to lose that special moment of surprise if it’s not done before Christmas because I’ll have to announce it on the blog. I don’t like doing that. But I do like finishing stuff, and so here we are.
Scrappy Thursday this week is for working on the Clementine Quilt. I don’t know if anyone remembers that I was one of the quilters in the original Clementine Quilters group, but I had to quit because we were moving. I hated quitting, but it was definitely the right call at the time because here we are, four years later, and it’s only now that I have the feasible time to work on it again. Fat Quarter Shop supplied me with the fabric to make the quilt, and I don’t feel right accepting fabric from people and then not using it, so it’s been on my mind ever since that I definitely need to get this completed so I can fulfill the obligation that I signed up for originally.
Update on Marshmallow: He’s doing better than he was. It looked like his hind legs were permanently paralyzed for many days, but in the last three or so days he’s started using them again, somewhat regularly. We changed up his meds the day before that development, so it looks like we’ve hit on a combo that works well for him. Pretty sure he’s gone blind though–he seems to only be responding to sounds, and he runs face first into things a lot. He got pushed down the stairs by Charlotte the other day because he walked near her, which is not a thing he used to do because she’ll bat any cat in the face that gets that close to her. (She’s such a GRUMP.) I feel like I need to set something up that will keep her away from him while I’m gone from the house because I’m afraid I’m going to come home to a murder scene or the like. Sigh.
So yeah, bad weather and geriatric cats…last week was intense. Hopefully things are a lot calmer this week!
I am perpetually in love with new beginnings, and January is the month of new beginnings. Whether you do resolutions or not, there is something motivating and optimistic about the first week of the new year. There’s usually something motivating and optimistic about Mondays as well: What will this new week hold for me? What projects will I make progress on this week? Will I improve this week? Monday is the great big beginning. So the first Monday of the year…very pregnant with possibility.
Em & Nathaniel decided to dye their hair on NYE.
My kids head back to school today, and I head back to normal crafty hours. There’s so much that is great about December and all the Christmas festivities, BUT…they deviate from the normal schedule, and man, have I missed my normal, quiet schedule. I’m really looking forward to getting back into the craft room uninterrupted.
I shared my plans for January in my last post, and today sees me jump into that plan with all my first-Monday-of-the-year enthusiasm. I’ll be dragging out Em’s Cat Lady quilt that I pieced for their sixteenth birthday and then never got around to quilting. My plan is to finish this up before their birthday at the beginning of February, but not give it as a present because you can’t give something as a birthday present twice. My kid is going to be a legal adult in a month. How did we get here? I’ll wax poetic about that closer to their birthday. Hopefully I can get this quilt completely done this week? That’d be great.
This week marks the re-introduction of Scrappy Thursdays into my routine, and I’m excited to finally start working on my #brickhousequilt blocks. I’m aiming to make up the first four of sixteen blocks. I’m really optimistic about my Scrappy Thursdays plan and this pattern; hopefully I can do some epic scrapbusting this year–the situation is getting dire!
As far as handstitching projects go, I’m still slogging away on past due Christmas gifts I didn’t finish up and still can’t show you. (Side note: I’m thinking that if one misses the Christmas deadline for making a gift, that perhaps one should post about said items because secret crafting gets old after a while, and if one posts about the items, there’s a little more peer pressure to finish…but that may just be my thinking…)
I did, however, get a lot of work done on my “car knitting” project because one of my cats, Marshmallow, went to stand up last week and I’m guessing he pinched a nerve in his hips or something, because his back legs suddenly slumped out from beneath him and he started yelling. It was a long day at the curbside emergency veterinarian, and I alternated holding his head in my hand so he’d stay calm, and knitting while he slept or was inside the vet’s office. He was given a diagnosis of severe arthritis, which is very common for the Scottish Fold breed, but I think I’m going to get a second opinion because I don’t think partially-paralyzed hind legs are something you just treat with anti-inflammatories. (I had a partially paralyzed leg for about a week before my back surgery–it’s horrifically painful.) He’s really struggling, and I think he’s going blind, too. He’s a grandpa of a cat, probably about fifteen years old or so, so it’s getting to be that time where we might need to make some sad plans for him.
Nathaniel is pretty upset, and has taken on the role of permanent cat whisperer; he carries Marsh around and helps reset his legs into a standing position so he doesn’t have to drag them behind him. Sigh. Loving another creature sure is painful when it gets near the end of their life. One would almost be tempted to not engage in the practice, were it not for all the funny little memories and cute moments we’ve had over the years.
Not the most uplifting end to a “motivating & optimistic” Monday post, but it’s what’s going on around here and I try to document the whole story. I’ve got a lot of work to do this week, and also try to find a vet that can squeeze Marsh in for a consult. Wish me luck! And I wish you luck with your week and your goals, and I hope all your pets are in splendid health.
I have a nifty little project rotation schedule in my mind that I try to use to work through old projects and not let the scrap bins get out of hand, and it’s just not working. I sat down to figure out what was going wrong, and just decided that I needed to make it work alongside what I want to do, instead of it being the main operating system of my craft room. As I’m sure you’re aware, every new year and month brings up new potential projects that you need to decide if you’re going to pursue or not. New babies, weddings, graduations, a crazy pattern that comes out that NEEDS to be made ASAP because it’s amazing, a new dress because of fifty thousand reasons…there’s just a lot that you can’t plan for, and it wreaks havoc on a system designed to corral the creative madness.
So…Idea #1: Each month will have its “must makes” that I will work on until they’re done, and then the remainder of the month will revert back to my UFO/Project Rotation schedule and I’ll make headway on the projects collecting cobwebs until the month ends. It’s simple, far too simple, but until I wrote it out I couldn’t see it as my solution.
I came up with this idea in October and finetuned and planned it out, but it felt like something was missing, and I finally realized what it was whilst lounging in my bed during the Great December Sickness of 2021–I’m not making enough scrap quilts. At all. The scrap bins no longer close, and I don’t have time for scrap quilts even though I won’t be able to use my craft room by the end of the year if they keep multiplying like they have been, completely unchecked. And then I randomly remembered that I came up with a weird little system for THIS EXACT PROBLEM back in 2019: Scrappy Thursdays.
Scrappy Thursdays were devoted to working on scrap projects and block of the months. It didn’t matter what I was working on outside of Scrappy Thursdays, I’d set it aside and work mostly from the scrap bins for that one day every week. I have four separate storage bins that held the fabric and patterns for four separate projects, and each week had its Project #1, #2, #3, or #4. It was still in experiment form when it dissolved out of my life, but it was a rather successful experiment while it was in progress! I just got really busy with the Blank Quilting ambassador thing and had no extra time for play, which was fine because I was having a lot of fun with all the yummy Blank fabric. Ah, memories…
Idea #2: I’m going to reinstate Scrappy Thursdays in 2021. I’m really looking forward to it. My chaos-loving brain really enjoys the break from my serious “get ‘er done” projects that I work on for the majority of the week, and my “obsessed with productivity” brain loves that I’m making progress on so many different things.
Beautiful Mammoth Flannels being cut for one of next year’s Christmas quilts!
I had another good idea during the Great December Sickness of 2021, which is my Idea #3: Use my leaders and enders for greater Christmas productivity. As in, cut the fabric for the Christmas quilts I want to make for Christmas next year NOW, and use them as my leaders and enders throughout the next year. When it comes time to work on said Christmas quilts at a later date, I’ll already have a ton of the piecing done. I’ve even set up an annual reminder that the week after Christmas is for cutting next year’s leaders and enders!
I’ve got the fabric for two of next year’s Christmas quilts prewashed and in the process of being cut. I have at least one more, if not two more, Christmas quilts I want to make this upcoming year, but no idea what pattern and/or fabric I’m going to use just yet, so obviously can’t precut anything for those quilts.
I’m excited for this extra bit of organization to help things run smoothly in the craft room! Do you have any good tips or tricks for quilty organization? I’d love to hear them! Happy New Year!
That Crafty Cara 