We’ve done it, y’all: We’ve arrived in the ‘Ber months! Woo hoo! It’s all about the cinnamon from now until the end of the year!
Debrief: August #craftygoals
Rachel’s Graduation Signature Quilt: The signature backing just needs its top and bottom borders, and legitimate work has begun on the front of the quilt. My knee started acting up the last two weeks, so I haven’t done more with it since. Bah.
Husband Christmas Socks: Got to the heel of the second sock yesterday!
Smitten EPP Quilt: This wasn’t technically on the August list of goals, but I pivoted to it when my knee started acting up and I’m happy to report I’m almost done with attaching all the rows to each other!
September #craftygoals
I’m looking at my calendar for September and I’m hesitant to commit to the idea of lots of crafty progress, given how much awesome back-to-school stuff we’ll have going on much of the month. However, if I were to have some #craftywishes, they’d be:
Penguin Party Quilt: Drop it off at the quilter’s house!
Wonky Stars Baby Quilt: This needs finishing, ASAP.
Rachel’s Graduation Signature Quilt: Keep chugging along, knowing that I cannot start another project until it’s done.
Husband Christmas Socks: Obviously, finish the thing. Realistically, get through the heel, maybe some of the foot?
If I can get through all of that, and it’s highly unlikely that I will, then I can recommence working on the FQS Sewcialites Cherry Limeade Quilt. The Moda Blockheads sew along is starting up at the end of September and I so badly want to join in on the fun, but I know I shouldn’t; I have way too many projects in-progress. I talk out loud about joining up, but then Renaissance rolls her eyes at me and tells me to stop because she knows that what I really want is to finish the already-begun projects and TO STOP CREATING MORE WORKS-IN-PROGRESS. Sigh.
Hopefully I have an actual finished quilt (or two!) to show you by October…I seriously don’t know, though, especially with adding the House & Holiday Plan into the mix.
Years and years ago, a fantastic woman named Cynthia Townley Ewer created a website called OrganizedChristmas.com and listed a handful of different house and holiday prep plans on it. I discovered her website in 2004 as I was heading into my first Christmas as a stay-at-home mom. I was OBSESSED with her website and followed it every year until she shut it down. Wisely, I printed off all the pages she had created and offered for free on her site, so I still have my Houseworks Holiday Planner binder to reference each year.
I discovered a new website carrying on her work a few years ago: Magical Holiday Home. I’m terrible about posting there, but I do check in from time to time and enjoy reading through the posts that others leave about their efforts to follow the House & Holiday Plan each year.
The House & Holiday Plan is an eighteen week long preparation plan that focuses on a different area of the house each week for deep cleaning and various aspects of holiday planning so that you arrive at Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas & New Year’s relatively sane and calmly prepared. It starts (generally) on the Sunday before the Labor Day weekend, which was yesterday, so here we are! It’s HHP time!
I have never followed the plan all the way through to the end. Never, in over twenty years. But that doesn’t stop me from starting up with it every single year! I enjoy whatever work I’m able to get done with its help and I love me any excuse to start working on holiday things as early as possible.
In the interest of trying to motivate me to achieve that impossible dream of following this plan through to the absolute end, I’m going to blog about it. Public accountability works well for me.
Week #1 is Planning & Paperwork Week.
The cleaning focus is the home office, and the holiday prep focus is setting up for this year’s HHP.
Week #1 Cleaning Checklist: Office
Declutter and clean the home office and any paper handling areas.
Set up (or refresh) your household filing system.
Week #1 Holiday Prep Checklist:
Set up your Christmas binder.
My husband used ChatGPT to create the little banner at the top of this post, and now there’s a new planner cover to match:
Complete the Holiday Values Worksheet to figure out what you’d like to focus on during this year’s holiday season. (Click here for the PDF) Note: Cynthia Townley Ewer wrote this and I completely copied it for myself.
Create a Christmas planning activity center.
I’m planning to use my dining room table this year. We don’t use the dining room a whole lot, so I figure I might as well use the empty space for this festive fun! I do worry because it’s one of the first rooms you see when you walk into my house, but anyone who would bother visiting me already knows I’m a Christmas junkie, so it’ll be fine.
I have a rolling cart specifically earmarked for Christmas stuff, so it’s been moved into the dining room to live up to its intended purposes.
I’m thinking of setting up a second sewing machine and/or crafting area on the dining room table so that I can pop in and work on things for a few minutes at a time when I’m making dinner. There’s often minutes of waiting involved when cooking and I’ve gotten into the nasty habit of scrolling on my phone during that time. It’d be WAY BETTER if I got two minutes of stitching here and twelve minutes of stitching in there. I can’t hear the oven timer at all from the craft room and I often forget to set an actual timer on my phone to take to the craft room, so another crafty location near the kitchen would be awesome. And it’s just fun!
With that in mind, what project(s) do I want to earmark for the dining room table? Can’t be cutting heavy because I do not want to set up a cutting station in the dining room.
Even though the HHP plans begins on a Sunday, I like to run mine from Monday through Sunday so I can use the weekend to finish up the week’s tasks. It’s my hope to check in each Monday with my HHP progress! Feel free to join in if it sounds like a good idea to you! I’d love to have more Christmas-obsessed buddies in my circle!
Well, as far as I’m concerned, summer is pretty much over. I keep my patriotic summery decorations up through September 11th, and then it’ll be full-on autumn here in Brooketopia.
Smitten English Paper Piecing Quilt
I gave my knee another week of rest, just to be safe, and spent my creative time working on the Smitten Quilt. I am thisclose to being done with attaching all the rows into one cohesive quilt top! So exciting!
Then I’ll need to attach the side triangles and two borders and the top will be complete. I am hoping to hand-quilt this one, so I talked to Renaissance and Rachel about the idea of me setting it up in the TV Room so that anyone could put some stitches in when they pleased and the two of them were intrigued. Fingers crossed, it would speed up the process and I love the idea of all of us quilting it together.
Rachel came downstairs one day while I had the two halves of the Smitten quilt laid out on the TV Room’s floor and immediately yelled out, “PLAGIARISM!” and ran out of the room. I yelled that it wasn’t plagiarism because I started sewing my Smitten quilt years before she started sewing hers, to which she replied, “I’m the one committing plagiarism!” as she dashed up the stairs to the craft room. Turns out she really liked one of my blocks and decided to shamelessly copy it in her own Smitten quilt. Ha ha.
I don’t know if I’ll keep pushing forward with this in the upcoming week, but it would be smart if I did!
Husband Christmas Socks
I put in some solid effort on them this week and I’m so close to starting the heel! I think I have like two rows left to knit before I start the heel. Woo hoo!
Back-to-School
It’s upon us and I’m about to get pretty busy with band shenanigans. We held an ice cream social during this last week and it was attended pretty well. It’s the first time we’ve done something like ahead of the school year, so I’m hoping it was enough of a success to warrant repeating it in future years.
House & Holidays Plan
It’s here! It’s here! Today is the start of the 2026 House & Holidays Plan! I can finally let all my Christmas joy explode out into the world and rain down like confetti throughout the house! I’m toying with the idea of creating a separate series of posts for this this year because I really like the idea of hunkering and going all in on this. I’ve dabbled with the HHP since 2004, never really ever finishing it completely, and I appreciate the ways it prepares and organizes my holiday season. Every year I go big in the first few weeks and then lose interest, so we’ll see how long I can keep it up this year.
Week #1 is “Planning and Paperwork,” which has me cleaning up the office areas and establishing my Christmas Activity Center. I’m hoping to start working on that once I publish this post.
Farewell, Summer
So we’re buttoning up summer and getting ready to immerse ourselves into autumn. Aren’t seasons just the best?!?! I love that the landscape just changes for funsies throughout the year. Enjoy this last week of real summer, seeing that next weekend is Labor Day and everything will become orange and pumpkin spice the morning after.
No complaints here, but I’m trying to be responsible until then and remain present in the moment and the moment is summer. Wish me luck!
Hello lovelies! We’re already at the last full week of August! This summer flew by at such a clip! I’ve been fighting the back-to-school vibes and the alluring pull of autumn season-core, but I grow weary of the battle and will soon concede to the apple and pumpkin overlords. I got a big ol’ hit of yearning for all things fall yesterday, and actually felt excitement about it, rather than dread and overwhelm. I’m glad we’ve been trying to fit in everything watermelon and corn on the cob these past few weeks because it’s felt like a good final embrace of late summer.
Rachel’s Graduation Signature Quilt
Shout out to my dear friend Chrissy for saving the day so I could keep sewing this week! My printer is out of magenta ink, so it won’t print ANYTHING AT ALL. I designed these pencil crayon quilt blocks for the front of Rachel’s quilt and wanted to do them using foundation paper piecing, but couldn’t print the papers and it was going to cost $30 to print them at FedEx Kinko’s, which I wasn’t willing to spend. So I reached out to my friend at 8:45 on Sunday night and asked if she could print them, and she said to head on over. Who cares if she was packing to leave on a camping trip the following morning?! She had my back. And then we shared the hot goss in her driveway for an hour while slapping at mosquitoes biting our ankles. Excellent summer fun. Five stars.
I was able to get a good start on these blocks on Monday morning and was really cruising along until I wasn’t. I have the pencil crayon tips mostly completed, but then something started pulling in my knee early in the week and I’ve been resting and babying it since. I’ve been lucky that I’ve not had knee injuries, partly because I’m terrified of them, so I shut everything down anytime I feel anything amiss in those precious joints. Rest seems to be doing some good, so we might be ok. I tried stretching them a bit this morning and they’re cranky again, so I’ll probably keep things light this week, just to be extra safe.
I sew standing up. My back couldn’t handle the motion of getting up from a chair very well after my back surgery, and I found standing while sewing meant less pain for me, so that’s how I’ve been doing it for many years. I might try setting up my machine at some sort of table temporarily and see if it lessens the pressure on my knees for a couple of weeks. Maybe my back is finally strong enough to sew like a normal person again? I guess we’ll find out!
Husband Christmas Socks
I am doing really well on these! I’d say I’m at least halfway, if not two-thirds to three-quarters of the way done with the leg of the second sock.
I started a new thing this week: Listening to an audiobook while knitting. It’s pretty awesome and I really recommend it. I don’t like audiobooks whatsoever; I am not strong in the audio processing department and prefer visual anything over listening to it, so it’s a big surprise to me that this new experiment actually went well. Apparently knitting may be the missing link between my brain and the spoken word?
We’ll see if it sticks, though–this was the last week of the weird summer training schedule for The Boy, and I won’t need to stick around at his practices for an hour each morning anymore. Hopefully I can still find time to knit each day when I’m no longer forced to wait around for him.
Summer Band Concerts
YOU. GUYS. Renaissance joined a local community band and they just got done performing their series of summer concerts in the park and it was SO LOVELY. I went to every one and enjoyed them so much. The sun would set over the course of the concert and everything would end on that warm and fuzzy note of a perfect summer evening spent in a camp chair on the grass. Friends showed up to support her, too, and we’d chat between pieces, basking in the golden light and beautiful music. blissful sigh
I’m so glad she’s playing music again. I missed seeing her play in a band these past couple of years while she was busting her bootay to earn money to pay for pastry school.
Back-to-School Band Shenanigans
We’re getting close! I manned the Band Boosters table at Tip-off this last week and it was so nice to see everyone again. As luck would have it, my table was right next to the table handing out the school bus passes, so I could easily flag down freshman students as they left that table and ask if they were in band. I was able to meet and greet A LOT of the incoming freshman band babies and their families, so it was a very good day. It’s going to be a fun year with the band, I can’t wait! I’m so glad I still have an excuse to go to the high school football games, even if I don’t have a football player in our home; it’s just such an autumn thing that I love so much. There are few things that feel more like autumn to me than a Friday night football game, the pep band playing in the stands, and our community cheering on its youngsters.
Awaiting the Apples and Preparing for Pumpkins
I didn’t do any of the things I was thinking of doing in the garden. There’s still time, but I’m starting to doubt any of it is going to happen. My cranky knee made things difficult and gardening tends to be hard on the feet and legs. We did enjoy some homemade watermelon sorbet, though, which is peak “August in a bowl.” I might try to sneak in a batch of strawberry ice cream this week, just for the sake of savoring the last days of summer.
The Ward Activities Committee had its end of the year planning meeting this morning and we talked all about sunflowers, apples, pumpkins and Christmas, so the autumn and Christmas vibes are definitely getting their little feet through the door. I also had dinner with my aunt and granny a few nights ago and I might set up a crafting project to do with my granny sometime this fall, which I think would be so awesome.
Dinner prep calls. Happy last week of August, friends!
It’s that blissful time of year when we spend quiet time at home tending to whatever happens to strike my fancy. Mornings are spent in the yard, talking to my little hummingbird friend when he hovers two feet away from my face while I’m drinking my morning tisane, and the sultry afternoons are spent in the craft room in air conditioned splendor. The squawking baby birds have flown from their nest tucked in the eaves of my neighbor’s porch, and I am low-key struggling to find new ways to get my family to eat ripe tomatoes and zucchini. I love late summer.
Rachel’s Graduation Signature Quilt
I was able to spend more time on this in the last week and the backing is almost completely done! As predicted, I ran out of the outer border fabric. I went to my local quilt shop to buy more, but they didn’t have any, so I put in an order at Fat Quarter Shop and it should be here next Saturday.
I shifted to working on the quilt front, which will be made from Riley Blake Confetti Cotton Solids that match the Crayola fabric I’m using on the back. I’m almost done cutting that fabric; hopefully I can piece the top this coming week? (Let’s be realistic, it’ll probably take three weeks…I don’t know why, but that’s just how things go in real life.)
Renaissance and I have been spending a lot of time together this summer, which has been awesome; we’ve even started watching movies and shows in the evenings in the craft room. That has been a big reason for the sudden action on Rachel’s quilt. I love this time with my girl. She works on her little projects, I work on mine, and we laugh at whatever we’re watching together. Most of the time we talk very little; it’s just nice to have another heartbeat in the room with me. I know I’ll cherish this extra time with her when I look back on this chapter.
Husband Christmas Socks
I did a lot of work on these this past week. These are the most complicated socks I’ve ever made (which isn’t saying much) and I am very proud of them. I think Michael will be very pleased with them on Christmas morning. I’m about 15% done with second sock?
Gardening
I woke up yesterday morning with an inkling to spend time in the garden and try to tame the craziness that it’s become after two years of being allowed to lie fallow. I figure, I may not get much out of it this year, but I can clean it up and it get prepped for an easier start next spring? That should work, right? Ha ha.
I came across a cute little bird’s nest tucked beneath the rhubarb stalks:
I have a cherry tomato plant that is sluggishly growing some tomatoes, and my container blackberry and raspberry plants actually produced a couple bowlfuls of berries in the past weeks. Not terrible for the zero amount of effort I put into them throughout the season.
According to my previous years’ notes, I could still sow some spinach, beets, turnips, and radishes for a little fall harvest. I’ve missed the date to sow carrots by a week or so, but I’m tempted to give them a go anyways. Wouldn’t it be lovely to get a little bit of produce out of this neglected garden before winter arrives?
I’m thinking about moving my blackberries or raspberries into the area of my garden where I usually grow beans. I think it’d benefit our family far more to grow berries than beans because we straight up like berries better and can’t get enough of them, while nobody around here is particularly passionate about beans. It seems like picking sugar over substance, though, so I’m having a somewhat Victorian moral dilemma over it all. I guess beans can grow the containers I currently have the raspberries in, so a swap wouldn’t be the end of the world…hmmm. It might not be the ethical quandary I’m turning it into in my head.
Autumn Approaches
I’m refusing to give space to autumn just yet. We’ve been so busy this summer that I haven’t felt like we’ve really gotten our share of the season! Hopefully we can find some meaningful ways to stretch out fully into these last days of summer break and be fully re-energized before school starts up again.
Methinks some homemade ice cream needs to happen, yes?
Things are finally calming down around here; I feel like I can actually check in this week, which is AWESOME. I love me some good ol’ dog days of summer when we can just putter around the house!
Rachel’s Graduation Signature Quilt
I managed a few hours in the craft room this week, mostly due to the bad air quality provided by the wildfires in our region—many outdoor activities were cancelled on account of the smoke, so I spent my unexpectedly freed-up time working on Rachel’s graduation quilt.
I am happy to report that the signature blocks are complete and assembled together. I next need to attach two borders. However, the original plan for this quilt was that the signature blocks would be the front of the quilt and then I’d use a simple backing. But now I’m going to use the signature blocks as the backing of the quilt, so the outermost border will need the extra four inches on each side for the quilt backing, and because of that extra four inches, I do not have enough of the fabric I’m planning to use for that border. I’ll need to hunt some down, oh dearie me! I think I actually saw a bolt of the fabric in one of my local quilt shops a couple months back, so I guess another visit in order, and soon.
Once those borders are in place, or while I am waiting to secure more of the outer border fabric, I will start working on the new front of the quilt. I do have the fabric for that. I also ended up with too many signature blocks, so some will be worked into the design of the front of the quilt, too.
Husband Christmas Socks
More time went into knitting these this week as well, yay!
I made the mistake of using some waiting-in-the-car time to work on them with the windows down, and eek, I had a raging headache from the smoky air within ten minutes.
I’m so glad from the temporary reprieve from the smoke, but it looks like the air quality will go back to yucky in the next week. I’m all for finding silver linings in challenges, so I am thankful when I get some free time due to cancelled activities, but it feels wrong to be getting so much personal good out of so much widespread destruction. I would happily give up the extra time to sew if it meant we got a miracle storm of rain to squelch out all these horrible fires.
July was busy, too; mostly with driving people places and trying to adjust to the different activities that summer brings. Good weather makes it difficult to stay indoors as well.
Debrief: July’s #craftygoals:
Rachel’s Graduation Signature Quilt: There has been progress. All signature blocks have at least two of their four borders.
Husband Christmas Socks: Finished the first one! (It looks SO GOOD!) I’m only on the ribbing of the second one.
August #craftygoals:
Rachel’s Graduation Signature Quilt: I know myself. If I move off of this project before it’s done, it will languish. So I am not going to make goals for any other project, besides the Husband Christmas Socks, until this quilt is completely finished. Summer is a hard time to find crafty time, so I’m just hoping to get some work done on this; it was silly to think I’d finish it last month, but here we are.
Husband Christmas Socks: I’m just going to keep trying to find thirty minutes a day to work on them.
If I manage to finish Rachel’s graduation quilt, I’ve promised myself I can jump back into working on the Fat Quarter Shop Sewcialites 3 sew along. But not before.
Kind of a boring update, but there it is. Enjoy these last days of summer! Being in Washington State means we don’t start school until later than most, so we’ve still got a good month of summer vacation to enjoy, and I do mean to enjoy it as much as possible, preferably outdoors because the winters here are gray and wet and very indoor activity-oriented and I feel like I’m going to lose my mind by the time February rolls around. You have to balance that part of the year out with by using the summer months to engage in a frenzied amount of watching the sunrise while walking through the woods and eating dinner in the backyard until it gets too chilly to stay outside anymore. Doesn’t leave a lot of time for the craft room. How I manage to forget that every year is baffling. 😉
Welcome to Full-on Summer, otherwise known as July! Whew! You guys, the Brookes were very, very busy in the month of June; I’m so glad I didn’t make any actual crafty goals for the month because there simply wasn’t any time available for crafting.
Debrief: June 2026 #craftygoals:
Graduation: Rachel is officially graduated from high school! I love graduations so much; the only celebrations I love more are weddings and babies. These life milestones are so special, and I try hard to make sure that they feel extra special for the individuals involved. I made a cute artsy ribbon lei for her and music note lei for one of her friends in the band because I think she’s awesome, and we threw a big ol’ graduation party as well. So much work! But everything went well and the party was well attended, so I’m satisfied.
Summer Plans: Well…sadly, my husband’s mother passed away the day before Rachel’s graduation ceremony. June 2026 was all about graduation plans and funeral plans. Once graduation was done and dusted, I pivoted immediately into funeral trip preparation. I was also invited to sing at the funeral, so I spent the weeks leading up to it feverishly transcribing (finally) a song I’ve been working on for years and working with Renaissance to write a flute part so she could be a part of it, too. I’m happy to report that it went well. With all of that going on, it’s easy to understand why summer planning has not happened yet.
July 2026 #craftygoals:
Time-Sensitive Things That Need Working on ASAP:
Graduation Quilts: All the signature blocks have been collected, so it’s time to start piecing! It’d be really great to get Rachel’s quilt completely done this month, but it will probably take longer than that, much to the dismay of the many people in our circles who have become (in their own words) obsessively invested in the final outcome of her quilt. Hey, if peer pressure helps you move forward with positive, productive things, then put that peer pressure in the driver’s seat and let it motivate you to push towards the finish line! (Looking at this in a realistic light, I think there’s a good chance I can pull off getting both of the flimsies complete in July.)
I am not sure when I’m going to get to Renaissance’s graduation quilt, though. With the realization that I want to put the signatures on the back of the quilt, I now need to create an entirely new quilt for the front of the quilt. As luck would have it, I just purchased a pattern not too long ago to make for her “someday,” but it’s a bit involved. I might work on a “palate cleanser” project once I finish Rachel’s grad quilt and before I get going on Ren’s again. I want to finish Ren’s grad quilt before the end of this year, though, that is a definite goal.
Sewcialites 3 Sew Along: I knew June would be busy and I’d fall behind on this, so I’m not panicking, but it is a goal to get caught back up with my blocks in the upcoming month. It’s just NINE blocks, no big deal…ha ha ha. I guess I’ll shoot for three per week. Oh, man…
Things to Work on After the ASAP Projects:
Machine Stitching:
Rainbow Coin Strip Quilt: The binding is done and Emily even slept under it when she was here for Rachel’s graduation. The label is not done yet, and I got it into my head to make a complicated label, so I’m working on piecing the label during my self-imposed mandatory 15 minutes of “Finishing Time” at the start of every work session in the craft room. It’s possible to get this done this month and do a legit photoshoot and all, but I can also see this label taking longer than that. Hopefully it all gets finished this month.
Baby Quilt: A friend is pregnant! There’s a baby on the way! Yay for babies!!! I’m trying to decide on the direction I want to go with this—I have a flimsy already made, the “Best Friends Farm Wonky Stars” quilt from during my Blank Quilting ambassador days, that would work beautifully, but I feel guilty re-purposing something I already made? That guilt is silly, right? If I decide to go with the partially-made quilt, I’d like to have it basted by the end of the month. If I decide to make a new quilt from scratch, I will need to decide on my pattern and acquire the fabric by the end of the month. As I write my options down and look out upon the expanse of projects waiting for my schedule to open up so I can work on them, I’m leaning heavily towards using the already-existing flimsy.
Hand Stitching:
English Paper Piecing: Get as much work done as possible on Smitten. It’s HOT in the craft room in the summer, so hand-piecing is perfect for this weather. I should set a daily stitching time goal for this. Fifteen to thirty minutes a day or something. We’re in the slog of it; I just need to sit my butt in the chair and stitch and it’ll be over faster.
Knitting: I usually work on the Husband Christmas Socks in secret, but I am much further behind on them this year than I normally am, so I’m going to talk about them because publicly shaming myself works for me. I try to have the Husband Christmas Socks done by the Fourth of July so they don’t hang over me, but here we are, almost at the Fourth of July, and I’m only about two-thirds done with the FIRST sock. Eek! The situation isn’t dire, obviously, but some heat needs to be applied. I’ve been working on them for fifteen minutes a day for some months now, but I guess I need to bump it up to thirty minutes until they’re done. It’d be great to finish them up by the end of the month, but a practical goal would be finish the first sock and get to the heel of the second sock? That’s actually a little ambitious, but possibly doable. I have some other socks I’d like to knit up as gifts this year, so being behind on this is annoying to my Christmas junkie senses.
Embroidery: None for this month. But it is July and hand stitching is lovely in the summer, so hopefully I get through my projects so I can visit some embroidery projects. There’s nothing like sipping lemonade and embroidering in the garden while the bees buzz in the lavender plants.
Summary of July’s Crafty Goals:
Rachel’s Graduation Quilt: Finish both the signature back flimsy AND the pencil crayon top flimsy.
FQS Sewcialites 3: Sew up blocks #15-23. (3 per week.)
Rainbow Coin Strip Quilt: Finish the label, photoshoot, blog post.
Riley Blake Designs’ Block Challenge Quilt: Sew up six chevron blocks.
Wonky Stars Baby Quilt: Baste. (Do I need to secure a backing and batting?)
Smitten EPP Quilt: 30 minutes of stitching a day.
Husband Christmas Socks: 30 minutes of stitching a day.
Embroidery: Indulge in some summer garden stitching on Sunday afternoons and soak in the aesthetic.
That Crafty Cara 