Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that we’re halfway through the month, but it’s better to do the thing late than to not do the thing at all. And I really do love to read through my #craftygoals posts years later, so here we go.
Debrief: October 2025 #craftygoals:
Penguin Party Quilt: Coming along well. Really thought I’d have the top done by now, but life keeps interrupting. Life be like that.
Rainbow Coin Strip Quilt: Ha ha ha. I think I’m getting too old to have multiple projects in-progress anymore. I don’t think I even literally touched this quilt once.
Peppermint Blossoms EPP quilt: Some progress made, but I need to be honest with myself and admit that I’m just not feeling this anymore, so I should probably set it aside or figure out a way to make something from what I’ve already got prepared, like a pillow or table runner or something like that.
Christmas Alphabet Embroidery Sampler: This was not done at the end of October, but it’s done now!
November 2025 #craftygoals:
Time-Sensitive Things That Need Working on ASAP:
Daffodil Princess Dress: Rachel is running for Daffodil Princess this year, and the selection ceremony is coming up. As such, she needs a dress for it, which we have secured and, SHOCKING, it needs hemming. All I do is hem formal dresses for this kid! Ugh. It’s a very pretty dress, though, so at least I’m working on pretty things. It’d be torture if they were ugly dresses. And this dress doesn’t have five skirts like that one prom dress at one point. That was pretty torturous, that one. So, hemming…STAT.
Things to Work on After the ASAP Projects:
Machine Stitching:
Penguin Party Quilt: So close. Really, really hoping the top is done and I’ve got this bad boy in the mail to the quilter by the end of the month.
Rachel’s Gingerbread Christmas Quilt: Prewash the fabric, maybe get some of the cutting done? I don’t know if I’m going to make it to working on this quilt in November.
Hand Stitching:
English Paper Piecing: I don’t know what I want to do here. I might take a break and focus on knitting instead.
Knitting: I want to knit some Christmas tree ornaments. I cast on a Churchmouse Woolly Wee Sheep today, so I think I’ll focus on making those for the next couple of weeks.
Embroidery: Get the Christmas Alphabet Embroidery Sampler framed.
There’s not a lot of November left, and Christmas prep is surging forward, so we’ll see how much we get done on these goals! Wish me luck!
This one’s going to take a very long time. I spent some time in the past week figuring out numbers for it and I think I’m going to end up needing 50 full blossoms and 10 half blossoms, plus whatever insane number of background triangles and diamonds that I’ll math out later. As of today, I have 8 red blossoms and 7 green blossoms complete. Only 35 to go…
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This project is my current crafting-in-the-van project that gets worked on whenever I’m waiting for kids’ practices to get over and when I’m sitting at church during Mutual because I don’t want to drive back home just to turn around half an hour later to come back and pick them up. Progress is slow on this, but I can usually knock out a full blossom a week now that I’m working on it during Mutual.
I also need to cut out more white jewel pieces for this quilt—113 more, actually. Yikes.
And here’s the Christmas Alphabet Embroidery Sampler:
The Ziploc bag that it’s stored in says it’s from ~2005, so this project is pretty ancient. I think I bought the pattern shortly after we bought our first home and before I got pregnant with Renaissance. I was leaning towards a primitive and folksy decor look, but decided later that it really wasn’t for me. (That, and my house was decorated in “homeschooling chic” out of necessity for the stage of life we were in, lol.)
I’ve been granting myself some “Whimsical Days” each month to work ahead on upcoming holidays and celebrations when my heart desires it, and I found myself wishing I had a slow stitching Christmas project to pick up on my Christmas days, so I unearthed this and have been putting in work on it while watching movies. I’m not worried about when this will be finished; it’s just fun to work on. Maybe it’ll be ready for this year’s Christmas, maybe it won’t.
But I like to keep track of progress, so this guy is at 12 blocks out of 26, which is ~46%, and we’ll subtract 5% from that to account for the border that will need to be stitched at the end, so 41% done.
And I just noticed that the pattern itself has a 2006 copyright, so I imagine I actually started working on this in 2006. I do love that fabric and yarn will wait for you!
Hopefully you’re able to find some slow stitching time on this beautiful Sunday! The weather is blustery here and so perfect for some down time with needle and thread.
It’s November, and right on schedule, it’s raining like crazy today. It’s pretty rain at this point—the brightness of the colorful leaves creates an impressionistic feel to the landscape, so at least we have that.
Top priorities this past week:
Halloween celebrating & traditions
Band Fundraiser Table Runners
Scheduling special musical performances for November
Finding a pianist for the Christmas program
Make some headway on the secret Christmas knitting
Rest when I’m tired or hurting
Celebrating
Halloween was fun this year. Not a lot of fuss, but Renaissance and I did manage to create our traditional chili in pumpkin bread bowls, which I wasn’t too sure was going to happen. She invited her friends over for another Halloween feast before Trick or Treating started, despite that they’re all adults now that don’t do Trick or Treating, and they hung out afterwards playing video games together and taking breaks to hunt down Rachel and Nathaniel in the neighborhood to jump scare them with light sabers. As one does…
I was a little sad going into Halloween this year because Ren and her friends have grown up and I was worried about Rachel and Nathaniel not having a group to go Trick or Treating with, but they put the word out that we live in a great neighborhood for Trick or Treating and some of their friends decided to come on over to do that here. It was nice. I love the chaos of having a gaggle of teenagers in my house on Halloween night. Absolutely love it—peak motherhood aspirations there.
So Halloween is over, and with that comes Christmas. I absolutely turned on Christmas music this morning as I worked in the craft room!
And spare me your “Christmas shouldn’t start before Thanksgiving” sentiments: I’m Canadian; I grew up with Thanksgiving taking place in early October, so my internal Christmas countdown was programmed in childhood to start once Halloween was over and I’m not going to reset it ever because more time in Christmas Town is AWESOME. I take the requisite days off from Christmas prep to do a proper job on American Thanksgiving, and we are very grateful people who are capable of exuding a thankful attitude even while decorating for Christmas. I know, it may be shocking that such people exist, but we do! Everything is OK, gratitude will continue to exist in our home despite the appearance of red and green before Thanksgiving. If you’re a person who doesn’t do Christmas until after American Thanksgiving, cool. You do you. But do not come in here demanding that the only correct way to celebrate the holidays is how you do it. Because that is blatantly incorrect.
And further more, how do you think Christmas music happens? Do you think musicians wait until after American Thanksgiving to start practicing that stuff? Of course they don’t! Big preparations take time, and there is not a lot of time between American Thanksgiving and Christmas. Sorry/not sorry to pop your bubble on this concept, but many musicians start practicing their Christmas music in October, even September. I started planning and purchasing Christmas sheet music in August. That’s how Christmas music happens—that far in advance. Just be thankful (hey, there’s that gratitude word!) that there are people who want to shower others with so much Christmas cheer that they’ll voluntarily give up their time very early on in order to prepare for Christmas, rather than pointing fingers and snidely alluding that the Early Christmas Cheer people are materialistic gimme pigs. We’re actually spending more time in service to others by getting the Christmas Town Express going early, and that’s…decidedly unmaterialistic, right?
/soapbox (I’m so tired of this argument that, really, shouldn’t even exist.)
Creating
I have found time to start working on the Band Fundraiser table runners this week. I’ve got most of the fabric cut up and I’ve ironed what I have on-hand and have done the first round of sewing on one (1) table runner. I hope the future organizers of this event don’t get tired of the table runners and get rid of them in a few years. They’re turning out quite nice and could potentially last for years if they’re treated well.
I made a little bit of progress on the secret Christmas knitting, too.
Community
I am hitting some major walls with church music. I shall remain optimistic through this weekend and if things don’t sort themselves out I’m going to have to alter my plans. Once again, but for a different crowd this time, how do you think Christmas music happens? A big part of that is people being willing to be a part of church choir. If you’ve ever wondered about joining your church’s choir, stop wondering and just do it. We’re desperate for you. DESPERATE.
Healing
I’m almost there, I can feel it. I yo-yo back and forth between overdoing it and needing to take time to rest from the overdoing, which is always a good sign that points towards a “nearing full recovery” kind of thing. I’m glad I wrote about it this time around so I can look back and see the glacial pace and know that it’s completely normal. Six weeks of inactivity is a really long time. You don’t think it is when people throw that timeline around, but laying around for that long is mind-numbingly boring. I guess I should be thankful that I’m feeling like bursting my prison right as Christmas Season begins. What a glorious reward!
Highlights
Halloween was noisy and fun. I love hosting all these kids at our house.
I made a beautiful pumpkin soup this week that was so delicious.
The best idea came to me at church: At the end of each month, sit down with your spouse and schedule all your weekly date nights for the entire next month. So simple, but it’s literally never occurred to me. When I approached Michael with the idea, he improved it by saying we could align our four dates each month with the four goal-setting areas of the Church’s youth program in order to expand our horizons a little more. So, a date night dedicated to 1) Spiritual, 2) Intellectual, 3) Physical, and 4) Social pursuits each month. In months with five Fridays we’ll have a family date, which are the most expensive dates of them all, but you know, kids deserve some fun times out with their parents, too.
Lowlights
Renaissance got her car stuck in the mud when she went out with friends to a haunted house this last week. Thankfully, Michael came to her rescue. Where would we be without good dads?
That Crafty Cara 