January "pretty projects"

I'd like to think I can work on sewing and crafts every single day for a month, and maybe I'll be able to later this year or at another phase of life. Right now, my daughters are not particularly cooperative with letting me work on things during the day so I have to sew late at night. Even that's a hit and miss because I have punk children who refuse to go to sleep until darn near midnight sometimes. So I'm going with doing something pretty for my house and life every week for this year. Hopefully I can finish something every week, but as long as I at least work on it, I'll be satisfied. So here's what happened in January.

Project 1: hook racks for behind the girls' bedroom door. They were scrap pieces of wood left from making their bunkbed 2 years ago. I painted them and got the little hooks at Walmart. I made others here for their coats, which are under the stairs. Mindy beat me for the first project done for the year because even though I had them painted, it took me awhile longer to get to the store for the hooks, and get them actually onto the wall. This is just one of them, but there are three.

Project 2: I went through ALL of the children's books and reorganized the whole bunch. There are hundreds. An entire box went to the recycle bin because it was random loose pages, torn up books, children's magazines that had been pulled all apart ... it was a mess. It's still a mess because the girls are constantly pulling books out and not putting them away, but at least it's less of a mess. All the trash has been cleared out - that alone made a big difference. It wasn't making something - it was organizing stuff we already have. But occasional organizing projects are necessary to keeping my house livable at all, if not more pretty.

Project 3: I started my quilting class and made a scallop banner thing to hang up over a window or doorway or something - this is also my January project for the 12 Months of Christmas because I made it out of Christmas fabric.

Weeks 4 and 5: Nada - we were out of town for a week for my mother-in-law's funeral, and the next week was spent unpacking and putting the house back together. Why does it take so long to get cleaned up from a trip? It was just unpacking suitcases, for pity's sake. Sheesh. Anyway, I need to rewind back to the of my quilting class (it's all online and self-paced so I can do that - hooray! because it's, um, over now) and I want to get back on track with that at least a little bit. It's a 5-week class with 3 projects per week - it's not expected that you do everything. You can choose. I'd like to at least try everything since I paid for all the lessons and patterns but it's going to take me the better part of the year rather than just a month. Some of the projects are pretty substantial and require quite a bit of time (making more than one full-sized quilt, if I'm reading it right), and I don't have days at a time to devote to sewing. I have a few minutes here and there.

And for my weekly project deal ... I will make up these 2 weeks of missed projects! I will! Maybe not in February because of being at the very end of the pregnancy, but I'll figure it out eventually.

Also - going through everything from someone's life was an major eye-opener on what to save and what not to save. For example, photos. If Nancy wasn't actually in a photo, we chucked it. We had no idea who these people were, and the photos had been sitting in a box for literally decades. I have no interest in hauling things like that around when we move, or leaving it to my children and grandchildren to say after I die, "Who is this person, and why did Mom have a photo of them?" If there's a reason for me to have someone's photo, I'm sure I can find something that has me in the shot with them, and I need to journal/ID everything now (before I forget myself) of why this person is/was significant to me. I did a big photo album sort and purge 2 years ago when my parents brought me all the stuff I'd had stashed in their storage room for 7 years, but I feel another one coming on.