fred_mouse

I've already started this one - as part of the task gathering I managed to motivate myself nicely.

The overall goal is to finish some craft projects. Lots of craft projects would be nice. Tentatively, to have fewer craft projects at the end, although given that there is a long queue of projects that I have materials for that haven't been captured, that might not be realistic.

So, what do I have in mind? I've listed 18 projects that I've progressed already at some point in 2025, plus 12 that I'm aware of that are stalled (ie. started but I haven't touched this year). I have at least one other list that I haven't looked through, and maybe I'll look at that, and maybe I won't. 30 projects is a nice number. I'm going to go for finishing 10. Because it is also a nice round number, and is 'some' but nothing as optimistic as 'at least half'.

The projects themselves are a right mix. Of the 18 in progress, there are four projects that involve crochet, two knitting, and three that are entirely virtual. One of the virtual ones cannot be finished in the time space, because it isn't that kind of project. Of the stalled, three are home renovations, two are quilts. The rest are a right mishmash and I'm not going to attempt to quantify.

Oh, and I have a list of eight 'new' projects that I could start, if I get bored with the list I have. These are specifically projects that I have on hand, and I believe I have the materials for. Several are quilts.

For the in progress, most of the stalled, and a very small proportion of the new, I have an itemised list of things that might be done. They aren't prescriptive, except in the case of things like 'finish the current row' and 'sew in all the ends' (there are so many ends to be sewn in in my future).

I'm tracking this offline, in a document that has all the details, including colour coding for planned, in progress, done, and abandoned (eg. in 'work through some of my how to draw' books, two of the three I picked are marked as abandoned). Daily notes of what I did are being made, although I don't intend to refer to them later. I also don't intend to make regular updates here. But I'm doing the thing, and it has been motivating, and I'll have something to show for it later.

As a follow on from the Virtually BeQuilted, an end of year table runner exchange was set up. This was a smaller group, but also included a couple of new people (one each from the UK and Germany, if I remember correctly - the Virtually BeQuilted was all local, word of mouth, two-degrees of separation).

The first step was to provide some guidelines/inspiration for the person who was going to be creating your gift. I don't remember exactly what everyone else did - I know that we were pointed towards a mosaic generator (http://www.bighugelabs.com/), so I wandered around the house and took pictures of my favourite things, and fed them in to the mosaic maker:



[description: six by five grid of house hold images, including shoes, a violin in case, kitchen cabinets, assorted decorative kitchen ware, hats, and an ostrich feather duster. Colours are mostly in the autumn range, woods are mostly jarrah].

(individual images from the mosaic are in the relevant flickr set)

 It's been a while since I did anything on writing up my craft challenges, probably because the last one was overly optimistic, and I got horribly overwhelmed. 

I wanted to finish something from Craft Challenge 1 - which I have done. The red quilt, which was a gift for transcendancing, has been completely, delivered, and photographed. It is possible that I will in fact put up photos at some point, but I'm not making promises. The hall bench cover was finished, although the slipcover hasn't yet been started. In addition, the shirt for middlest is up to buttonholes. They would be done, but with the new machine, 3/6 buttonholes worked the way I wanted. Which means that I have to go and un pick and redo the problems. 

I also wanted to finish something from Craft Challenge 2 - I managed to deal with the library thing tagging of location on shelf, although I need to go through and see where books have slipped through the system. Fortunately, the ability to search for everything minus a particular substring is working in my favour. 

I planed to read at least three books from my 'been meaning to read those for a while' pile. I definitely finished 2, plus one SF&F magazine, but I don't think I've read any more. One is 'The Windup Girl', which the thought of finishing makes me queasy, so I might just return it to its owner. 

And I had a list of new stuff, of which I wanted to do at least one - I've done the quilting on the star quilt. In fact, this week, I've also done half the putting of the border on that same quilt. 

I did manage to take the kids to Adventure World, but probably not as often as I would have liked. As they get older, and are more able to look after themselves, I might consider getting them season passes again. However, youngest needed supervision, and I got very tired very quickly. That on top of not usually being able to get a locker (and $8 for a locker is pretty steep) and I wasn't very motivated.

I didn't read as much of the stats book as I would have liked - this is a standard problem. 

Other things have also been done - the kitchen floor got painted; I finished another crochet blanket (starting with blocks acquired from someone else that weren't enough for a complete rug); I've read quite a lot of books (and reviewed a few of them on this blog).