This & That

Keeping My Hands Busy

It's been a while since I've posted about keeping my hands busy. Lately, it's been mostly family and outside stuff. We'll be wandering in the yard and garden a bit soon. A lot of this has happened just this past week as my husband has been on an adventure, which freed me up to get some unfinished projects done.

I did take the non-jelly jelly and put it back into a pot with another package of pectin. While it's ever so slightly thicker than the syrup we started with, it doesn't qualify as jelly. I guess I won't be trying that again.

I changed up my planner system. Every time I settle into a planner system, I firmly believe it's what I'm going to use forever.....until it isn't. I wasn't looking to do this necessarily, but this new system has pages for extensive meal planning with inventory lists and the like, which appeals to my meal planning nature. What doesn't appeal to my planner-oriented personality is the fact that I have half the year in one system and half the year in another. It definitely messes with my matchy-matchy preference and makes me a little twitchy if I think about it too long. I'm trying desperately to lalalalalalala my way through and be flexible like my family is always telling me I need to be. I hate that word.

I finished a quilt block. 

I also finally finished off a card kit.

Life has been such that this particular kit has sat on my craft table since before I was hospitalized in February. 

I got 14 cards out of this one.

It honestly felt good to do something creative, and those butterflies and all the flowers are very old stash items, so yay me.

I've been doing a little Project Life catch up in spare moments. 

I'm current getting all the pictures put into templates, but need to get the journaling caught up. 

 

Keeping My Hands Busy Post Holiday

After being sick at Christmas, 2 weeks tending grandkids, and working our way through Covid, I had a little time to work on projects that have been sitting on the work table for a while, starting with this one.

The pattern was originally to be finished as a pincushion, but I decided to keep it flat and attach it to a small clipboard for display. It's hard to see, but the clusters of white Colonial knots are sheep.

You'll see that I concentrated on projects that just needed a bit of finishing to be complete.

I seem to be in a bit of a sheep stage. 

This penny mat measures about 10"x12".

I'd started this card kit before the holiday, but things got hectic the closer we came to Christmas, as you might imagine.

It had a lot of pre-made die cuts that made embellishing cards very easy.

I had a good time mixing and matching for card fronts. I got a total of 18 cards of varying sizes,

including a few mini-slimline cards,

and some regular slimline cards, this one embossed and filled in with metallic watercolors.

I'm working my way through the last few weeks of the year with the Project Life app.

All of these stories have been told here on the blog, but it's always good to see the year's event unfold as I see the pages come together for the family yearbook.

One more week to put together and then I can place the order for the yearbook.

Keeping My Hands Busy this Month

Honestly, my hands have mostly been busy taking care of Christmas shopping. I'm close, but not finished. It's a big project, as you might guess from the size of my family.

I have, however, finished off an older Simon Says Stamp card kit. It had a lot of pre-made elements that I used,

and there were others on which I used things that were just a little more involved. I got an even dozen cards from the kit and they were done over a couple of week's time. A bit here and a bit there. It's just the time of year. Not a lot of crafting going on.

I'm pretty current putting pictures into templates for Project Life pages.

What I'm not quite caught up with, is the journaling.

These next few pages show what happens when I have gobs of pictures.

Another plus to using this system is that I can just add a couple of pages to the week's layout.

That was the case for the week of Halloween.

It will slip easily into the year book, as long as I keep things consistent. That is, if I'm doing 2 pages per week and I want to add more, I put in 2 more pages. If I only add 1, then I'd have to turn the page to get to the second half of the week, if that makes sense. That tweaks my ordered brain, so I just keep it the same.

This Year's Cackle & Craft

This year's Cackle & Craft happened at the cabin. It's a great place for us to get together and enjoy each other's company, and we all look forward to the concentrated time spent every year.

One of my sisters takes really beautiful pictures, so some of these are hers.

As an added, extra bonus, we had gorgeous weather. The first afternoon was hot, but after that, it was wonderfully temperate and even downright chilly, much to my delight. 

We did still have residual smoke from west coast fires hanging around, but after the first day it wasn't too much of an issue.

As always, there was delicious chick food galore. 

And crafting, because you can't have a Cackle & Craft without the crafting. One of my sisters brought a cute cross stitch project. Mine is almost done.

As usual, I brought cards to make. 

We split that up between 2 days so no one would get too burnt out.

My other sister will often bring a wood project with her, and I want you to take note of something here. Her sweet husband pre-cuts all the wood and pre-drills all the holes for us before wrapping everything carefully together into kits. He takes good care of us novices and we really appreciate the effort.

We got going with the staining,

and the drilling,

and TA-DA!! What are they you ask? They're blanket ladders! We...have made....blanket ladders! And we were just so proud of ourselves.

Just a little glimpse into the stage we're at right now, too. My mother is now 86, and we do notice some changes going on.

Since she lives in the same city as I do, I see them more than my siblings, but yes, there are changes. We are grateful for this yearly time to recharge and spend time as sisters and miss each other a lot in between those times.

Keeping My Hands Busy During June

A little bit of stitching and a little bit of crafting this month.

Starting with this UFO (unfinished object) from the last Cackle & Craft. Yep, cross it off the list of UFOs. One down......so many more to go.

I also finished off a few squares from the new ongoing project in the Primitive Gatherings wool boxes. 

The project will continue over the course of the next couple of years.

There are 4 new squares in each box that comes every other month. 

Beyond the title of the project.....Dragonfly Dreams....we have no idea how this will be finished.

All the squares are different, but I'm assuming there will be a quilt of some sort at the end of the process.

It's an interesting, very neutral color scheme, which is something I'd never gravitate toward if I was just walking into the quilt store to find a project. I guess for me that's the advantage of getting these boxes. I can try new techniques, stitches and colors I wouldn't consider. 

These block are a lot more labor-intensive than the previous long-term project....maybe you remember my little 6" squares of houses, birds and flowers. Yeah....another unfinished project as of this moment. These pieces finish 10" square, so you can see there's a lot more going on. I could finish a previous project's square in an evening or two. These take several days.

I also broke open a recent Simon Say Stamp card kit. In my opinion, this is one of the best kits they've put out.

The theme was dandelions and the patterned papers in the kit were just gorgeous, and at 8" square, were a little bigger than the usual 6" papers included in the kit. I tried out a mini-slimline design with a few of them.

With the larger paper size, I got 32 cards just using the patterned papers. I think that might be a record.

There was also a dimensional embossing folder included that I'm in the process of playing with, so another 6 cards will be added to that total when I get them done.

These were the first slimline cards I tried my hand making. It seemed like an awful lot of real estate at first, but the 8" papers were perfect for the fronts. Again, getting things pre-packaged like these kits helps me try new things I wouldn't necessarily try on my own.

And truth in advertising, you can see the photo board I photograph my cards and other projects on. I have several of these and they're just so handy for stuff like this.

Keeping My Hands Busy

It's been a long time since I had the time or inclination to stitch.

I finished off a couple of 6" block from Primitive Gatherings Everlasting series. 

The stitches around the perimeter were problematic for me. It's hard to get them even when nothing is printed on the fabric for you to follow.

The leaves on these blocks sometimes have embellishing stitches and sometimes don't. I'm putting something on all of them...just for fun.

Again....stitching free hand on the outside is so difficult, but these were easier than the triangle ones on the other block.

I have a few more of these to get done before I can turn these blocks into a quilt. 

I am also current for this year on Project Life pages.

You've see most of these stories up close and personal either here or on my IG feed.

I've put off a couple, though.

And will tell them when I'm ready.

For now, it brings me such joy to see all these stories told and gathered.

 

Keeping My Hands Busy...The Christmas Edition

The hands....oh yes, the hands have been busy, although not necessarily with an over-abundance of crafty things.

I did manage to create a tag for every day of the 25 Days of Tags event on Tracy McNeely's blog.

There are always some I like better than others.

Some I think turn out nicer,

and it's interesting to me that when I post the tags on Instagram,

what I think turned out cute and what viewers think is cute don't necessarily line up.

Yes, I find it very interesting. Based on the number of "likes," this one was the favorite. Now, I'm not sure if that's just because it was posted during the first few days of the event and interest was high, or what. That's not to say I think this one is ugly, I just figured some of the others would be like more, if that makes sense.

This one came in second. 

I also finished off a couple of holiday card kits from Simon Says Stamp. 

Now, I'm just putting it out there that getting kits is kind of a crap shoot. Sometimes the stuff inside is really great and you love everything in it, and sometimes things are harder to work with. The upside of this is that you get small portions of newer product to try out and see if you like it. 

The supplies can also really stretch your creativity and get you thinking  outside the box. I'm not very good at that. I like my box.

But let's just say that I'm not posting things for public consumption that I don't like. Experimental things I don't like tend to disappear, never to be seen again.

I did do an editorial page using the journaling from my Christmas Eve post. This will go in a binder to be preserved, hopefully for posterity.

Here are a couple week's worth of Project Life pages. I'm close to getting another year totally completed.

Daily life documented. Ordering year books from these pages has changed just a little bit. They're now offering a hard cover option in a non-flat lay format which enables one to have more pages in a book. 

I'm going to try that out and am looking forward to getting a whole year in one book. It has a lower price point as well.

Mostly, I'm just glad that these stories have a home.

Keeping My Hands Busy, the Fabric and Paper Edition

Bit by bit, little by little, sometimes agonizingly slowly,

I finally managed to finish this quilt block. It's by far and away the most involved wool appliqué I've ever done, and I'm not sad to have it behind me. I'm on to a block with a squirrel.

I finished off a couple of partially-done card kits.

Both had beautiful papers in their own way,

so very little embellishment was required to finish them off. I did have some holographic paper and punched some hearts from it.

I've tried to stay pretty caught up with the annual 25 Days of Tags event hosted on Tracey McNeely's blog.

This is always a fun series to play along with.

The projects are small-scale, so there isn't a huge time commitment involved.

Sometimes the inspiration is direct and obvious,

and other times it takes a swerve around. 

Sometimes they're a little fancier, 

And sometimes deceptively simple. Either way, it's fun to feel creative, and since I know the holidays will bring a crafting dry spell, it's nice to get some time in now.

 

Keeping My Hands and Phone Busy

Things have been really, really busy. Mostly I've been busy canning because that's just the time of year it is. 

I finished a 6" block from a recent Primitive Gatherings wool box. 

Honestly, I just haven't been in the mood to stitch for whatever reason.

I've been more focused on these Project Life editorial pages. This was a prompt from the My Modern Story IG account about dealing with stress.

I also finished pulling the Stuff I Know posts off my blog,

and I've been going through older blog posts, picking and choosing some to put into this editorial format for printing. 

This one was actually one of my favorites about my own personality and refers to the Biblical story of Mary and Martha, not that other Martha.

Just snippets of life as it was several years ago.

Lots and lots of memories with these.

I've also stayed current with the Project Life pages. 

So easy to do.

Between this daily life documenting and my personal daily journal, it's about 10 minutes a day.

For me, that's a pretty small time commitment to create a family history.

I'm sounding like a broken record now, aren't I?

I love all these stories.

Keeping My Hands Busy, the Papercrafting Edition aka Overcompensating

Yesterday I mentioned that I miss the creative process of physical paper, glue and embellishments. This is how I try to fill that need:

I worked through a recent Simon Says Stamp card kit.

It had gorgeous papers and I really tried to stretch them out over as many cards as I could.

I think I got something like 14 or 15 cards.

So not a bad total at all.

Thanks to COVID, I also finished off this year's Week in the Life album before a year went by and I was scrambling to remember exactly what happened, and get it done the week before the event happened again.

...as was the case this year when I finished last year's album right before starting to take pictures for this year's.

This year the week of documenting just happened to land right in the middle of my husband's knee surgery recovery.

This project is a more in-depth look into a slice of what's happening in my life during a finite period of time.

My daughter was also in town, which doesn't happen very often at all. I will often incorporate different page sizes, and put pictures both inside and out of page protectors. 

Ideas like that as well as all the materials almost always come straight from Ali Edwards Design, the creator of this particular project.

I've said many times that my ancestors were not journal keepers and the question I ask most in my head is, "What did you do all day? And how did you get it done?" Then I look at what I'm doing to document family history and ask myself, "Overcompensating much?"