Happy New Year all my dear readers. We had a quiet family celebration, though my kids were excited to stay up until midnight. We tried to persuade them to watch the ball drop in Times Square Live on TV at 10p.m. Mountain Time, but they wanted to wait until midnight. I guess when you are 11 and nearly 15 staying up that late is a big deal. My youngest tends to wake up early no matter how late he goes to bed, so he was a bit tired on New Years Day.
I spent most of my New Year’s Eve Day crocheting. I was working on some design ideas for publication proposals. Hopefully you’ll be seeing a few of them in 2018 magazines. I’ve been crocheting some gifts for birthdays this week. 2018 is definitely beginning with lots of yarn fun.
On New Year’s Eve I went back to read my 2017 resolutions and reflect how well I had done with them over the year.
My 2017 resolutions were:
- Learn to do Calligraphy.
- Open my Etsy Shop.
- Clear out a lot of the clutter.
- Make more videos for my YouTube Channel.
Resolution 1 – Learning to do Calligraphy is still in the works, though I have gotten a lot more confident with it and other hand lettering. I’ve found that I am more comfortable with the flexibility of free-form hand lettering. Calligraphy has a lot of rules and I find I don’t have as much patience with that. I’ve learnt some of the basics and have been applying them to my free-form hand lettering attempts. I haven’t yet gotten to the point where I’m creating the art work with words and images that I had envisioned, but I am moving in the right direction.
Resolution 2 – Open my Etsy Shop did happen, but I’ve since closed it. There were some security issues with their payment options that I wasn’t comfortable with. So I decided that wasn’t the right platform for me. I may eventually find another market place for my non-pattern items, but for now that has slipped down my priority list.
Resolution 3 – Clearing out a lot of the clutter. I have been steadily working away on this one, though some days I feel like I’ve made very little progress. There have been a few time-consuming set backs like the big Whooping Cough illness my entire family came down with in August that continued into October.
Resolution 4 – Make more videos for my YouTube Channel. Unfortunately another resolution that I didn’t do so well with. Technically I did make more videos for my YouTube Channel, only 1 was published though. 2017 was my technical difficulties year. I seem to have a knack for running into problems with both my camera and my editing software. I may primarily be dealing with a learning curve.
I don’t know that I am going to be setting resolutions so much this year. I’ll still have my “list” because it is the way my brain works, but I’m focusing my New Year’s energy more on abstracts this year. I’ve been thinking on this over the past week and I am going to realize this abstraction with single words.
I’ve picked 5 words for my 2018:
Gratitude
Kindness
Persistence
Compassion
Curiosity
2018 is starting off with some big excitement and brings the first word to the forefront. Today the winners of the CGOA Board seats were announced and I am one of them. I’m so grateful that the members of CGOA had confidence in me to serve on the board. I’m looking forward to learning more about what my role on the board will be. There will be some shuffling in my schedule to make sure I can fulfill my duties as well as keep up with my work, but it is a challenge I welcome.
This is the last weekend of the kids’ winter break from school, so I’ll be getting in a little more family time before we are once again doing the school schedule.
Mamas2Hands 