random reflections

OWL: January Assessment

We're nearly at the end of January, and Honoré is hosting a link-up today for our monthly assessment of our OLW. 

COMMIT is my OLW for 2020, and so far it has proven to be a good motivation for keeping track of my intentions. One of the best decisions I made this year, was to set intentions month by month, rather than a longer list for the whole year.

For January, I set three:

1) The Unread Shelf Project:  Actually this will be a year-long goal, but each month has a different focus. This month we were to count our unread books. I was not surprised to discover we have over 200 books on our shelves that have not been read. Many have been started, but not completed. Frequently, for me, that’s because I have to abandon a book in order to complete the books for my two book groups. Hopefully, this project will help me get back to some of those. I also counted the unread books on my Kindle. Tracy and I share a Kindle account, so I counted only those books I hoped to read someday—another 27 in addition to the books on the shelves.

We were also asked to reorganized our books so all the unread books were in one place. Now all the books on the bookshelf in our bedroom are unread books, and there are a some more in the guest room. In the process of reorganizing we identified 36 books that we would probably never read, and donated them to a good cause. (I think that’s part of February’s plan, but I’m guessing a few more could go then as well.)

The second part of the commitment to The Unread Shelf Project is to complete one of those unread books. I read A Gentleman in Moscow, which had been recommended to me multiple times by multiple people. They were right, it was a wonderful book, beautifully written.

2)  Taking two online coloring classes was the second goal. I’ve written about them here and here. I did complete the Coloring Challenge Road Trip class, and I've completed half of Sandy Allnock's Colored Pencil Jumpstart class. I had hoped I’d be able to move on to another project in February, but clearly I need more time with the Colored Pencil Jumpstart class. Each of the lessons so far has included three to five videos with worksheets for each of the new skills. Here’s a sample of one of the many practice worksheets, we’ve been asked to complete.

3) The third goal for January was to prepare three meatless meals each week, and to create a meal plan on the weekend. This has been totally successful, and my “meat and potato” husband has had no complaints. I’ve finally figured out how to do the meal planning on my recipe app, Paprika.

I can’t recommend this app highly enough. Paprika 1) stores any recipe I download into categories of my choosing, 2) links the ingredients from recipes on the app to my grocery list, 3) can be set so items that are put into my cart “disappear” from the list as I shop, and 4) allows both of us to add items to the list, and to divide up the grocery shopping on the rare occasions we shop together.

So it’s been a productive month. In addition to A Gentleman in Moscow, I’ve finished How to Read the Constitution—And Why (our couples' book group choice for January,) and Olive, Again. Before Friday (then end of January), I will have finished The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. It’s this month’s book from my interfaith book group and a book from the Unread Shelf! This keeps me current with my year-long goal of reading a minimum of four books a month.

I'll be back in a few days with my February intentions.

 

 

Using Colored Pencils

For Christmas, Tracy gifted me with two classes from Sandy Allnock's Art Classes. I started the first one right after Christmas--Colored Pencil Jumpstart. I envisioned that it would be a one month project. Two things, however, have caused me to reassess my goal. First was the amount of time the Coloring Challenge Road Trip, Online Version took. It was so worth the time. (I blogged about it here.) The other was I had no idea how much content was included in the colored pencil class. There are 10 lessons, and each of the lessons I've worked through so far has included 3-5 videos with practice sheets to complete. Each practice sheet is time consuming if one wants to learn the principals behind the lessons. One night, however, I decided I wanted to use some of the skills I learned in the Road Trip class with some of the things I've been learning in Sandy's class to actually complete a project. 

Before the holidays, I had purchased a few items from The Stamp Market, included an overall design of leaves, Just Vines. It's not the kind of stamp I often order, but it was great for doing some coloring practice. And it took some time! I worked on it while I watched my favorite women's basketball team play a game on television. It was a win/win. I enjoyed the game and completed a project. 

Once I had colored the background leaves, the challenge was to turn it into a card. Another Christmas gift was a gift certificate to Simon Says Stamps. I used part of it to purchase a new set of frames, A2 Thin Frames. Cut in black, it provided just the right contrast.

Finally, I cut another piece of black cardstock and embossed it with the sentiment from Simon Says' Brush Stroke Messages. 

All the colored pencil work was done with my Polychromos pencils on Stonehenge paper (recommended for pencil work by Sandy Allnock.) 

There's a lovely texture to the paper which goes well with the leaves. 

Once again, it's been a long time between blog posts. The days fly by. This week, however, I'll be checking in soon with my progress for my OLW: COMMIT as I believe Honoré is hosting a link-up early in the week.

Coloring Class

The most recent Online Card Class, Coloring Challenge Road Trip, Online Version taught by Kathy Racoosin, took up the better part of my free time Monday-Wednesday of this week. It was time well spent. I learned a lot, and have lots to practice. On Thursday, I had time to do my first practice piece, and although there is still plenty of room for improvement, I'm quite happy with the result. I chose my colors based on the Altenew January Inspiration Challenge, which I've been following for some time, but have never entered. 

The floral image was stamped with Altenew's Wallpaper Art stamp set, masking the flower to add the leaves. It was colored with Copic markers. After coloring the image, colored pencil was softly added to the nooks and crannies with Polychromos colored pencils. It's easier to see the purple center of the flower in this closer look.

The sentiment from Sugar Peas' Everyday Sentiments, was embossed in white on black cardstock and adhered with dimensional tape. I mounted the image onto a pieces of purple Bazzil cardstsock and then to a green card. You can also see the Copic markers I used to color the image here.

In addition to the Altenew challenge, I'm entering this into the Seize the Birthday challenge, without the toppings option.

Once again it's snowing here. No one seems too sure how much we'll get. I've seen estimates as low as 3" and as high as 8". I'm hoping for the lesser amount--enough to be pretty, but easily dealt with.

Snowflakes

Despite the fact that we've had more rain than snow in the last week, I chose snowflakes for three birthday cards I needed to make and get in the mail this month. The first two are variations on a theme. 

Both the cards and the snowflake dies were cut from Papertrey Ink's Fresh Snow Linen cardstock which has a beautiful, if subtle, texture, and both feature the same sentiment from an old favorite Papertrey set, Winter Hills.

Both the smaller snowflake (Simon Says' Lea) and the larger snowflake (Simon Says' Marie) were die cut three times and stacked for some dimension. The sentiment was embossed in silver on a Pink Fresh Studio Basic Label Frame die cut. The embossing is better seen in close-up:

I'm entering the second of these cards in the CAS on Friday challenge: "Winter."

The second design was created with the help of my daughter who received a Cricut Maker for Christmas. For someone who showed very little interest in crafting at a younger age, she's become quite the maker herself. First she took on woodworking, and has a wonderful woodworking shop in her basement. She built her desk for her church office, and has rescued and refinished a number of pieces of furniture. Then she took up quilting, and has created some gorgeous quilts for her children as well as for charity. And then, first with a Cameo, and now the Cricut Maker, is creating all kinds of wonderful projects for her church as well as for her family. While we were there, she was playing around with some woodgrain paper and die cut a beautiful snowflake. I remarked that it would make a beautiful card if it were smaller, and soon I had this snowflake in my hand.

I layered it on a piece of kraft cardstock cut with a Stitched Square die by Simon Says, and backed that with some fun foam for dimension. I didn't want to obscure any more of the snowflake than necessary with a sentiment so embossed the sentiment from The Greetery, Sentiment Suite: Birthday on a banner with the coordinating die. You can see the texture in the woodgrain paper here as well.

This is the perfect entry for the Seize the Birthday Challenge on now: Layer It!

 

 

The Card Concept: Time To Celebrate

It's amazing how quickly the days fly by the first week we're home trying to get unpacked, "undecorated," and to get back into some semblance of normal routines. I can check off "unpacked," but not quite yet the other two. I do expect by the end of the weekend that we'll have put away all the Christmas decorations. I have to admit, however, that I will miss them--particularly the tree and the lighted greens on the mantle. 

All of a sudden, I realized after days of posting nearly every day, it's been several since I got a blog post written. I do have a card for The Card Concept challenge: Time To Celebrate. I was inspired by the metallic colors in the photo as well as some of the neutral colors. 

Since I needed a masculine card I decided to emboss and stamp the design, from Papertrey Ink's Sending You Comfort, on kraft card stock. I stamped it in navy blue, and then embossed the leaves with bronze embossing powder. The sentiment from Papertrey's Penned Elegance is also stamped in navy. Once again, I'd categorize this as a Clean and Simple card--lots of empty space, one layer, and easy to recreate.

It's impossible to see in the photo above, but I trimmed off a bit of the front of the card, and layered some navy blue cardstock on the inside edge. 

This photo also shows the beautiful shine of the copper embossing powder. 

There's been only a bit a crafting done as I'm working on the assignments for Sandy Allnock's Colored Pencil Jumpstart class that Tracy gifted me for Christmas. I'm learning a lot, but it's not going quickly!

The Card Concept: Favorite Card

As I was looking through the list of current card challenges, I found the current Card Concept Challenge to post your favorite card of the year. Since I just posted nine of my favorites, I decided to designate one of them as #1. It's interesting that the one that rose to the top came about through an error in technique. Although I intended to dry emboss My Favorite Things Rectangle Peek-a-Boo die onto the front of the card, the die machine cut through the card front, so I had to devise an alternative, which in my mind turned out to be better than the original plan. 

I like the CAS design, and also the muted colors. I'm not sure why I colored the sprig of leaves from Altenew's Weekend Doodles in shades of gray, but it was in my stash of pre-colored and die cut images when I set out to make the card. Overall, I think it's a design that will lend itself to a variety of cards for different occasions.

Favorite Cards and Books of 2019

One more faves post inspired by all the favorite card collections I've seen on Instagram as well as my favorite books of 2019 which I neglected to add to my post about my OLW. 

If you've followed my blog for long you know that card making is my hobby of choice. I don't often look back to choose some favorites, but I did this week and chose nine to share. Sometimes it was the design I particularly liked, and sometimes it was a technique that turned out well.

My reading goal for 2019 was 50 books. I surpassed that by two, and always enjoy seeing the graphic Goodreads provides for each year. This is the third year I've participate in the Goodreads' Challenge, and I read 1,300 more pages this year than last, and about 650 more pages than in 2017 (the year I read the Bible cover to cover.) I'm keeping the same reading goal for 2020--5o books. On days we don't head to the gym as soon as we get up, we routinely read for an hour--in the winter next to the fire. If I leave reading to bedtime, it's likely not many pages get read before I nod off. My volunteer work and social calendar keep me pretty busy during the week, so it's unlikely I'll find a lot more reading time in 2020 than I did in 2019.

I went through the 52 books and chose eight favorites. If you look at my list of books, you will see only one book that received 2 stars. If I'm not invested in a book by the time I've read about 50 pages, I have no trouble abandoning the book. There are just too many books I know I'll enjoy reading. This year I did finish Ross Gay's The Book of Delights which I did not enjoy. I don't regularly write reviews, but I noted that although I loved the idea of the book, I didn't find many of the delights "delightful," and although I'm not often offended by language, I was too frequently offended listening to this one. (It's also unusual for me to "read" an audio book, but I recently finished Save Me the Plums shifting back and forth between Audible and the Kindle. That worked very well on our road trip to Wisconsin. When I give a book 5 stars or choose one as a favorite, it's because the book caused me to think about the content well after the time I finished it.

Americanah was one of the longest books I read this year. I had read many wonderful reviews, but wouldn't have picked it up because of its length had our couples book group not chosen it for September. It took me all month to read it (we were on the road three weeks), but I'm still thinking about it. The Dearly Beloved was the most enjoyable read. A character in Americanah comments that American fiction primarily focuses on dysfunctional characters, and I think there's some truth to that. In the Dearly Beloved, the characters have their issues (don't we all?) but no one is truly dysfunctional. Both Grace Will Lead Us Home and How to Be An Antiracist are two books that are helping me understand racism in the United States and to deal with my white privilege and unintended thoughts and actions that might appear painful to others. I belong to an interfaith book group, and Holy Envy was definitely our favorite book of the year. Both Lost and Wanted and Where the Crawdads Sing were satisfying reads with lots to think about. A Woman is No Man was a difficult read, but an important one, helping me better understand the immigrant experience. (Americanah was also important there, as well.)

So that's a wrap for 2019. Onward to a new year of crafting and reading!

(If anyone knows how to improve the resolution of the Goodreads screen shots, I'd love some advice.)

One Little Word: Recap and Commitment

Earlier this week, I gave some thought to how my One Little Word: YES! served me last year. It was a mixed bag. Overall, I was successful at saying YES to the things that really mattered to me, and letting go of some things that were no longer fulfilling. The most surprising decision was deciding to give up my Project Life scrapbooking. The albums take up so much room, and some months I had lots to record, others not much. I’m hoping to switch to creating an annual photo book but I’m not making any promises as two of my totally unfulfilled intentions last year were to create two photo books from our international travels. I gathered up all my scrapbook paraphernalia and donated it, which cleared up a bit of space in my craft room.

I joined Ali Edward’s OLW class thinking it might help keep my intentions in front of me, but truthfully, I stopped being accountable somewhere in June, and never really got back on track. I listed 19 intentions for 2019, and a friend commented that 19 seemed rather ambitious. That proved to be true. I counted only 10 of them where I was totally or partially successful.

So what now? Usually by mid-November I have a short list of words I’m considering. That didn’t happen at all this year. It wasn’t until last week that I happened upon an ad on Instagram for a planner from Commit30.com. I’d already purchased my planner for 2020, one I’ve used successfully for three years, so I wasn’t tempted to make another purchase. The word, COMMIT, however resonated with me as did the process of setting a goal or intentions for each month. Commit: a willingness to give your time and energy to something that you believe in, or a promise or firm decision to do something.

So COMMIT, it is, and I’ve decided to choose one or more intentions for each month, COMMIT to those, and reconsider what I’ll do during the succeeding month. I’m thinking this will be much more effective than having a longer list for whole year. Yesterday, Honoré announced she’ll be hosting a link-up for monthly progress reports. I’ve already added the January date to my calendar.

I’ve also chosen to join The Unread Shelf Project. January’s goal is to count your unread books, gather them together in one place, and to finish one of those books by the end of the month. Since I’m away from home, counting the books on the shelves will have to wait until next week, but I already know there are 37 unread books on my Kindle. In fairness, my husband and I share the Kindle list, so he added some of those books, but I counted everyone I’d like to read. My book for January is A Gentleman in Moscow, started long ago, but never finished.

The other item on the list is to complete two online classes: Colored Pencil Jumpstart, a Christmas gift from Tracy, and a new online card class The Coloring Challenge Road Trip. I’m thinking the two classes should work together well.

Inspired by a NY Times article, I’m going to attempt to serve three meatless meals each week. Living with a meat and potatoes guy means this may be a challenging intention, but he seems willing to give it a try.

So that’s it for January. I’ll be interested to see if this process works well. And I’m willing to give myself some slack until I see how many goals/intentions I can follow through with in any given month. I may have overreached for January. I know that during months where we’re traveling this year the goals/intentions will need to look very different.

Highlights of 2019

I thought I’d join in with the tradition of looking back on some of the highlights and faves of the year.

We had a great year which began with a trip to Disney World with Sarah, Adam, Caleb and Hannah. Sarah had a week long conference to attend in January so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to take the kids to Disney World. We all had a fabulous time.

In April, I traveled to Washington, D.C. with a group of five others from our Presbytery for the Ecumenical Advocacy Days. It was five days of inspirational and motivating workshops and speakers. On our final day, we were able to meet with the staff of our legislators to advocate for two bills. A wonderful side benefit of the trip was meeting Honoré for dinner one evening. After several years of being blogging friends it was wonderful to discover how much in common we have---and how much fun we’d have if only we lived closer to one another.

Tracy’s mother celebrated her 90^th birthday this summer. Her children hosted a wonderful party for her and about 75 of her family and friends. Here she is with her five children and two step-daughters.

We spent five days in Nantucket with Matt, Betsy, and the girls. It’s always a wonderful time. They live just a mile or so away from us so we see them frequently, but this is the only time in the year we get extended time with them which makes this trip even more special.

In August, we were invited by a friend to spend four days at the Chautauqua Institute. The theme of the week we were there was Grace: A Celebration of Extraordinary Gifts. Krista Tippet of On Being was the host of the morning lectures and we heard some thought-provoking and entertaining interviews, all of which were recorded for the On Being podcast. The afternoon speakers at the Hall of Philosophy were also extraordinary, including one of my favorite theological writers, Barbara Brown Taylor.

Our last big trip of the year was a three week road trip through Washington and Oregon. In the middle of the trip was the beautiful and moving wedding of our nephew, Mason, and his beautiful bride, Molly. And I had another opportunity to meet up with a blogging friend. Vicki and Jim Hein met us for coffee one morning as we drove from the Oregon coast to Ashland.

From top left: Overlooking Seattle, the Seattle waterfront, Atop Hurricane Ridge on the Olympic Peninsula, Heceta Lighthouse on the Oregon coast, Molly and Mason, the Hoh Rainforest, Jim & Vicki Hein & Tracy & me, Mt. Rainier, Diablo Lake in the North Cascade National Park.

And a year end review just wouldn’t be right without some photos of my grandchildren who grew so much this year. We made four trips to Wisconsin to visit Caleb and Hannah this year. We wish they were closer, but we’re grateful they’re within driving distance.

Top row: Caleb and Hannah
Second row: Madelyn, my one chance to capture all five together--a total fail, Ella and Skylar
Third row: Skylar, Madelyn, and Ella; Skylar; Caleb and Hannah

Happy New Year! May you be blessed with good health, time with family and friends, and wonderful adventures in 2020!