Books

I’ve been busy so far this year working on my One Little Word, EMBRACE. I spent all of February focusing on re-lighting my love of scrapbooking by participating in an annual event I’ve wanted to do for several years called LOAD. The purpose is to create a layout a day for each day of February. The overarching theme was Once Upon a Time and our connection with books, and each day the host, Lain Ehmann, gave a different prompt that we could use for our layout. These included design principles, color combinations, or a topic sentence, all from beloved children’s books. I managed to do a layout all 28 days of the month and I had so much fun. My output has slowed down in March, but I’m still working.

I did a layout showing the entire month’s work, which included a few extra layouts on some days for a total of 34. I count two-page layouts as one layout. Because I mostly stayed with the daily prompts, I had to do some layouts about me, which is a first, and also not chronological, which was fun and very freeing.Here are my two favs from the month, both of which were color prompts:

This year I also signed up for Ali Edwards’ One Little Word class which gives monthly activities to help keep our word visible and in use in our lives. I did the prompt for January which involved a lot of reflecting and making goals and got those all in my album but haven’t finished some of the daily life pictures from January and none from February or March. Need to add those pages to the album in the second quarter. February’s prompt was to make a vision board and I had so much fun cutting up magazines and gluing that all together. It’s now hanging in my sewing room.

 

I’ve been doing some sewing, too. My new threesome quilt group is doing a 1930’s quilt this year and have several blocks done and I’ve posted about those already. My regular twosome quilt group made a Schoolhouse table topper that needs to be hand-quilted as soon as I finish the Candy Shop quilt, which is almost done. We are now working on an Arrowhead quilt, but it’s a secret project so I’m not posting much for now. But it’s looking mighty awesome so far. Other projects in the works include the following:

 

I’ve spent a fair amount of time getting some pillowcases sewn up for the Festival of Trees gift boutique in December. Some of this fabric has been waiting around for two years for me to get it done, so I thought this was the year to get them all sewed up and off my plate. They turned into thirteen lovely pillowcases.

 

I’ve only been out in the garden once so far this spring and it looks like it needs some major cleaning up. But Scott and I were asked to be in charge of a youth play at church and since I wrote it and am directing it, it’s taken up a ton of time this quarter. I have to spend a lot of time planning and organizing in order to utilize the limited rehearsal time and make it all seem effortless. The performances are this week and I will get some time and energy back.

We’ve also spent a lot of time discussing, planning, and researching the possible addition to our home and it’s amazing how time-consuming that’s been with very little actual progress to show for it. But lots of knowledge in our heads.

As part of my One Little Word this year, I made a list of things to get done. I’m working away on the list and crossing stuff off which is making me happy. Organizing my quilt patterns, cleaning up my scrapping studio, reading some magazines then moving them out, and reading books for my reading challenges. I’ve kept up with the two that have monthly goals and made progress on the others, and I’m eleven books ahead of schedule on my goodreads annual challenge of 104 books/year. Plus my dishwasher has been broken for most of the quarter and I’m washing dishes by hand, which takes time but lets me listen to audio books. Trade-off.

Here’s to the second quarter of 2015: may it be productive. EMBRACE the future!