My little home in the universe.

A big part of me finding my home here though has been the tons of other women I have been reading over the last year.  They have helped me nestle in here in this space.  One of those women posted this video today.  Go check it out.

It is indeed a new day (for me, for our country, for our world), and I can’t wait to see what the next 100 posts reveal!

Yesterday, my bgf and I decided to go to the fabric store and look at the garment fabrics.  Usually, we just head straight for the quilting stuff, but yesterday we thought we would try to branch out.  We got some very plain knit wear to try to make a skirt, or two as it turned out.  I had a skirt pattern in mind, so we headed home.

I won’t say that our results were perfect, but I think they came out prety cute.  I say “they” because due to some mismeasurement on our parts, I think, we ended up making two.  The first one was way to big for my bgf.  She is about ten million sizes smaller than I am, no really, and the first skirt fit me!  So, I got one too!

Pictures of hers are below.  Notice the cute little ruffle that I wish I could take credit for, but completely can’t because it was a total accident.  In this case, a good total accident, but accident nonetheless.

But, they are both even for the most part, and they hang well, so I think that we did a good job!  By the way, fold-over-elastics make waistbands a snap!  We are going to try a real elastic waistband with our next creation for her.

I am a closet (literally) scrapbook hoarder. I joke that my hobby is really collecting (and organizing) scrapbooking materials. And, while I have all these materials, I am not actually creating pages. I have ideas, but I always have some excuse that holds me back from taking the next step. And, I have been wondering, lately in particular, if I needed to sell what I have and admit that although I want to scrapbook, I am not ever going to do it. I have been receiving gentle prodding in that direction by others around me too.

But, I am not ready to give up the idea that I can be an academic and a scrapbooker/crafter at the same time, even though I know that this is definitely one of my hang-ups about scrapbooking.  I am reading Ali Edwards‘s book called Life Artist, and I am really loving this term right now. I think I like it because it allows all my loves to be “okay.” I can create in my classroom as well as every other medium in my life that I choose. This one term allows for all of my desires to coexist, albeit sometimes very strangely.

This year, we have been doing some major purging like what Christine is talking about. We have been getting rid of the things we don’t absolutely love, and I have been trying to get rid of the stuff that I am keeping because of fear. Fear someone will be upset if “it” is not on my wall, fear that “it” will never fit again, fear that I can’t believe I spent so much money on “it,” or whatever. But, as we are clearing more and more out, I am not feeling better, as I had hoped that I would. For me, I think that I need to take the step and actually clear out the mental clutter, keeping only what I love. This is the same discussion that I hear everywhere right now. I keep reading about the idea that you have to let go of what is holding you down, just forget about it. But, the light bulb moment happened for me as I got to #26 on Christine’s list of things to toss.  This thing was an attitude or a belief on a  list of physical things to pitch.

What I need to toss right now is not physical. I can completely empty my house, and I am still not going to feel the way I want to feel until I get rid of the mental clutter that is clouding up my energy. I have come to terms with the need to get rid of my physical clutter, but my brain has been like a cluttered hard drive on a computer for far too long. I think that this is the core of what I keep seeing discussed, in whatever format it takes at the moment. You are only going to be successful when you keep the thoughts that you love and think the thoughts that are going to help bring you what you desire. It is really just the law of attraction boiled down. I have to clear out the mental clutter I am keeping, and I have to deal with the fact that I am afraid of what I will have to admit if I give it up.

So, I have decided that I am not ready to toss our my scrapbooking aspirations yet. But, I do realize that if I want to be the life artist I really want to be, I have to realize that it is the mental clutter that is holding me back in all my life’s mediums (ie: It isn’t perfect, so no one will want it. The things I create won’t be good enough. I am going to mess it up. The act of creating is a waste of time when I have other things I should be doing). These are all the thoughts that are going to have to be put aside in order to succeed at this goal.

I mean since I got the new sewing machine, that I love more than other any crafting tool I could ever imagine, I have been creating lots more. So, I know that having the tools I need to create what I want to create is the first step. I have actually known that the tools matter for me for quite some time and already give myself the tools I need to make the task of teaching easier to manage. So, now it is time to clean out all the clutter, mental and physical, and take the next step towards creating the life I desire in a fuller sense.

Amazing how perfectly this goes along with my word for the year!

I think that the first thing that you have to do when dealing with an adventure into the imperfect is to stop judging other people’s imperfections. This act of calling attention to other people’s perceived weaknesses is likely just a way to make the expounder feel better anyway. We all just need to feel better about our imperfections, and maybe we will not judge our own stuff quite as critically. So, maybe, if I can just let things be, then it will trickle into the rest of my universe.

I will let you know how it goes. Until then, I am off for a grading marathon today!

As I am sure that readers who know me have noticed, I love to make gifts for people. And, I love to create things that I have seen somewhere else or in my brain and recreate them. However, one of the first things that I will do when I give you anything is show you where the imperfections are. I also rarely keep anything I make for myself, and I am beginning to more clearly understand why.

For about four years, I have been planning on making a quilt of my husband’s and my old t-shirts. All the shirts that hold sentimental feelings, but we not longer wear them. This was originally because I knew that as a military family we weren’t going to be able to keep collecting, but there were a few things that I knew that we wouldn’t be able to let go. So, I thought this was a wonderful idea.

So, I have been taking baby steps on this quilt for some time. The first major step was cutting the shirts up. Then, I went back in and trimmed all the pieces. I looked around online to see if I could find any really cool examples, but all the ones I found were so carefully planned and executed that I knew that it wasn’t the right way for our quilt to come together.

So, I found a backing that I love, and I got the batting that I think that I am going to use. But, since I did all that, nothing has gotten done. I am completely stuck. I don’t know if I should carefully try to lay everything out, or if I should just wing it. Honestly, the worst thing that will happen is that we end up with two quilts if I run out of space on the one.

However, after reading the blog entry for today, I have been thinking a lot about all the projects that I end up working on. Most of them are perfectly laid out in my brain, but I have some trouble with the execution. The blocks don’t line up, or the painting isn’t just quite right. And, I have trouble seeing past the imperfection, which is largely why I think that I don’t keep the things that I make for myself.

So, I have decided that I am going to be try to let myself be more imperfect now. Instead of it being something that I hide from, I think that it is going to be something the I embrace. I am human; I make mistakes. Thank god! I personally don’t really like perfect people, so I am not sure why I want to be one. However cliche is sounds though, there is one thing that I can do perfectly…I can just be the person that I am in the best way I know how.

So, if you get an imperfect something special from me, I hope that you love it (which is the whole point, right)!

He made a really interesting comparison with The Tipping Point, which I swear I have at home on the shelf to read. I am really interested to see my own version of the match-up here! I am sure that I will report back soon.

Awesome Video

I have realized where I fall on the spectrum with the paper that I still have yet to turn in from last Spring, and I need to figure out a way to keep moving from here. How do you make yourself do it if you don’t think that it is in you? Certain blogs that I have been reading lately encourage a blind commitment to the process. Be like Nike. Just do it. So, I am going to find myself some time to just do it, and I will see if that process works for the academic endeavor as well. It will be an interesting experiment. And, if it works for this, then I can’t help but wonder what else it will work for.