Cook more this year, and take the time to cook new things with ingredients I enjoy.  I did this some last year, but I look forward to cooking even more this year.

Make at least one quilt for my family to keep.

Get caught up on previous projects (this is a  huge one).

Read more, and watch less TV.

Say goodbye to quite a few of my scrapbooking supplies to make room for the things I really love.

Get rid of the things in our home that don’t make me happy anymore.  We are going to have one HUGE yard sale this fall and get rid of a ton of stuff.

Find a way to work and go to school without getting overly stressed out by it.   This likely means that there are new avenues I need to pursue with regards to the way that I help support our family.

Work towards living “if it isn’t an absolute yes, then it is a no.” (see #5)

Keep working with the boy on making our house our home.  I have told him several times that I don’t feel like I really live here yet, and I would like to keep working on that.  A large part of this will be continuing to add our touches to the house.

Enjoy more of the small moments in my life, particularly with my little man and the boy!

Recently, I was reading Lisa Leonard’s blog, and she asked her readers what you would do if someone offered you $20K for everything in your home.  The response in the comments was interesting, but today she directed us to this blog post where Kim at Tomkat Studio shared her story about selling her house and everything in it!  Last night, my good friend Bonnie, who has an awesome blog for kid advice, posted on Facebook that she wanted a do over with all of her stuff.  And, that prompted me to wonder what would be on my list of things to keep if someone offered me $20K for all our stuff?

First, my answer would be yes.  For $20K, I would sell everything I owned.  When I first started thinking about this, I was in the middle of Ali Edwards’s Week in the Life project, and I thought that it would be interesting to document our house at this moment in our lives.  Things are undone and all over the place after moving last year.  Lots of empty wall space still, so I don’t really feel settled completely.  Most of our stuff is what we have collected over the last ten years of marriage and moving, and the boy’s job influences the way we think about our stuff (we are always worried about how heavy something is!).  But, these are a few of the things that are particularly important to me and would be on my keep list.

1 | The first is the headboard to our bed.  This was an old window frame that I saved from the dump that I had made into a headboard by a wonderful old woodworker in the town we lived in when we were in Kansas.  On the top of the top cross bar, it has “Always kiss me goodnight” etched into the wood.  I love it, and it is one of those pieces that I hope becomes a family heirloom.

2| Next would have to be the glass cabinet in our kitchen.  It is a piece that I picked at a craft fair in Kansas.  It is wonderful, and one of the last truly country crafty things that I kept from that phase in my life.  I don’t think I will ever get rid of it, but I have thought of painting it several times!

3| Then, there are these, which I have posted about before.  It is unnatural how much I love them!

4| And, finally, there are lots of pictures and wall art that I wouldn’t want to leave behind.  One of my favorites, is my ceiling tin piece.  This was another find from that Kansas craft fair, but it was one of those things that was almost a complete loss.  I saw it there the first year I went, but I had already gotten the pie safe above, and I didn’t want to get both.  But, then I went home and thought about it and was really bummed that I hadn’t gotten the one I saw.

The next year I went, and the weather was awful and the vendor wasn’t there.  It wasn’t until the final year I went that he was back, but when I went to his booth, they didn’t have any of the larger ones displayed.  So, I asked about it and explained the story.  It turned out that he had left it in his truck because the economy was bad, and he didn’t think it would sell.  It is huge, but it looks perfect in the front entryway of our new house with the higher ceilings!

What this little experiment taught me about our stuff is that I value the unique more than the everyday.  I see lots of our possessions as functional pieces that work for the job we need them for.  But, the pieces I love the most are the ones that have a story and took a little extra effort to acquire.  A good lesson to learn at this stage in my life!

Em: Hey, isn’t that where you get your hair done?

Me: Yup!

Mom: I need to go in there and get some hair for the garden to keep the groundhogs away.

Em: Oh, that works for groundhogs too?

Mom: Yeah.  I am wondering if I can go out every once in a while and spray it with hairspray to keep it fresh.

Em: Well, it would definitely keep it in place!

So awful it’s funny!

First, my wife, Alie, really liked the canvases that I made of my favorite scrapbooking paper.  These are the ones that I made for me a long time ago.   They worked really well in the old house, shorter ceilings.  In the new house, they need to be added to.  But, that is something easy to fix.

So, for Christmas, I made Alie a set of her own!  They came out really cute. I was very happy with them, and most importantly, so was she!

I also made a set of the rough edge letters I found on Sew Mama Sew and Happy Together for my friend’s little girl.  I thought they would be a cute way to play with spelling, etc.  If I make another set, I will make duplicates of the most popular letters, so they are easier to use.

To keep them all together, I picked up a little suitcase at Paper Source with the hope they wouldn’t just become more clutter.  I love the way they turned out and can’t wait to make more for other little boys and girls in my life!

I am looking forward to the crafting potential for next Christmas.  I have some big ideas!  And, I have some fun crafty stuff to share that we have been able to accomplish at our house too!  I have to get home to take pictures though.

Right now, we are in the midst of the great blizzard of 2010!  So funny that in eight short weeks, my son has seen two/three blizzards in an area that doesn’t normally get this much snow.  Crazy!

But, for now, I thought that I would share this….my virtual to-do list if you will.  I am an idea collector, and my friends send me ideas as well.  So, I finally set-up somewhere to collect them!  Check it out!

Back in January, I chose the word “embrace” to guide me over 2009, and I wrote all about it.  And, over the last twelve months, I have definitely embraced all aspects of life and the many changes that have occurred with our little family.  And, as this year comes to an end today, I feel very fortunate for all these changes and the fact that I was open enough to embrace them.

For me, embrace has meant to sit back a little and let things happen, a position that I am not always comfortable taking.  It meant embracing the plans that others had for me, particularly with regards to the methods and means for us to start our family.  It also meant that I needed to embrace the system and trust that it would allow us to end up where we were supposed to.  And, they both worked out exactly like I had hoped.

And, I think the best lesson I learned over the last year is that sometimes I don’t always have to take an active approach to life.  Sometimes, I have to sit back long enough to figure out what is already in motion, and sometimes embracing that action is all that needs to be done.

As I transition into 2010, I feel again like I am turning ten again.  I feel like I am growing up and have so much still to learn much like I did 22 years ago. So, this year, my word is going to be “proceed.”

proceed

1. to move or go forward or onward, esp. after stopping.
2. to card on or continue any action or process.
3. to go on to do something.
4. to continue one’s discourse.
5. to be carried on, as an action or process.
6. to go or come forth; issue (often fol. by from).
7. to arise, originate, or result (usually fol. by from).

I think this word will give me a way to keep moving forward with my goals and all that I have learned since I started this process two years ago.  And, I think this will be particularly important over the next year as I learn to be a mom and how being a mom fits in with the rest of my life, particularly since right now, as I am so new in the moment, it feels a little more like a replacement than a merger.

This next year will be quite an adventure.  And, I hope my word will be a solid reminder for me to keep moving forward.  And, because it is always more fun to do this kinda thing with friends, if you are interested in creating your own word for the year, then you should check out the Word-of-the-Year Discovery Tool that Christine Kane is offering!  It is a great way to help you get started.

This is a quilt that I have already talked about a great deal in this space, so I won’t go through all the details again.  But, like my entry from last Spring, it was a quilt that had been saved.  This is how it started.

And, the reason I love it so much is that it is one of the most loved quilts I have ever made.  So, again, thanks Amy for giving us a chance to share all our pretties!  You rock!  And, everybody, please go check out everyone’s great work!

This is the Isabella Chair from Pottery Barn.  We love the one in red.  But, we didn’t love the price tag.  No way that we could justify spending almost $600 for four chairs for a table that was less than $75.  So, we headed down to the Virginia Bazaar to see what we could find. And, again, we hit pay dirt!

We found four chairs that look almost exactly like these that I found on this site (I was too lazy to go out to the garage and take pictures of ours).  And, now that I have seen these chairs, although they are in better shape, I am realizing that the $5 a piece we paid for the four we got made them an amazing deal.  They seem to be circa early 1900’s.  Like I said, ours aren’t in amazing shape.  They need some wood glue and new seats.  We are also going to paint them this color.

It is a great Behr color. And, it will really make the chairs pop.  What is the dilemma you might ask?  Well, the pretty blue gingham fabric on the existing seat covers isn’t going to cut it.  And, I have been looking for some fun fabric that will look great in our kitchen and allow us to pull in a lot of other colors in the same hue as the red above.  And, I have narrowed my choices down to these two.

The first you might recognize as Alexander Henry’s Mocca.  And, I have some of this downstairs.  It is a print I love, but I am concerned about how well it will hold up because it isn’t really decorator or upholstery weight.  The second is a specialty organic fabric from an awesome designer, Daisy Jane, that I have been eying for a while.  It is definitely pricey, but it is perfect, and I love it!

My dilemma is which one?  Now, I know what most of you will say.  With a baby on the way, expensive fabric that we going to be sitting on is probably not a good idea.  But, that is why it is a dilemma.  I am wondering if this should be our one spot to splurge on this project, particularly since we wouldn’t need a ton for the four chairs.

Well, the very first order of business was to get caught up on the virtual quilting bee I am signed up for.  These ladies are awesome!  They have the coolest fabrics to work with and the neatest ideas.

As I said, I was really far behind, but I am all caught up now (well, I have one for September to get out, which will happen early next week). But, here are the five blocks I created for my swap partners.

I am really happy with the way they all came out.  But, I am a little in love with all the circles.  I made that one for Edie.  She sent some amazing fabrics and asked for circles.

And, even more exciting, September was my month.  So, I picked some of my favorite Heather Bailey fabrics and the string quilt pattern that Film in the Fridge had posted, and I got to see a sneak peak of one of the first blocks to come back.  I didn’t send enough fabric apparently, but can you see how cool this is going to be?

I am so excited to see this all put together and in our new family room.  It is going to look amazing with pillows in this pattern, don’t you think?