hopefully something rhetorical

Yesterday, Donna Downey, one of the amazing ladies I soak in, posted this badge to her blog.

With this badge, she posted the following explanation. This is a campaign for creativity, and it seems the exact right ticket for me to be on. As I have explained repeatedly here, I have had a huge draw towards the creative aspect of my life. I don’t know if it is because we are about to transition to a new place or what. But, it is a strong urge, and I have been fighting it in the sake of getting my “real” work done, but I think that is all about to change.

Often I grade at home because I only have a laptop at work. What that means is that I am playing and taking a break at work and spending time working when I should be playing at home. So, I asked for a monitor at work, and I am going to try to shift the balance. I have set the intention to have more time to play at home. And, this weekend I am going to go for a repeat of my sewing day. I have a few projects that I would really like to have done by the end of the weekend, and I got myself a little inspiration to do it.

These are both books that I have wanted for a long time, and I have just been waiting - I am not really sure for what.

But, they will be here tomorrow, and I can’t wait!

p.s.  Sometime soon I am going to post a list of all the amazing-women-blogs I read.  I think I need an inspired list!

Well, my Saturday plans for sewing didn’t quite work out as I had hoped, but I was able to get something done today.  In August when I was back on the East coast, I had a chance to meet up with my good friend Bonnie and her little girl.  Their family recently bought a new house, and they were doing up Paige’s new room, so we went to the Pottery Barn Kids outlet.  What an awesome store!  She found the comforter she liked, but they didn’t have a sham that matched.  So, we wandered through all the linens and found a crib sheet in the same material.

I told Bonnie to just get the crib sheet, and I would make a sham for her.  And, I did! I think it came out pretty cute, and it was only $9 for the crib sheet.

I had the pokka dot fabric in my stash, and I decided to also make a pillowcase to match.  I was particularly impressed with myself about the detailing.  Just gives the whole thing a little more visual interest.

I thought they both turned out pretty cute, and it got me thinking about how I might be able to make sheets for our bed.  We have a wonderful mattress, but it is ridiculously tall/deep (24 inches).  Trying to find sheets is almost impossible and very expensive, but since we really only use a fitted sheet, I think I might be able to give it a shot.  Next time we are near a Home Goods, I am going to look for a cute King flat sheet to see if I can modify it.  If I do, trust that I will share all the gory details here!

So, as I have mentioned before, I am a closet scrapbooker.  I have a ton of beautiful supplies, and I work really hard to keep them organized.  I have a ton of magazine layouts for inspiration that I repeatedly come back to.  I have lots of ideas for pages, and I have even sold a few layouts on Ebay.  In fact, when I am creating layouts in absence of my pictures and stories I do just fine. My secret is that I have NEVER made an album (or a layout for that matter) for us to keep. I think I get caught up into the mindset that what I create to capture my family’s memories has to be perfect.  Somehow, it is my job to capture them perfectly.

As I said in my last post, this week I am doing the week in the life of challenge with Ali Edwards.  It has been really fun to capture a look at my week.  I have been taking lots of fun pictures, and I am excited to see the album come together.  For a while, I have been thinking about how all this was going to come together.  What kind of album could I do?  What all would I include from my week? I also have thought a lot about how I was going to use items that I already have in my stash.  I don’t want to buy a bunch of new stuff.

One thing I have had in my stash for a while is a small three album set with a case that I got on sale once.  I think they are basic grey.  In fact, I am pretty sure that I have two of these album sets.  As I was considering my project this week, I realized that one of those small albums would be perfect, but I wasn’t completely sure what to do with the sets or whether or not I want to break up the set into different albums that weren’t themed together.  I really wanted to figure out how these three could work together to capture this year for our family. One of the other problems I have is also trying to decide how to work with the HUGE backlog of pictures I have to get into albums somehow.

Then, it hit me in a flash exactly how to set everything up.  Because I already have them, the three albums I have will work together, but in the future this will probably be done in one album, but broken up into pieces using dividers or something unique to split up the sections.

What I am going to do is take each of the albums and use each one to document a part of my year.  The first book will be a moment.  Every year we all likely have one moment that we document more carefully.  This could be a trip or family vacation.  Or, it could be a child’s birthday party.  Anything that you have enough pictures to tell a larger story about.  For us, this year, our moment will be our trip to Europe.

The next album will be my week in the life album.  This is something that I would like to do once a year to consider how my life changes over the years. And, finally the last album will be my year in review album.  I can organize this by months or just have the layouts of the rest of the stuff that happens.  Holidays, etc.  The key I have to remember is that it doesn’t have to be oppressive to get all those done.

What I am hoping this organizational system will do for me is ease the burden of having to create full albums of every moment of our lives.  It is not feasible for me to do that, and I think it is what has been holding me back all this time.  This will also give me a great way to get started on pulling together the past years.  While I won’t have a week in the life for the past years, I am going to try to create one section for a moment for that year and one section for the year in review.  I don’t know how big my albums will need to be, but I do really like the idea of using the three-ring albums.  They are easier to add pieces to.  And, I like the idea of doing one album for each year.

I think my first step is to go back and pull together pictures from each year and see what the moment would be and what the review information would be.  I think that if I start to weed out some of the huge back log of pictures that I can create a reasonable number of albums to put together, and then, maybe it won’t see so daunting a task.  I will let you all know how it goes and share what I come up with here!

Just thought I would check in and let you know a little more about what I was up to…

1. First and most important, the boy and I celebrated our eight year anniversary yesterday.  This week, I am a little stressed out because of number three four (I can’t count!) down there, and he knew just the right thing to do.  He also bought me a beautiful plant.  (He told me “Flowers just die.”)  It wasn’t a perfect day, but every moment of it made me remember how much I love him and how happy I am with him.
2. I am following Ali Edwards and her a week in the life of series.  It has been really fun to examine my life more carefully, and I want to try to take more pictures for the rest of the week.  I did get a great one of the HUGE spider I killed the other night. That was a fun adventure.  I have been doing a pretty good job of writing about my day throughout the week though.
3. We found the coolest new breakfast place in our town.  It is fabulous, and the stacked french toast is amazing.  So amazing that when I made the boy go there with me for breakfast on our anniversary and he tasted it, he actually moaned.  Incidentally that was my second visit for the week, but who’s counting.
4. As a roll-over from last week, I am still grading job packets for my tech writing students.  Besides the final report, this is the assignment that takes the longest to grade, at almost 20 minutes a piece.  With 76 students, I am ready to be done.  I wonder if all teachers feel like they are always saying the same thing over and over again when they are giving feedback.
5. I am going to start working on posting my mother-in-law’s cool fused glass work to her new Etsy site, hopefully today.
6. Yesterday, I submitted a proposal for a conference in Baton Rouge about the Second Life stuff I have been working as part of the grant I received last year.
7. I am going to get to see a friend that is coming back in town for the weekend.  A younger version of myself!  That promises to make this weekend really fun.
8. Friday is a diversity conference.  I was inspired at the conference last year, so I am hoping it will do the same again this year.
9. Finally, I am planning the all-day sewing extravaganza for Saturday.  I don’t plan to work on anything school related all day!  My new labels will be here, and I can hardly contain myself I am so excited about the prospect.  I hope to have lots to show at the end of the weekend.

It is probably no surprise that I scour Etsy for ideas and gifts.  The Pounce feature is one of my favorites.  I can sit and pounce for hours longer than I would care to admit.

So, I thought that it would be fun to do another overview of all the awesome and inspirational stuff I have been looking at lately.

First, this has made me want to start collecting all the bits of paper around my house!  This Etsy shop owner makes the cutest little notepads, although she doesn’t have any for sale right now.  But, I love the idea of using scrapbook posts to bind everything together, and this might be a fun little something to try out!

These are just one of the many pieces of jewelry I have found to lust after lately.  I am not really a high-end jewelry kind of girl, and this simple design, from an English artist, speaks to me!

Another piece of jewelry I keep coming back to look at again and again is this ring by an Oakland artist.  Some of his stuff is really fun, but I love the chunky style of this piece.  He had another one that he sold back in June that I liked the colors of even better!  But, I am guessing that he doesn’t make this one very often because he doesn’t have a huge number of them in his sold listings.  In fact, this is only the third one he has ever listed.

Also, as I think I mentioned before, I really want to learn how to lampwork, so I can make beads and pendants like this one.  I think it is awesome!

And, speaking of things that I want to be able to make.  Check out this stamp!  I love the idea of being able to make my own stamps.  And, I think it would be fun to make a set of stamps using my handwriting.  From what I can tell, it doesn’t look very hard.  In fact, I think that we used to do projects like this in art class in elementary school.  This is just the grown-up version!

And, last but not least.  I think that I found something to add to the box for wedding gifts.  I like the simplicity of it, and that it isn’t too cutesy but is still customized.  This artist  actually has quite a few cool things that would useful for decorating in future rental houses!

The good news is that I was actually able to cross something off my crafty to-do list.  I made the other pillow for the man room.  It looks just like this one does, so I won’t post pictures of it.

But I was a little more confident with this one, which is good because I am about to make another pillow sham, one I won’t be keeping, this weekend.  And, that will be another thing to cross off my to-do list.

The bad news is that I have just added all the Christmas gifts to my list.  I can’t even explain how excited I am about all the goodies I am going to make, but I am a little daunted.  I have a feeling that if I can do this, then I could easily do a small craft fair booth (yes, we have that many people in our family)!  I am also hoping this will help us give gifts that mean more and cost less.  A great combination overall!  The boy has already offered his cutting services.  He is great at cutting out fabric for things like rag quilts.

There are also a few things I added for myself on the list.  Last Spring, I posted about these.

And, I still gaze at them fondly from time to time.  They were made with Basic Grey paper from the Urban Couture line.  And, then last week, on my new favorite online fabric store site, I found this!

They are turning this line of scrapbook paper into fabric!!!  This is a huge deal to the BGF and me because we have always said that fabric needs to look more like scrapbook paper, and now it does!  But, what that means is that I think I need new curtains in the studio now.  I got a couple of charm packs (man those things are awesome and affordable), and I am going to do something cute and simple with fun accents for my studio. I am thinking tab tops with each tab a different fabric with some cute squares at the bottom.  Nothing too matchy-matchy of course.  Just similar enough to echo what’s going on on the other wall.

I will post them as soon as I can!  As, that will likely be one of the only things before Christmas that I can share.  Well, that isn’t entirely true.  I am sure that there will be some sneak peaks!  But, the big reveal of all the Christmas goodies will be after the holidays!

The other day I was over at my friend Lisa’s (who just opened a new store on Etsy and has some great patterns and fat quarters you should check out!).  She was showing me more about how to use my Bernina Stitch Regulator, which was the last thing on my new machine that I was afraid of.  This was really sad because this feature was one of the reasons that I bought this machine.

I have wanted to do free motion quilting since the first time that I ever saw it.  I have had the machine for a year or so, but when I tried it, it didn’t turn out the way I expected, so I put it back in its box and vowed to try it again after receiving a little more instruction.  Lisa, who sold me my machine, was the perfect person to tell me to get over it and just do it.

Before we even got started, I told her that I just wanted to watch (because I knew she would make me try too and I didn’t want her to see how bad this was going to be).  She sat down, plugged everything in, and showed me how simple it actually is.

Lisa: “It is that simple.  And, it would be so much easier with my gloves.  Where are those gloves?”

Me: “Wait, you use gloves?  I see all these women on the blogs I read using gloves, and I never know what the deal is.  Why do you need them?”

Lisa: “You don’t have gloves!  Oh Sandy! Now, you have to sit down and try it!”

And, after trying it with and without, now I see what the big deal is!  Working with the gloves is like trying to open a jar with one of those little rubber thingies.  Everything is much easier to hold on to.

When I got home from Lisa’s, I decided I was going to start knocking out the Christmas list with one of the things I knew that I could free motion quilt.  This is just a simple baby’s quilt for a friend’s new little girl.  It is a floor quilt, so I used drapery fabric on one side and flannel on the other.  I put a piece of batting between and just went to town.  Super simple gift, and I am pretty happy with the way it turned out.  The stitches and pattern are far from perfect, and I started out a little tighter than I wanted to, but I am okay with all that.  I think that the fabric pattern and the matching thread mask all those tiny imperfections enough.  All I have to do now is bind it!

My mother is a couch sleeper.  She is fine if she sits down and her feet are on the floor, but the moment that she leans back into the nice comfy pillows, she is a goner.  So, she has a routine.  Every night, she she falls asleep on the couch and stays there for several hours.  Then, some time in the wee hours of the morning she makes her way to bed.

As a child, I would often try to wake her up, thinking that she would be more comfortable in her bed than on the couch.  But, the moment you turned the TV off or tried to rouse her in anyway, she would tell you that she was watching that and to just leave her alone.  This is the way it is, and it is her thing, so as an adult, I have realized that she is happiest if you just leave her where she is.

One problem with this affliction is occasionally when you wake up to go to bed, you find that you then can’t sleep!  That would be the boat I am in tonight! (Please excuse all misspellings and typos!)

Another problem with this tendency is that apparently it is genetic.  From my observations, all my mother’s children regularly fall asleep on the couch and are quite happy staying there.  I am one of the afflicted.  And, I think that would end up on the couch at three in the morning often if it weren’t for the boy insisting on going to bed.

He will let me sleep for a while every night.  Then, he quietly closes up the house, turns all the lights off, and turns down my side of the bed.  After he does all this, he comes in a wakes me up.  How nicely often depends on how tired he is, but he really is a wonderful man.

A few nights ago, this was the scene on our couch.

As I have mentioned already, the new baby, when he isn’t tearing ass through the house, is quite cuddly.  He is particularly keen on showing you how much he loves you between three and six in the morning when he tries to bite your nose and lick you lips. But, if there is anything that is kryptonite to couch sleepers, it is warm, fuzzy animals.

When I found these on the camera, my first inclination, of course, was to delete them.  I am notorious for deleting pictures of myself that others have taken.  This is another of my idiosyncrasies that the boy will put up with.  However, when I found theses pictures, the first thing he said was don’t delete them, very seriously.  Since, this is not a request he makes very often, I obliged.

But, it did make me think a little about why he wanted to keep them.  It may be because it is a cute picture of the new baby, but it also might that his nightly chore of putting his wife to bed has become part of his routine too.  And, he may want to capture that in some way.  So, despite the fact it isn’t the greatest picture, I thought that I would share it here and say thanks to my husband for being so wonderful!  He may stop a whole new generation of couch sleepers some day!

(photo borrowed from Brene)

For the last few days, I have been working on a post with the original title up there.  I had my dilemma all laid out.  I explained that I am between a place of should and want in my life, and I feel run over by my to do list of what I should be doing.  Right now, I feel drawn towards my want to move to more creative endeavors, and I am having trouble focusing on the shoulds.  I outlined all the reasons I love my job and some of the reasons that make it hard.  And, in the language of the whole post I talked about the separation between my creative life and my academic one.

And, then I opened Brene’s post from a few days ago.  Brene’s blog is one of the blogs that I read very slowly.  With most blogs, I just devour new posts, trying to take in as much information as possible, but with Brene’s, I take my time.  She has amazing things to say, and I feel a connection to her for some reason.  But, when I opened this last post, that connection was made even clearer.  The image above is of a statue on the University of Houston campus, where Brene works.  The statue is called “Sandy in a Box.”  This is why the title of this post has a subtitle.

Reading through her post, I realize that I am trying to place all the areas of my life into little boxes (yes, the song is playing through my head too): this project focuses on diversity issues, in this one I am going to work on green issues, here I am going to be a teacher, here I am going to be creative, here is where I am going to spend time with my friends and family, and this is where I am going to be an Army wife that knows about deployments and acronyms (albeit a box I haven’t found myself in lately, and I am little afraid of returning to). And, like Brene, I think I am ready to start stepping outside of these boxes, and I have found it to be an uncomfortable process.

I really don’t know why I thought living my life in this compartmentalized way was going to work.  It is like trying to have completely separate groups of friends.  There are times when you want to pull everyone together.  So, instead of focusing on the different hats I am supposed to be wearing in each scenario, I am going to acknowledge the pull I feel between want and should.  I also have to acknowledge that being in this position is a dangerous spot for me because it has a tendency to stop productivity on all things.  This is because when I move towards doing something I want to do, I feel bad that I am not working on my shoulds and vice versa.  And, as a result of all of this, I am turning my wants into requirements (ie: making Christmas presents for everyone) in order to give myself permission to do what I want in the first place.

The bottom line is I have to make some decisions about my time and intentions related to what I want to do and what my perception is about what I should be doing.  I have to pay more attention to the work and time I do that fulfills me.

A place to start:

1. It is time for me to start really practicing Christine Kane’s philosophy about if is not an automatic yes, then it is a no!  The things I am working on are either a part of my whole life or they aren’t.  And, if they aren’t, then I need to cut my ties with them.
2. I plan to honor the commitments I already have but take more time to think about those I accept or seek out after this point.  Those who know me will know that this is not my typical MO.  I love to help people, and I love to get involved, but I need to be better about managing my involvement.
3. As a creative person, I need to believe creativity will follow me into all the areas of my life if I follow my last decision.  And, it is okay for me to be creative.  It is what makes me a good teacher and a hard worker.  And, my creativity allows me a different view of the world than everyone else.
4. I need to understand that my view of the world is not going to be accepted by everyone.  After all, the reason I have a different view than others is because theirs doesn’t resonate with me. I want to try to start using the appropriate language when these differences occur.  It isn’t always personal.  Those that I have conflict with just believe in their view point as strongly as I believe in mine.

This whole process makes me think a lot about Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken.”   I have taught this several times to my students.  I think it is a great poem to use with students that don’t have experience with poetry because most of them feel like they understand what Frost is saying, and the message resonates for them.  Upon the first reading, students always think that Frost is celebrating the choice he made to take a particular path.  But, in actuality, it is more likely that the poem wasn’t meant to talk about the benefit of one choice over the other.  Instead, Frost is talking about the inevitability of the choices you have to make.

I think this poem can really be thought of as a statement about just living your life to see how things turn out. So, while I am at this crossroads between want and should, I get to decide if those are two divergent paths, solely moving away from each other.  In this model, I am always missing out on something, and I will likely always be at the standstill I am at right now.

I would like to have a more circular approach to my life, where moving towards something is not moving away from something else, but rather, sneaking up on it from behind!  I think that’s the only true way for me to break out of my boxes and live one complete, fulfilling life.

“I have an addiction, Sir!”

Name that quote.  These are the first addiction that I thought I would share with you.

If you happen to see these in the grocery store, run the other direction!  They are the most evil chips I have ever eaten.  I am normally not a straight potato chip girl.  But, these are the only chips that I could literally eat the whole bag and not think anything of it (and, of course that is just hypothetical).

They are made by Boulder Canyon, a subsidiary of the same company that owns Burger King.  I was completely shocked to find that out!  But, nevertheless, I can’t get enough of them.  And, it only makes me feel slightly better that they are sold in the organic section of our grocery store.

My second addiction is the newest addition to our little family.

Would you get a load of him?  He is so cute and the most cuddly cat I have ever met.  And, the Curmudgeon is slowly conceding.  He is still a stinky kitten, but we are having lots of fun with him.  And, I can’t get over the fact that yet again we chose an animal that matches the furniture.