A New Year

My first resolution of the year should be to blog more often. Believe me, there are lots of blog entries that never get from my brain to the internet.

Christmas came and went but a good time was had by all, which means me, my husband, and our four cats. I had 2 weeks off from work (woohoo!) so I tried to do everything I've always been meaning to get to but in the end I mostly watched movies, knitted, and relaxed. Not a bad way to spend a couple of weeks. I did accomplish some things, like decorating the house for Christmas, spending the day in the city with my friend spinnity, swatching and packing some fabric away, and baking Christmas cookies. But the vacation just flew by. As it does.

As far as resolutions for the new year, I mainly just want to be happy. But here goes:

1. Blog more often - see, it is first! What I really want to do is use my blog to communicate to friends and family. I want to document the things I've made and share them with others. So I will try to get the blog ideas out of my head and onto the internet.

2. Lose weight. Oh yeah. This is on most everyone's list and is on mine every year too, even when I don't make a list. We have a gym membership and we bought Dance, Dance Revolution for the XBox 360 (yes, we did!) so maybe I can dance some pounds away.

3. Embrace my hobbies. I get frustrated because I have so many interests and not enough time to enjoy them all. But I need to let go of that frustration and just enjoy what I do. I should not fret that the spinning wheel is sitting idle because while it sits, I'm sewing or knitting. As long as I am enjoying what I'm doing, then I should not feel bad that the supplies and equipment for other things are sitting idle. They will get used eventually.

4. Think before I buy. I've already been doing this although it's really tough when it comes to fabric and yarn, but I have shown restraint. When faced with tempting purchases, I try to summon up the little voice in my head that reminds me of the materials I have at home that are unused. The little voice also reminds me that I don't need more things in the house. I have to ask what the purpose of possessing the object is and if it is really worth taking up valuable space.

5. Find the good in my work. I'm talking work-work here, as in J-O-B. This is a tough one. I have issues I can't go into here. Suffice it to say that I need to hang on for the next 7 months to a year (hope it's not that long) until another contract job comes along. I don't want to leave the company I'm with but leaving the contract job at this time would not be good for my company.

6. Nurture relationships, be they friendships, family, or my darling husband. Good relationships can't be one-sided so I need to do my part in order to keep them good.

And now to put #1 and #3 into practice. One of my neglected hobbies has been machine embroidery. When I first bought my Pfaff, I thought I'd be embroidering lots of things and I did do some embroidery early on and had fun with it. But over the years I've only been collecting designs and expensive software and not much has been embroidered. We recently upgraded our home computer operating system to Microsoft Vista and that prompted me to find a way to get my embroidery software (VIP) working again. With help from my husband and the internet, we found the right drivers for the dongle and the correct type of cable and I'm back in business. Even though I had sewing, knitting, spinning and weaving I wanted to do, I took time out to embroider some Christmas designs I've been meaning to get to for a while now. These are from a Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer collection I bought a while back. I intend to make them into ornaments, which is why I embroidered mirror images. I stitched them onto felt and used tear-away stabilizer on the back.

These were taken with my new camera, a Nikon Coolpix S200, which my husband gave me for Christmas. I asked for a small camera that I could slip into my purse and take with me to make snapshots of friends or things I make. It's a great little camera. It doesn't replace my Nikon D50 SLR of course but there are plenty of times when I just want a picture and don't want to deal with the lenses and stuff. My husband also got me a small camcorder, something else I asked for, so that I can take little videos of things. Here's a boring little video of my embroidery machine in action, taken with my new RCA Small Wonder. I'm sorry I chose to video when it was stitching white thread. Oh well, I'm learning!