Last year was all about connections, and this year it was about making time for the things that nourish me and bring joy into my life.
I’ve always loved this quote:
It is one of the reasons I love crafting and working on art projects. It adds beauty to my world. It also fills up my soul with happiness. My theme this year of craft projects for my home accomplished both for me. Continue reading
I have enjoyed crafting my way through the A to Z challenge this year and for my final post, I’m going digital. I’ve created an online zine to showcase all of my home craft projects.
What is a zine?
a noncommercial often homemade or online publication usually devoted to specialized and often unconventional subject matter
When I return from a trip, I spend weeks, even months, crafting my travel album. I journal while away so I have good “notes” and love to find that delicate balance between pictures and text that combine seamlessly to tell the stories of my travels. My trip never feels complete until I’ve transferred my travel memories into a printed keepsake. Continue reading
After taking a year off from blogging, I returned to the A to Z Blogging Challenge with my creative spark renewed. I spent March prepping all of my posts so that I could focus the majority of my time during April on visiting and engaging with other bloggers which is one of my favorite things about this blogging challenge.
It was both strange and exhilarating to be blogging again after a period of inactivity. It was also serendipitous. As news headlines grew more dire and states began to issue shelter in place orders, having blogs to read and comment on throughout the month was an enjoyable distraction.
We have a deep kitchen sink, but as our family eats meals throughout the day, it starts to get piled up with dishes. Once we add a few of our taller Calphalon® pots into the mix it gets too crowded. The endless supply of dirty dishes starts to encroach onto the surrounding counter. The clean side is no different. Our drying rack is no match for the shear volume so we have to lay drying towels along the back of the counter to hold the overflow of clean dishes and the endless supply of empty seltzer cans that my youngest and I produce in a given day. Between the dirty and the clean, this area of the kitchen is often the messiest and most cluttered. I hate it.
I am physically uncomfortable in a cluttered space. I’m happiest when my house is clean. Fortunately, at least when it comes to the kitchen sink, my husband feels the same so we can usually keep ahead of the onslaught.
The same need for uncluttered spaces applies to my to do list. I like a nice, organized list.
If I searched my hard drive right now, I’d probably find old excel files dating back almost twenty years with titles like “house projects”, “gardening plan” and “renovation”. I use to have Doctor Who sticky notes with barely legible instructions scribbled across them hanging from my computer in multiples. My refrigerator mirrored the messiness of the sink with hand written lists and reminders organized on scrap paper and hung by magnetic clips at eye level helping to remind me of what I needed to do that day or that week.
Somehow my short break from blogging turned into a year and a half long hiatus, with a few occasional feeble posts to make me feel like I was somehow still engaged. I kept up a little better with my social media accounts and still spent a lot of time thinking about my blog but just didn’t get around to posting that much.
Maybe that’s the natural ebb and flow of a hobby blog. I don’t know. This is my first blog. I can’t feign that life was too busy. My empty nest meant I did have excess time to devote to my blog, but I found other things to fill the time instead. There were a few major life events during my break including the loss of my mother and a change of jobs. The first certainly a large stressor, the latter more of a minor transitional period.
In the end, I don’t think it was any specific incident just a temporary loss of interest.
Weekends in Maine 