Life

Interesting Times

Martha
Life

I saw this post on line earlier in the week. I don’t know if it’s really by First Lady Coolidge or not, what struck me was the words in the post. The last half especially, about taking up a needle has provided me with stability in difficult times.

This approach has been used multiple times over. At the end of world war 1, soldiers with shell shock (what we would now call PTSD) were successfully treated using sewing and knitting as a stabilizing therapy. At the end of the 19th century, sewing was used to treat emotional disorders in women. More recently I have read multiple articles on how knitting and sewing are good for brain health and help people live longer lives. I know it doesn’t work for everyone, but for me these articles have always resonated deeply with me.

In times of great distress, sewing or knitting does several things for me. First of all, the repetitive motions associated with both are calming, much like a form of physical meditation. Second, I am creating something, which gives me a feeling of control. Some times a feeling of control in times when there is little control to be had.

We are now in the middle of figuring out social distancing for the COVID-19 outbreak in the US. There is a meme on facebooks that introverts have been preparing for this moment their whole lives, and I have to giggle – so have quilters and knitters. I have enough yarn and fabric to keep me busy for MONTHS. I also have patterns and projects in work and ideas galore.

I know this is a difficult time for many. I am approaching this the only way I know how. I am being careful with the things I do and the people I am around, and I am trying to find the silver lining in the cancelled events as they mean more time at home to sew and knit. Hopefully I can get a couple of things completed as the world works through this and we can get back to a more familiar life as we know it. I’d also like to think that I will use this break to reset my hectic schedule too, to gain more time to slow down and wield my needles, but I’ve said that before and life always takes over. I need to take this opportunity to slow down. I hope you can do the same.

Doing the Dishes – the mundane tasks in life

Martha
Life, Quilting

One of the great disappointments of adult life, is that absolutely everything you do has two parts – one the great fun, and one the mundane maintenance. Like doing the dishes. I love to cook, but it makes dishes. Lots of dirty dishes. I love having a variety of clothes to wear but wearing clothes makes for lots of laundry.

Sewing is no different at all. Sewing anything means cutting stuff out, which I hate, and cleaning up the sewing room when I’m done, which I also hate. Oh and don’t get me started on ironing. I tolerate all these things, and do them somewhat grudgingly because I enjoy the primary activity enough to make it worth while.

The last couple months, I have been metaphorically doing the dishes on my website. A friend helped me do a major overhaul, pulling out things that I don’t use, cleaning up stuff that has broken, and fixing really weird stuff like how the header would insist on staying on the screen as you scrolled down. I couldn’t figure that one out at all.

You, my dear Reader, will probably really not notice much difference at all, other than that stuff WORKS correctly now, but it took rather a chunk of time and effort to get it to that point. I know going forward that I will have to do the dishes on the website regularly to keep working smoothly, that’s just part and parcel of having a blog and website. It feels pretty darned good to have this done. It’s like after a long weekend, getting the kitchen cleaned up to where I only have one or two things to clean makes it seem so much easier.

In all things, I am learning that keeping up with the dishes as you go is much easier than doing nothing for 3 days and having a Mt. Everest of dirty dishes to over come. I know this but putting it into practice is tricky. I do tend to procrastinate (I know. You are all shocked. Thank you for that.) so I have to push myself to do just 5 minutes worth now, so that I don’t have 5 hours worth later.

So in life. Keep doing the dishes. Do them often. Keep up. Everything has dishes.

Gaining Focus

Martha
Life, productivity

I’m one of those people who wants to try and do just about every single form of fiber arts available on the planet. I’m sure when we finally meet aliens, I will want to try their fiber arts too. I’ve been that way as long as I can remember. I will seen what friends are doing, or see an article on line, or something in a book and my hands literally twitch wanting to feel how that process works.

I know I am in good company in this, I have a lot of friends who are multi-craftual. A lot of quilters also knit or crochet. I have a couple of friends who are weavers. Believe me, that is a rabbit hole, down which I am DESPERATE to fall, but it takes up space in my house and time out of my schedule. It’s not just crafts, it’s music and games too.

There is so much out there in the world and I want to do it all. The problem is I am bound by the fact that we live on earth, a planet which has 24 hours in a single rotation, and I am a human being so I require 8 hours sleep a night (long long gone are the days when I could get by on only 2 or 3 hours sleep) and in order to pay for all of this stuff I have to keep a job which takes a minimum of 45 hours every week. All of this leaves me very little precious time in which to do the things I want to do. So this means I have to make choices, and limit myself.

I am binary when it comes to time management. I can always get myself ready and plan for traffic and be on time for things and I ALWAYS plan too many things. I get over committed and even though I get it all done, I end up tired and worn out. I need to figure out how to manage a sweet spot where I do enough to keep my hands and my brain engaged, but not so much that I can’t keep up and things start falling by the wayside.

I am taking a long hard look at this year, and I am realizing that there are a handful of things, that I really enjoy, but that are too difficult to keep up and I need to cut back. I don’t want to do that but I know it’s the right thing to do. So decisions have to be made, then it’s off to the sewing room to work on a myriad of projects. It’s nearly faire season again, which means all kinds of garment sewing for a bit. More on that in another post.

Making Something Out of Nothing

Martha
Life, Quilting

One of the things I have always loved about quilting is how a whole lot of stuff comes together to make a lovely quilt. Thanks to a group who loves swaps, I have really come to appreciate the really scrappy quilt. We have exchanged a lot of things: hourglass blocks, 5″ squares, log cabin blocks, lots of stuff – and since a number of people have been involved in the swaps, the stack of stuff I get back tends to be a very random, unrelated stack of things.

The last few years, my eye has been drawn to really scrappy quilts. I’m using patterns that focus on the contrast between light and dark more than a specific color or style of fabric. I have been cutting up my stash (that’s a long term effort for sure) and more and more, I am finding fabrics that on their own, don’t go with anything, but when cut up fit right into my scrap quilts

I am also noticing, while working on several projects at the same time, that there is a whole lot of chaos and nothing for a long time, then all of a sudden there are blocks that can be sewn together as a top. I don’t think I will ever get tired of watching all of the chaos and destruction of my cutting table suddenly coalesce into a stack of blocks that are enough to make a quilt. This is the one and only are of my life, where my effort directly translates into taming the insanity and creating something good. I seem to really need that a lot of late.

One of my projects is a quilt made up of 256 6″ squares with a circle appliquéd on each one. When I started it was a stack of pretty fat quarters in a plastic box. Then it was a stack of circles cut out and a stack of squares. I’m about half way through the applique process and all of a sudden I have a box of finished blocks and I can now start to see what the finished quilt is going to look like. It’s so exciting to see it start to come together.

Another project is 169 6″ pineapple blocks. So far I have 26 completed, but that’s enough to see my happy little stacks coming together and I can see the promise of that project coming together even though there is a long road of strip cutting and piecing ahead of me.

I know no matter what all happens out there in the world, I can continue to make something out of nothing happen in my sewing room.

Overwhelmed by Life, making a plan.

Martha
Life, productivity

You may have noticed I missed last week. I have to say, over the holidays, I did not have a clue what day it was. There were so many Saturdays and Mondays it was shocking. I’m very hopeful that things will settle down now that we are back in Ordinary time.

With that being said, holy cow, I am overwhelmed by everything. I have a list of things I would like to do that is longer than my arm. The list of things that I have to do is shorter, but most of them are repetitive tasks, so that tends to stretch on at length. So there are never enough hours in the the day, nor days in the week. I’m sure this is a familiar sentiment for everyone out there.

I know what I need to do is to sit down and make myself a list of priorities for the coming year. Identify things that I really want to get done and then focus on those. I am thinking about making it for the year because some of them, like putting sod down in the back yard, are very time dependent, so even though that is very high on my list, I probably cannot start that until March or April if I’m honest.

I got a new planner called Commit 30 (no affiliation, no paid advertisement, I’m not a brand ambassador, just saw it and liked it). The idea is that each month there is something you want to accomplish and the planner is setup to define that goal, make some notes about how you are going to get there, and then put dates on that month to do things to accomplish that goal. I like this idea. There are 12 months in a year, which means I could possibly get 12 things done this year. Honestly some of my things will take much longer than 1 month, like cutting up my stash, but I can make one heck of a start in one month, and better still, I should be able to establish a new habit in that 30 days.

I really don’t like the idea of New Years resolutions, but this time of year is a very natural time to look ahead to the next 12 months, as we have turned the corner on the shortest day of the year and have started the new cycle. I want to have goals instead of resolutions. I want to make a reasonable plan, that include steps to achieve those goals. Ok honestly, I want more coffee first, but after that, there will be goals.

The end of one year is the beginning of the next.

Martha
Life

This will be my end of year post, and this is a big end of year – it is also the end of the decade. That means it’s also the beginning of the next year and the next decade. Can’t have an ending without a beginning, and as with most beginnings, it’s difficult to be sure of where things are going at the initial point.

Humans like to count things and pigeon hole things and make sets of things. This is why we like to keep score. How can you know where you are if you don’t have some kind of way to measure your progress? Brings both good and bad to the equation. On one hand, knowing where you are tells you how far you have to go to your destination; a way to answer the eternal question “are we there yet?”. On the other hand, keeping score leads to comparison (scores have value when compared against other scores or against a scale) and that is where we tend to fall down a rat hole in the game of life.

My progress on my journey is not the same as either your progress or your journey. Comparing my score to your score is pointless. Apples and Oranges. Which I never really understood since they are both mostly round fruit with stems. More like Apples and gorillas. I’ve seen the meme on FaceBook several times that comparison is the thief of joy. How many times have we been perfectly happy with something until we see what somebody else has.

This year I’m not going in for any resolutions, or comparing of my decade with anyone else’s decade. I’m going to go into the new year and the new decade with goals. Goals that are measurable. Goals that are attainable if I keep focus and work towards them. Goals that have meaning and significance to me, no matter what they mean to other people. I have a chance here to set the strategy for the next artificially bounded span of time in my existence. While I would like to start counting years differently (I’m getting older, I’d like the years to slow down a bit), our society functions based on a common understanding of time, so I kinda need to count my rotations around the sun the same way. I do not, however, have to make my goals or my expectations align with anything else in the world but what is right for me. That is an important life lesson.

So as this old year winds down for all of us, I wish you peace, I wish you clarity in identifying your goals, and I wish you the power to achieve them. I’m working on doing the same in my life.

More Effective Use of Space

Martha
Life, productivity

As many of you know, this past year I built out at the farm and moved in August. I downsized the house somewhat from what I had in McKinney. From a 4 bedroom w/formal dining and game room to a 3 bedroom. I’ve been working hard on trying to fit everything into the smaller house, and to quote Dolly Parton, it’s rather like trying to put ten pounds of mud in a five pound sack.

I had planned to use the larger bedroom as the sewing room / office area and keep the spare room for a guest room. I was really going to do it up nice, and have a private suite. Ah the best laid plans you know. When I really sat down to think about it, the number of times that company comes and stays for a significant visit will be very slim. Close to none. I might have a handful of people who will spend the night over a weekend but that has different requirements than long term company.

Dave Ramsey talks a lot about how our home is the largest investment we will make, then people will set aside a percentage of that investment and rarely use it. When I look at the amount of real estate taken up by the spare room, that means I’m setting aside 21% of my house and not planning to use it. Holy Smoke. That’s a lot of my big investment that I’m not planning to use on a regular basis.

So I’ve made a very difficult decision and moved my work office into the third bedroom and will put in a day bed to use when company comes. This means I can use the room 5-7 days a week every week of the year, though what it is used for can change. The decision was a difficult one to make; somehow felt like I was conceding defeat. Now that the decision is made, my whole perspective has changed.

I got the furniture moved over the thanksgiving week, and a couple of friends ran an extra LAN cable through the attic so I can connect to my network in here. I’m hanging pictures and putting things up and I’ve come to a couple of huge realizations:

1) I’m no longer hitting my head on the long arm when I back up from my desk. That area was rather tight and I bumped my head more often than I’d like to admit.

2) I have a place for my train stuff. I have a lot of train stuff, much of which I like to have out on display. Up til now I had no idea how I was going to be able to do that, but now I have a great way to display that stuff all in one place, AND it is a part of the house I am in regularly so I can enjoy it.

3) I can hang up a lot more of the pictures and mementos that I have , that were not originally part of the spare room design. Maybe that was a limitation of the original plan, but I’m happy to see that stuff out and on the walls.

4) the space vacated by the desk in the sewing room is large enough for one of the bin organizing solutions I had in the other house which means I have enough room to unpack the rest of the fabric boxes and put it away. That’s huge. I didn’t know how I was going to fit the rest of the stuff in that room.

So are you using your space effectively? Have you set aside 20% of your biggest investment and are not using it? Is there a way you can make rooms dual purpose to make other areas more functional?

I’m excited about how this will look when it is all done, how I have a space for work now, and especially how I will be utilizing all of my investment.

this is the song that never ends….

Martha
Life, Technology

I learned early on, that laundry and dishes are two of the great lies of adulthood. No matter how hard you try, you are never done. You might get done for now, or done with this round, but no matter how hard you work, you will turn around and there will be a dirty cup sitting next to a dirty sock. That’s life.

I am coming to understand that anything technology is the same as laundry and dishes. I started this blog a while ago, and I thought once I got the website layout done, that it would just hum along happily but that’s not how it works. WordPress is constantly going through upgrades, and any upgrade, at any time, can break a part of your website or blog with no warning. Some things I’m able to figure out how to fix. My portrait on my blog is finally right side up after a very long time of being sideways for some users (not all, that would have been too simple). I’ve noticed that the links to my InstaGram photos breaks more often than anything else, and I can’t figure out if that’s down to WordPress or InstaGram making changes. Either way, it’s a very frustrating dirty sock to chase down. I’m almost to the point of just removing that widget and not having that link in place.

In my house, I have a bunch of WiFi enabled lightbulbs. At first, they were just amazing. I have scheduled routines and I no longer have a physical timer on every light that the cat used frequently as a back scratcher, thus changing the default time on the timer. I have noticed that after several upgrades, things aren’t so smooth anymore. The bridge that controls everything is now end-of-life so I will have to replace it, and my nightstand light in the bedroom has gone rogue – it just turns itself on and off at the beat of its own drummer, completely ignoring the programming that I set up. At this stage I’m almost ready to just start turning my lights on and off by myself. This does open me up to a lot more stubbed toes as in several rooms I have to walk into the room to get to a light to turn it on and the number of times I stub my toe on something or trip over something is startling.

I like technology, and I like using technology, but when it starts becoming dishes and laundry instead of magic, I get less and less impressed. If you will excuse me now, I have to go fight with my blog and InstaGram and try to find that other dirty sock. It never ends.

Thankful and Grateful

Martha
Life

We head into Thanksgiving this week, and as the name implies, my mind has turned to all the things for which I am grateful. Well most of the time. The few times I have been out shopping, my mind has been on how many people really need to quit being bitchy and focus on what they do have in life. That’s a different post, however.

This will be my first Thanksgiving out at the farm, and oh my, how fall suits this place! I’m learning new routines with the dog (have to wash his feet when we go out side after it rains because ALL THE MUD), the cat is getting much cozier as it cools off (as I type, she is positive she can sit in my lap on top of the iPad. She cannot), and cooking has taken a definite cool weather direction (soups, chili, beans etc)

I am grateful for so many things this year, this blog post would go on forever if I named them all. I am grateful to health and friends and the fact that I have the ability to build this house and move out here. I am grateful for everyone who helped me along the way. I’m even grateful to people I don’t know – my awesome kitting was an owner surrender and because of that person, I have the most amazing house panther.

I will keep this short, I know we all have a lot to do this week so that we can enjoy the week with family and friends. I hope you find all the blessings in your lives this week and spend a little time reflecting. I worry that our society is much more focused on what we don’t have, than what we do. I don’t have everything I could want (there’s not enough room for that much fabric anyway) but I have enough, and in that I am tremendously blessed.

I would also like to express my gratitude for whoever had the brilliant idea of gas fireplace logs with an electric starter. I have fire at the push of a button and on a chilly country morning, it doesn’t get any better than that.

The Vanishing Weekend

Martha
Life

Here it is, Monday again. I swear it was just a few minutes ago and it was Thursday and Monday was a long ways in the future. Plenty of time to write a blog post. Next thing I know, the weekend is gone in a puff of smoke and I’m looking at 10am square in the face and no post to be found. Well it happens sometimes.

I’ve decided I need a refund on my weekend – or at least a partial refund. I’m positive I did not get as much time as I paid for. I had a huge list of things to do and people to see this weekend and barely managed to scratch the surface. It was good to have a more ‘normal’ calendar after all the hubbub of the move: there was a lecture series at the quilt shop in which I was a participant, some friends came out to the house Saturday and it was game day Sunday for my RPG. All good activities that had me out and around people, but I’m relishing coming back out to my quiet little house in the country.

This weekend marked another big milestone – I picked up my mower last week, so I was able to start mowing this weekend. I am the proud owner of a 52″ zero turn Hustler mower. (Insert the maniacal laughter here). That thing just zooms around the yard. There is something surprisingly relaxing about mowing over things in the yard, and in some cases, backing up so you can mow over it a couple of times before moving on. Yes at this point I’m pretty much just mowing weeds all down to the same height, we aren’t even coming close to ‘yard’ or ‘lawn’ but it looks nicer, all neatly trimmed. The dog doesn’t get lost in the weeds now, and it’s easier to see him when I am out at night. I haven’t mowed my yard in YEARS, and riding is much preferred to walking a mower around, so this will take some getting used to. There’s a lot of work to do out there, but I don’t have to have it all done this week, this month or even this year. One of these days I will look out on a really nice yard and wonder when that happened. In the mean time I am taking lots of photos so I can look back on how things used to be.

I’d like to say we are headed into fall, but here in Texas the temps are still in the upper 90s so I think we have several weeks to go, but I will say, this morning at dawn, standing outside with Mr. Pops, there was just the faintest hint of coolness in the air. A little tease of what is right around the corner. I’m ready for fall here at the farm.

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