Welcome 2024!

Hello all my lovely readers and followers! It is a new year! New chances to craft and make and enjoy our hobbies! I am all about enjoyment this year. I have spent so many years on design teams, making things to a schedule and using products that I was asked to promote, that I am enjoying just making for myself! (I am not opposed to a new design team, but I will be careful what I choose.) 

My blog posting has been a bit sporadic, and my YouTube channel has been on hiatus for several years, but I am going to try to post more often to the blog, Instagram, etc. this year. I cannot promise I will revive the videos, but you never know! I have such a long list of things I wish to accomplish this year.

In fact, I have made several "bingo" boards listing "works in progress" projects (known as WIPs), and each month two numbers are chosen at random and those are the projects I will concentrate on. I hope to make progress on my stitching, coloring, and paper crafting projects this year by using this method.

Note: The stitching WIPGO concept was created by Jessie Marie Does Stuff. Visit her YouTube channel or the WIPGO 2024 Facebook page for more information. 

Plus, I want to try hand dying my own cross stitch fabric, and am joining Annette Green's group on FB to be inspired to create planner pages each week. I hope to share those pages monthly at least. I am still sorting that out. I have a lot of product to use up, a lot of things to accomplish, and I am enjoying just....crafting. Like in the "old days" before social media! That said, I do enjoy my various FB groups where we work toward a common goal or inspire each other in our makes! 

Here are a few things I have been doing the last few months.

I love to use old books in home decor. I also love to buy used books from Thrift Books dot com - to read! And the books are often hardback books. However, they are not always pretty or suitable to use for home decorating. But...if you cover them with scrapbook paper which matches your room's color palette...Ta Da! So I saved out a bunch of books from the "give away" box to cover with paper! These are for my living room. I have more that I want to cover to use for some of the upcoming holidays. And everyone knows, I have paper to spare! 

I also made about 40 Christmas cards and mailed them out. I am not sure how many more years I will tackle this job, I must be honest! I don't love making them enough to keep adding it to my list of things to do at Christmas time. As I get older, just decorating the tree and the house is a HUGE job for me. Then the un-decorating in January! 

However, I did use the Silhouette to address all my envelopes! I had tried it out by addressing my son and daughter-in-law's wedding announcements, and it worked so well that I decided to do it again for the Christmas cards! I was able to use Stampin' Up pens (which are older than my son who just got married!) to address the envelopes. It was so easy! 

Since I was on an assembly line card making kick, I also made a stack of masculine themed cards for my stash. I made birthday, Father's Day, graduation, and generic styles using my masculine papers! 

My kids informed me that I need wedding congratulations cards. My husband said I need some sympathy and get well cards aimed at men (he preaches weekly at his men's Bible group and there are a lot of older men who need a card sometimes). So I guess I have my orders!

I will be writing a stitching post and a coloring post later in the month to update you on those hobbies as well. I confess that most of my time lately is taken up with cross stitching! It was my original passion, and getting back into it after over 20 years has been such a blessing! I have some finishes to share for both coloring and stitching, so stay tuned for those posts. If I escape jury duty next week, I can work on blog posts! 

Happy New Year, my friends! My God bless you mightily in 2024!