Hello, Miss You + Goals

Hey y'all, happy new year.  This is actually the first card I've made in 2024 and the first blog post I've written (I wrote the last one before I went back down to Houston in December 30).  So let's get stuck in, shall we?

I decided to go with sea turtles today thanks to the Color Throwdown:

I used Blueberry Bushel, Old Olive, and Very Vanilla for my colors, with a bit of Crumb Cake for a neutral.  I didn't have any Blueberry Bushel DSP that matched what I had in mind, so I used a blending brush to add color to some plain Vanilla cardstock.  I rinsed the ink out of my blending brush and just slung water from that onto the cardstock and that's how I got my watery background.  And now my fingers are a little bit blue, but it gave me the look I wanted.

Check out the first Freshly Made Sketch of the new year:

I used some linen thread to represent the long skinny panel on the sketch.  My sentiment today comes from the brand new set Filled with Happiness and while I got it mostly for the stamp with the oranges, I do love the '80s-inspired fonts on the hello and thanks sentiments in the set.  I know who I'll be sending this card to, and I will be writing in some cards later today to get out in the mail in my ongoing single person effort to keep the USPS going.  Also, buy postage stamps ASAP, prices are going up again.

Supplies, all SU!
Stamps:  Sea Turtle, Filled with Happiness
Ink:  Blueberry Bushel, Old Olive, Crumb Cake
Paper:  Old Olive, Thick Very Vanilla
Accessories:  linen thread, Rhinestone Waves Basic Jewels (retired)

Okay, you can feel free to skip this bit if you want to (really, you don't have to read anything that I write, I can't make you), but at the beginning of January I like to take a minute to think about the things I accomplished in the previous year and what I want to accomplish in the year to come.  You can see last year's post here, and here's my thoughts on what is to come in 2024.  As I said in last year's post, I don't do resolutions, I kinda set intentions and I think for like the third or fourth year in a row my word for the year is BALANCE.  We all have about a billion things vying for attention at any given time, and I am forever striving to balance what is most important and what is most effective at keeping me and my family happy.  So in addition to that, let's revisit my yearly intentions.

1.  Scrapbook layouts:  I made 142 scrapbook pages in 2023, which is pretty dang good with an international move in the middle of the year which means I had no craft room from May to August.  I always try to make at least 100 pages, and this year I have an additional goal--make my wedding album.  Yeah, the hubs and I had our 20th anniversary last October and I've never put together our wedding album!  I want to do it before we're all reunited at the end of the hubs' deployment this summer.  (He doesn't read this blog so I'm not worried about spoiling the surprise here.)

2.  Organize and pare down pictures:  Um, need to reattack.  I haven't done anything on that since we moved, other than putting new pictures in folders (which is important), but I need to get back to sorting through the older ones.  I feel like this is going to be a project forever.  And I need to find a place to print my pictures for future scrapbook pages (see #1) because the last place just had horrible quality and I haven't printed pictures in over a year.

3.  Reading:  According to Goodreads, I read 95 books in 2023, about 40% of which was Terry Pratchett's Discworld and it was SO FUN.  Discworld was definitely the reading highlight for the year for me personally, but Ryan and I read through the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series and that was fabulous for both of us.  I love that he's getting old enough for me to share some of the books that I love with him.  Yesterday I started rereading a book that I loved as a kid and it was so fun to start off my 2024 reading with something that I loved 30+ years ago.  This time last year, I had 545 unread books on my Kindle and today that number is 731.  I continue to be amused at how large my TBR stack is, and also grateful that it's all on my Kindle so I don't have to worry about a mountain of books falling on me in the middle of the night and suffocating me.  If all those books were hard copies, then "book avalanche" would 100% be my most likely cause of death, ha.  I'm not even going to bother to check how many books I've bought just since January first.  I shall never lack for something to read...the bigger problem is choosing what to read next.

4.  Stitching:  I'm still working on last year's temperature tracker, which has been an interesting project but I admit I'm ready to move on to something different.  I'm currently stitching the October line and it shouldn't take me too long to finish it up, I just need to sit down and work on it.  I didn't start on the last three Pretty Little Cities patterns, but I did make a beautiful tiger on some amazing hand-dyed fabric and I have so many projects I'm itching to start.  Let's be honest, I have enough potential projects to keep me busy for at least the next thousand years.

So yeah, that's where I am as of right now.  I have lots to look forward to this year :)