I recently took a long hard look at my life and realized that while most of it is great–I love the work I do, I have a wonderful husband, great friends and an increasingly cuddly cat–I am very disappointed with the creative-side of things. I have way too many WIPs (Works In Progress) and I am not working on any of them.
I kinda lost my crafty mojo last year, which is understandable. It has not disappeared completely, it has just been dormant for too long. I know this because when I recently made a golden snitch for a friend, it brought home for me how long it has been since I did any serious knitting because I seem to have have lost all of my knitting callouses.
The obvious answer is to just pick up a project, new or in progress and get to work. I wish it were that easy. I have been wandering into our craft room about once a day for the past week or so and I look at all of the yarn and get overwhelmed. I have recently returned to Ravelry to find a pattern I want to work on and the same thing happens. And yet when I decide I want to start small and just make a washcloth, I turn my nose up at the simplicity and decide that it is too boring.
I have since decided that in part winter is to blame. I haven’t been walking because it is still dark too late in the mornings. However, that is noticeably changing which I am very excited about. In fact, yesterday I took my bike out for the first time in many months. I didn’t cover much distance, but I did tackle some hills (kind of inevitable when heading in any direction from my house) and they weren’t too bad.
And the narcissus are beginning to poke up out of the soil, so Spring can’t be too far away. That being said, I still have to spend an hour every morning sitting in front of my SAD light so I don’t just crawl into my hole until winter is fully passed.
So in the spirit of both my physical and mental health I am going to try the following regimen for the next 30 days.

  1. Writing every day. This does not necessarily mean that you will be seeing more blog posts. I am just committing to myself to write something every day. Some of it may be blog-post worthy. I suspect more of it will be private musings that I keep to myself.
  2. Working on a crafty project for at least 15 minutes every day. This may be no more than a few stitches and I may very well rip it all back the following day. The intention here is not to complete anything. Instead, the intention is to slowly rebuild my crafty muscle-memory.
  3. Go outside every sunny day. The goal here is to get me back in the habit of getting dressed first thing in the morning (as opposed to staying in my pajamas until the afternoon) and committing to at least going around the block once. It also gives me permission to stay inside on those really crappy rainy, cold and windy days that we have been having.

Thus far today I have succeeded in 2 of my 3 goals and it is only a bit after 10 in the morning. Guess I know what I will be doing this afternoon.