New Old year resolutions

Back at the beginning of the year, I set a loose goal of reading a book a week in an attempt to reduce my kindle's backlog of purchased but as yet unread books.

So far, so good.

By my count, I'm about a week ahead of schedule on the total book count. I'm not entirely sure the number of books in the queue has decreased, as I've picked up a few more, but at least I'm making an effort.

It's worked so well, in fact, that I'm setting one more challenge-type goal for 2014. I'd like to finish one sewing/quilting project a month between now and the end of December. Including August, that would be five projects.

Hah! you say - you call yourself a quilter? Most true quilters' volume would be more than twice that!

Yeah, but they don't live my life.

It's been busy, I've been extremely tired, and sewing is on the bottom of the activity list most of the time. At the moment, the studio is in a shambles. I remember the last thing I worked on - the Zentangle-like soon-to-be-a-pillow quilting piece, but I think that was sometime in May, since the class in which it was begun was May 10th.

Yeah, a summer with pretty much no sewing.

I'm giving myself the freedom to count pretty much anything as a "project". For instance, I have four sets of martial arts thingees (the technical term for the ... thingee) on which to shorten both sleeves and pants. Since the hems need to be rather deep and reinforced with a total of four lines of stitching each (four times four hems per set, times four sets is sixty-four total lines of stitching), it takes a while even with a machine whose top stitching speed is 1,100 stitches per minute. Unless my double needle is the right width (woo hoo, only 32 lines of stitching!) I think I can count that as a "project".

There are small and/or easy things that aren't part of the dozen or so in-the-works things that, if I complete them, will give me more room in the studio. Four throw pillows (the pillow forms take up a lot of room hanging around the studio) for one, the valance for the patio doors another (four and a half foot tall roll of decorator fabric leaning up against the wall).

The first order of business: clearing out the discombobulation in the studio. I've guests coming for lunch Friday, but after they leave, I can start shifting things around in there. The following Friday I'm hosting a craft day; that gives me a target for actual project progress.

We'll see...