Ah, a nice rainy day to start my extra-long weekend! It kind of feels like this is the real start of fall now. Usually this is the time of year when I’m excited to get started on a bunch of things, but since this year was such an anomaly I am in the position of needing to finish some projects up so that I can actually enjoy beginning some new ones. I have a big checklist of items I want to complete this month.
I spent a few hours this morning soldering my big stained glass project that I’ve been working on. I’m in the home stretch now and I should be able to get the glass panel done this weekend. After that I will still have a few hurdles to get past to make it into a sealed unit and install it in the door. I need to do some research to figure out how much of that I will be doing for myself. It’s unlikely this will all be complete this month, but if I can at least have a solid plan for how it will all go down, I will be happy.
I also have 2 small stained glass panels that I made with my leftover materials while I was waiting for the glass I needed to finish my main piece. They just need to be framed and they’re all done, but I have been putting that part off because it’s not fun. These, I should be able to finish this weekend; it literally will take me an hour at the most, I just need to do it.
I painted our dining nook, which is now my office, a few weeks ago and it looks much better, but as usual, I still need to paint all the trim. The new colour is so nice that I decided I’m going to repaint the rest of the kitchen the same, so I want to do as much as I can with the paint I have left. It already looks partially done, so I might as well make the finished part larger. This month.
I also have a bunch of my black and white etchings and lithographs from when I was in art school that I want to hang in there. Framing them has been on my to-do list since about 2010, but now that I’m bundling it in with ‘finish office nook’, it has a deadline.
That isn’t everything on my list for this month, but you get the idea.
I also have a lot of things that I am happy to continue working on into the fall and through the winter:
I’m in my second round of pottery classes. The finished pieces are starting to stack up already and I don’t think I’ve even brought everything home that I made in the first 6 weeks. My work has increased in size, which is a step in the right direction, but my skills have a long way to go before I will be at the point where I am actually making something with specific intention. Right now the finished product just looks like whatever it looks like, not like something I planned to make.
I bought some macramé cord and I have a couple of library book on hand for reference so I can try making a hanging planter, but I haven’t actually given it a shot yet. I feel that my years of experience making friendship bracelets as a pre-teen should serve me well here. That’s what I’m hoping, anyway.
Over the summer I had a socially distanced visit with a friend from dance who was wearing a super cute sweater. I decided right then and there that I was going to try to knit a replica of it. Luckily she knew exactly where it came from and it was still available online with lots of good photos to reference. I found a similar pattern and have altered the details to copy the design features of the goal sweater. I started working on it this week, but it will be a while before I know if it’s going to turn out how I’m imagining. Overall it’s a simple knit, so I can work on it while I watch TV without losing track of what’s going on.
A couple of posts back I mentioned that I had read the book, The Power of Habit. Well, since then I have also read Designing Your Life, Company of One and Atomic Habits. I’m on a bit of a self-improvement binge, I guess.
They were all super interesting and had their own specific viewpoints, but for me, the main takeaway from all of them is that you can always examine your life and work on trying to improve the areas that aren’t optimal, and even small changes can eventually have a big impact.
The reason I mention this now is because some of the other ‘projects’ I’m working on are ways of tweaking my routine and integrating habits I want to have into my life so that I’m free to focus more time on all of the interesting things. It’s a bit early to say how it’s going, but I think any attempt to consciously look at the way you’re doing things and decide if that’s the way you want to keep doing them is good. Like Ferris Bueller said,
Dancing In Irreverence 