I am a starter of things.
A lot of things.
Too many things.
Unfortunately, I am far less often a finisher of things. Also, unfortunately, I have always struggled with the “journey” part being the point. What this means is that when I start something and don’t finish it, I feel like I have failed. EVEN IF I have learned something along the way or I “Made Something” for 178 days, but didn’t make it until 365, it still feels like a failure, that I have let myself down and wasn’t able to follow through. Heck, even the fact that I’m typing up this Project 365 post on January 25th instead of January 1st feels like a huge failure to me. But I guess I’m working on it.
Around the second week in January I found Project 365 Somethings on iHannah’s blog. I’m not sure how I missed it. You should definitely stop on over to her beautiful blog and take a look. The short version is that you end the year with 365 Somethings. You can do this as a daily practice of one thing a day, a weekly goal of 7, or work in whatever number of batches works for you. Some people are even breaking it down to 52 Somethings to start. Then, post progress updates to your blog.
The overall idea is to really delve deep into something you’d like to learn or something you love to do. This is like the 10×10 board game challenge that I have started several times (and only completed once). As people near me know, I have been focusing more on embroidery lately and moved a little further away from beading. I still love beading, but I have this other, newer, love right now and that’s demanding a lot of attention. I’m in several challenges and groups dedicated to it: 1 Year of Stitches, WIPocalypse, Stitch From Stash, etc. But most of those focus on finishing individual and specific projects.
My biggest reluctance and hurdle with Project 365 Somethings is that I had a hard time figuring out WHAT that End Something could be. I mean, making 365 different embroidery pieces is too much for me. Even *I* know that! Looking at all the embroidery I love, I am often most impressed with people’s handwriting and lettering. Especially since it’s the snarky things I like the most so they almost always have words. I’ve never had particularly bad handwriting, but it’s not Embroidery Worthy handwriting. So I think this is where my end game lies: to be better at embroidering mine and others’ lettering.
BIG GOAL: My goal for this year will be to Embroider 365 Words. Included in this will be the weird fonts on presents I am working on for friends, handwriting and lettering practice done on my own for no REAL purpose (this in and of itself–terrifying), and just general practicing of new stitches in lettering form.
First up: a Mortal Kombat present for a friend that I’m still working on…
Finish Him!
That font man…I tried to get the two H’s to be as similar as possible, but that’s as close as I got on that. I definitely need a lot of work on stylized fonts. But it’s a start, right? And 178 days of making things is better than none, right?
For now? 2/365 #365Somethings2018
crafting{without}kids 