Lately

I've been working hard on new items for the shop, and I'm getting excited about the big reveal. I'm planning it for the beginning of March, with possibly some Valentine's Day items up before then. It can be difficult, juggling a full time job with a side business (and now a second job—at an ice cream shop!), but I'm hoping this is the year I can figure out a balance. I had a couple big milestones in 2014 (my first sale! finally getting serious and ordering business cards!), and I'm ready for 2015 to be the year that I create (and meet) tangible goals for myself and my business. One of them is to share more here and document this time in life.

To the newest year.

Well it's 2014. We're all here stating the obvious, scratching our heads at how we got here, but here we are. I've been ready for this year to begin for some time now, knowing I needed that artificial reset button to get myself into gear. I took a good amount of time off from various things—this blog included—and now I'm back and feeling ready to dive in. This knitting business is slowly blooming in front of me, and I'm itching to put it out into the world. For now my fingers are busy busy busy each night getting ready. The single-digit and negative temperatures have made knitting my number one priority. So here's to the newest year.

Made | A new look!

My overarching goal for 2013 is to keep learning. There quite a few things on the list of what I want to learn, but one that's been at the top for some time has been to learn how to customize this blog. I've come close to purchasing design services, changing my mind last minute because I knew I could learn to do it myself. It's hard to get bloggers to reveal their design and coding secrets, so when I saw that A Beautiful Mess and Elise Cripe had joined forces to create the Blog Design E-course, I signed up the day it was released. That, in combination with Head First HTML & CSS, Second Edition* by Elisabeth Robson and Eric Freeman, have helped me to dive into all of the backend mysteries involved with writing a blog.

I'm sure this space will always be a work in progress, but I'm happy with how far I've come with just a Sunday afternoon and a lot of trial & error.

Care to share any design tips you've come across?

*Full disclosure: I work for O'Reilly and was able to get a copy of this book for free. Either way, I'd still recommend it. 

In 2013, I will learn.

For the past two years, my friends and I have dubbed the ensuing year The Year of ______. Two years ago, in 2011, it was the year of the lasagna. We had just partied ourselves exhausted in Saratoga Springs (and I had just met Mike!) and were all giddy with the experience of staying up until 7 AM to sled into the sunrise and the new year. Our dinner that evening consisted of homemade lasagna and too many cupcakes, and we snatched up the memory to take with us for the rest of the year. That group spent the eve between 2011 and 2012 in separate states, but we texted and emailed and dubbed 2012 to be The Year of The Trader Joe's Chocolate Chip Ice Cream Sandwich (have you never had one? You must!). Through all kinds of unfortunate circumstances, we weren't able to have the Trader Joe's chocolate chip cookie ice cream sandwiches at this past NYE celebration in Saratoga, but we made them from scratch. Through some mixture of nostalgia or lack of creativity, some of us have dubbed 2013 The Year of the Lasagna & The Trader Joe's Chocolate Chip Cookie Ice Cream Sandwich. It's different if you combine them, you see?

So to follow tradition (while making tradition my own), I'm thinking of this year as The Year of Learning. My friends tease me about all of my different hobbies: sewing, crocheting, baking, writing, reading, making jewelry, the list goes on. This year I want to add a few more to the list, but not just for the sake of making the list longer. I really want to focus on quality this year. I don't want think of myself as the Jane of all trades anymore. I want to hone my skills, discover things I love and figure out ways to marry what I do for a living with what I love to do. There are also a few things in there that I love to do that I never want to give up.