2006 resolutions of all kinds

OK, there's no New Year without some heavy resolutioning to be done. Mine can be sorted into three piles: the family and household kind - to be better organised in terms of quality time with the girls and meal making - the "private" kind - to make more time and organise more fun things for hubby and myself - and the "me me me" kind - to get more involved in my local International Women's Club, to get my albums sorted and finally: to get into the local quilting scene. I've received a few leads that I will follow up on now. And I am determined to spend my evenings not only folding laundry and mending clothes but also quilting! Let's hope I've got something to show for it soon!

Remember this?

It's my first ever finished project, now on proud display for Christmas.

Inspiration

I read few blogs on a daily basis, Fibermania is among them ... and I struck gold today! Mrs Mel is talking about her new sketchbook and showing drawings from her old one. I'm a bit obsessed with sketch books myself, though I am not using them much at all. I even bought a book on artistic journal keeping: "Drawing from Life: The Journal as Art".

But when I saw the old sketches, I realised that I was "medium" blind in one of mine. I had attempted to paint our old house in a rather more abstract way. It looked naff (and rather like the MSWindows logo). Now I know: it calls for a quilt!

I'm pleased and now have another project waiting to be begun. That's a "yay" and a "not-so-yay" all rolled into one.

Heaven has come to a store near me!

That's a rare sight in Germany ... and quite a costly piece of Heaven.

Everybody's knitting, I'm scrapping instead!

I'm happy to say that scrapbooking and quilting are complementary hobbies. Why? you ask. Because you can use Fiskars cutting mats for both! This is as good a reason as any for me to talk about scrapbooking here.

I've just picked up my albums again and really need to crack on with them. I have about four years of photos to put in - and that's those four years when I seriously got into photography ... sigh. So I attended a scrapbooking event at my local International Women's Club. It was excellent fun and got me started again. Ever since though, my massive bag is sitting right where I dropped it when I got back from said event late at night.

To help with my scrapbooking, I decided to take an art class that sort of deals with calligraphy. It's more about old fonts and proper handwriting. But it will hopefully come in handy once I journal in my albums. Can you believe that after SEVEN years of marriage, there isn't a single word written into my wedding album (here, we don't get them done professionally by the photographer, but do them ourselves)?

Off to my "to-mend-basket" so that I can pick up my quilting again tomorrow. I'm already terribly tempted to buy more fabric. That's all I ever do, it seems. Buy fabric, squirrel it away and then not do anything with it. I need my own sewing table!

Spammers beware ...

because my blog now has a new feature to keep automatic comments away, let's see if it works.

Moth balls!?!

The question I actually meant to put out there - just before my mind side-tracked me - is this:

how does everybody deal with moths? Do they even exist where you are? Do you use artificial moth repellents? Sandal wood? Lavender?

I have my own fabric to think of and then my husband dropped the last two metres - ever! - of vintage upholstery fabric for his vintage (dare I say it?) Porsche in my lap. It's a gorgeous tweed and needs to be stashed away for future car seat maintenance. It must not under any circumstances become moth fodder!

Any thoughts?