New Year, New Start!!!

Happy New Year to one and all!!!

I hope you all had a relaxing Christmas break and are now looking forward to the year ahead.

As you all know, I've had two very bad years what with my depression, having no job and losing my dad.   Looking ahead to 2012, I need to start the year on a positive note.  They do say that life is what you make it, and I know that only I can turn a negative into a positive!

January is of course the time when we all think about resolutions and making plans for the year ahead.  For the past few weeks I have been thinking about that a lot.  I realise first off that I need to de-clutter my life, which means going through all my stuff and getting rid of things I don't need or use any more -- I need to be ruthless!!!

The plan had been to start over the holidays and do it with my fiancé, but he found Call of Duty MW3 far more interesting than going through his corner of clutter in the study!  I made a start on my own stuff, literally halving a pile of magazines in 10 minutes!!!

I also had a sort through one of my stitching baskets and put all my Christmas stitchings away in it's box.  I still have another box to go through and I know that I need to be ruthless in deciding what patterns I really plan to do because over the last few years I've amassed patterns that I know I will never do, so I should just get rid of them.

I inherited a lot of cross-stitch magazines from my fiance's aunt which I shall be going through tomorrow.

I also have loads and loads of magazine articles and cover kits that I need to get rid of so I shall probably try and sell some of them at my first craft fair next month!  When I've got them sorted, I'll collate a list and post it on here and if anyone is interested in taking them off my hands, you can have them for a small fee!

I have lots of crochet ideas for this year too and in recent weeks I've amassed quite a bit of wool.  The bag that I had been storing it in is now overflowing and the multi-coloured yarns are threatening to overtake my lounge, so I really ought to invest in a large storage container!

My wool stash is breeding!!!!!

I've been dabbling in a bit of crochet over the holidays as I'm working on a design of my own, but on Monday night when I couldn't sleep I got out my hook and yarn and started making a Pokeball (at three in the morning!!!!)  I finally finished it yesterday evening:

I realised after I'd finished that I'd mis-read the pattern and worked the red and white bits in the wrong order which is why it doesn't look right.  The stripe around the middle is a little lop-sided too due to the fact that I have worked in continuous rounds.  I suspect joined rounds may be better for this project.

I have patterns for various other balls that I want to try (when I get the right colour yarn), but I have plenty of red, white and black so I can always have another go at this and see if I can get it looking better.

The pattern was designed by Linda Potts and can be found on her fabby blog W0IfDreamer-OTH.  I know I've probably said this before, but she has a fine selection of gaming based patterns for crocheters of all skill levels!

Just because I've started dabbling with hook and yarn, does not mean I have abandoned my cross-stitch!  On the contrary, I have a stack of stuff I want to do this year.  I finally finished Sudowoodo and the pattern should be up in the next day or so when I've made a few tweaks and converted it to PDF.

I finally got a pattern I was happy with for Mewtwo and with my thread stash re-stocked, I should be starting him this week as well as working on Flygon and maybe even an In Stitches character or too!!! *wink, wink*

I've also started working on the next four Pokemon for the blackwork series -- more on that later in the month.  Oh, and I hope to have some more Pokedex 3D AR Marker patterns by the end of the week too!

*PHEW*

So, it looks like I'll be quite busy with my crafts this month ... better go get started!

Till next time ... keep Kalm and cross-stitch! xx