happy new year

Another year, another set of hopes and dreams and I-promise-to-be-betters. If there's one thing I've learned about resolutions, it's that setting a long list of ambitious ones is effective at not much besides helping me feel woefully inadequate at being the heroine in my own life. But I also believe you should be learning at least one new thing at any given moment (and probably you are, so often we learn without even realizing), so the list of "I resolve"s should contain a few stretching goals, at least.  With that in mind, here's my recap of 2011:

• Learned how to be pregnant and healthy. Upped my intake of protein and veggies, switched to be a walker instead of a runner, drank a lot of h2o, had a healthy pregnancy and a healthy baby.
• learned relaxation techniques to help me get through natural labor. Learned what to expect from labor and delivery, gave birth to a beautiful baby girl without any drugs.
• Learned to breastfeed, sleep in 3 hour stretches, swaddle a baby, soothe my tiny girl, choose, use, and launder cloth diapers...yep, a lot last year was about being a mom for the first time, which is fantastic.
• Gained and lost 35 lbs
• Tried a few new recipes (favorites: pumpkin chili and oriental drumsticks)
• Froze and dried cherries from our tree
• Budgeted - found a system that, so far, works for me/us
• Joined a book club
• Didn't really make any progress at all on the gardening front. Planted some veggies, didn't follow through much with caring for them, harvested quite a few tomatoes out of sheer luck (and their natural heartiness); totally at a loss as to the proper care of fruit trees.  In my defense, I did have a baby in the middle of garden season.
• Saved enough $ to finish our basement (minus the bathroom - in progress) and still be able to quit my job

And here are my goals for 2012:

• Read at least 12 books by the end of the year (I realize a lot of people set a 52-book goal, but that's not realistic for me right now, nor is it how I want to spend the bulk of my time)
• Read at least two new books about parenting
• Run a half marathon or two (maybe another full marathon will be in the works for 2013...)
• Pick up some freelance writing/editing work
• Spend at least two hours/week working on my own writing
• Read at least two books with my baby every day
• Try a new recipe every week
• Something craft-y/creative every two months (so six projects this year).  I have some in mind: curtains, quilts, refinishing furniture, re-covering furniture, photo books...)
• Stick to our budget

We'll see how I do.  I'm learning that with a new baby, setting one big "to do" item each day is really all that's realistic, and sometimes not even that is do-able.  I'm trying my hand at my first refinishing project this week, and it's taken me three days (and counting) to sand and stain a simple bookshelf, trying to work around nap schedules :)

I'll try to track my progress here to hold myself accountable.  I'm nervous and excited for this new year - my first year without full-time work or school, so I have the bandwidth to finally try some things I've always wanted to do. I want to make sure I use my free time wisely (not that I really have MORE of it with an infant, just that it's easier to fit things in being at home instead of in an office).  I'm also anxious about freelancing.  I've picked up a few odd copy writing and editing jobs over the last few years, but I've never made anything steady out of it.  It's going to take some work - I'm up for the challenge!

oh by the way,

those tomatillos I planted last spring with thoughts of delicious salsa verde? They came up just plain old tomatoes. Which is fine, except I had also planted a bunch of those, so we had tomatoes coming out our ears. Who knew you couldn't just trust the label from the nursery implicitly?

a new hobby

...and also a really good reason (I think) for having neglected this blog. Yep, we bought a house! We love it. We've been busy painting, cleaning, moving, and peeling vinyl off the walls (no offense to those vinyl lovers out there, I'm not one of 'em).  More "before" and "after" pictures to come...everyone keeps telling us a house is never completely finished, so I'm excited for this to be a regular on the new-hobby list :)

On another note, we did get a couple of delicious cucumbers from the garden at our old place, approximately 500 lbs. of green tomatoes (ok, but it was a lot), and ONE red one. ONE. Oh well, there's always next year!

where I've been (or really, how the state of my garden prevented me from posting)

Well, in the weeks since my last post, I have learned a few things.

1. Summer is busy. It's hard to find time to pull weeds, and if I don't pull weeds, I don't really want to tell anyone about the state of my garden :)
2. Tomato cages are important. Very important. And if you wait until August, when your poor tomato plants are a tangled mess just above dirt level, it will be very hard to find cages, plant stakes, really anything you could use to help prop tomatoes up, in the store.
3. A small front garden is not the place to plant a cucumber. Thank goodness I only planted one! It has taken over the entire area and is now growing up our living room window.
4. Those little shoots I thought were marigolds were not marigolds. They grew into thriving weeds. I don't know what kind - if it weren't dark I would take a picture - but they completely took over.
5. I like pulling weeds. Too bad I didn't figure that out before the unidentified weed took over. But I think it's vanquished now. Ha!

Now that the garden is just a tangled mess instead of a weedy tangled mess, I will try to keep up on it more and post more often. Plus, I want someone to tell me what my weed infestation was.

i want to try

...this:

There's an awesome free-motion quilting tutorial here at Oh, Fransson! (and lots of pretty quilts...check it out).

More to come on my attempts. Wish me luck!

first quilt

My interest in quilts and quilting has been piqued several times, but a couple of Thanksgivings ago, I went with my mother-in-law to a Black Friday sale at Jo-Ann's. While waiting in line, I picked up a quilting book (or magazine or something) showing how people had taken pictures of stunning colors in nature and turned the concept into a quilt design. The quilts were impressive, to say the least, and those photos have stuck in my brain as something I knew I had to find time to get around to sometime.

So here it is, something like two years later, and I've finally finished my first quilt! I didn't use any "nature inspired" themes - I figured for the first one I should keep it simple. I made a baby quilt for my nephew using just square blocks.  I'm embarrassed to say that I started it when he was born as a "welcome to the world" present, but I didn't finish it until last month, so it was a "happy first birthday" present instead. Here's my nephew with his quilt and various other birthday loot. And a cake-face picture, just because it's cute.

The main reason it took me nearly 12 months to finish this sucker is the binding. For some reason, I felt completely overwhelmed by the idea of binding a quilt. I used a pretty basic binding method (following a tutorial on you tube, mostly) that only shows on one side of the quilt. Next time, I think I'd like to use a thicker binding, and one that's visible on both front and back.  My mom helped me a TON with this quilt - even just hanging out with me while I did the sewing was a huge morale boost - and she let me use her sewing machine.

I do have my grandmother's old sewing machine at my house, but haven't used it because the tension is all out of whack. We discovered my mom's has a similar problem, so now that I've worked through the issue on her machine a few times, I think I'm ready to strike out on my own ;)

While trying to figure out what I was doing (patterns, sizing, binding, etc.) I did come across several blogs with great ideas I'd like to use. I'll post some of them on here too. I'm excited to get my sewing machine set up and choose the fabric for quilt number two! Maybe I can finish the next one in less than a year...if I can find someone to help me with the binding...

the garden

The thing about documenting new pursuits is that you can't be shy about where you are in the process, so here we go.  This is the first year I've tried planting my own {very modest} vegetable garden.  The small flowerbed in front of our window (facing east) is really the only available real estate, so space was limited. I put some flowers in front to try and make it pretty as well as functional, but I got the plants in late in the season, I didn't research which flowers would grow best in full sun, and let's be honest, it's my first time so it was bound to be a bit of a mess.

The good news is, the vegetable plants, although still small, seem to be growing and look fairly healthy.  There are even some blossoms on a couple of them.  The flowers on the other hand...well let's just say I know what not to do next year (i.e. wait until late June to plant, buy flowers just because they're on sale without so much as a google search to see whether they'll grow where I'm putting them, and plant too shallowly).

Some of the things I probably did right (because I acted on the advice of my mother who is a fantastic gardener) were prepping the nutrient-depleted soil with compost and peat moss, and planting tomatoes in a sunny spot.

Here's where I am:

Tomatillo, cucumber and tomato plants.  Still alive!  The cucumber is the vine awkwardly planted in the middle of the garden - not sure what I was thinking there.  If I had a do-over, I'd put the cucumber in the corner by the porch instead.  Luckily, there aren't any breathtaking flowers for it to overshadow where it is.

Those spiky-leafed plants that suspiciously resemble weeds are actually flowers that I planted on purpose. I don't know what they were, but they were beautiful.  Were.  For about a week.  Now I think they're just dead. I did try.

I do know what the snapdragons are, but that knowledge didn't do them much good.  I've already pulled out two of them that were completely shriveled, and the rest of them are on their way out.  Maybe it was just too late in the season for them?  Anybody have tips for snapdragons?

You'll notice there is ONE beautiful pink guy in the center.  I like to think he's telling me, "Hey, I'm not dead - you didn't completely fail at beautification. Try again next year."  I'm not sure what he is either, but I'm sure my mom does. Yes?

Notice the little shoots around him - those are my other bright spot of hope.  Some of them, I'm sure, are weeds, but some I think are shoots from the marigold seeds I planted.  I hear those are good for keeping bugs off tomatoes, so I hope they'll keep growing.  When they get a little bigger, maybe I can figure out which ones are just weeds and pull those out.

Here's my plan for the next week or so:

1. Buy stakes or cages for the tomatoes (the little guy on the end is already tipping over)
2. Buy Miracle-gro for the tomatoes (this is at the advice of our neighbors who have a much more impressive garden)
3. Wait for the littlest shoots to get a bit bigger, then separate out the weeds. Any tips on identifying tiny weeds?
4. Adjust my watering schedule.  How much water do tomatoes need?  I've been trying to eye it so far, but I think I've been guilty of both over- and under-watering.

We'll see what happens - we eat a lot of tomatoes at our house and I have salsa plans for those tomatillos if I can keep them alive!