goodbye 2011, hello 2012

2011. I've been thinking about you.  What a strange year.  What a full year.  What a hard year.  I really can't believe that it's over.  Finished.  Ended.  The year went by so fast.

And now it is 2012.  The beginning of a new year.  New and blank and full of possibilities.

I made a list of the big things in 2011.  And I made a list of goals for 2012.  I may share some of both of these lists in the coming days.  Until then I want to say goodbye to 2011.  And I want to say hello to 2012.  I am full of hope for the new year.  Hope and plans and possibilities.  And I am wishing the best for each of you in this new year.

Beauty and peace and joy and creativity.  Love and hope and faith and... the best that life has to offer.  Each day is a gift.  A possibility for great things.  It's easy to forget that.  It's easy to focus on the minutia.  It's easy to forget the beauties of each moment.  Can we each vow to try to remember?  Can we, as a group, as souls linked by creativity and friendship and love vow to try to remember?  Vow to try to make the most of each day?  Each moment?  It's a hard task.  A hard commitment, but I think we have to try.  I want to try.  What about you?







*I picked these roses on the day after Christmas.  Amazing that there were still enough roses in the garden that looked so good.  I am so excited to see what the roses of 2012 look like!

yarn bomb!

About a month ago, Shannon from Free Spirit Knits had a giveway on her blog during her 30 Days of Giving Thanks.  It was for a handknit flower from the Yarn Doodler ready to be secretly left in a public place.  And I won it!

I hinted at it in this post when I showed a glimpse of the package.

The flower was so bright and cheerful and it made me happy just to look at it.

It was ready to be "planted" as a yarn bomb, numbered, named and dated.

The flower arrived just about the time that we brought home the dogs and I thought that it would be fun to plant it somewhere that we walk with them.  And then it rained and rained and rained.  Not good yarn bombing weather.  And with the short days many of our walks were in the dark.  I was getting impatient!

Finally the weather was good and Matthias and I were walking together (I needed someone to help document the moment!) with the dogs in one of our favorite parks and I found the perfect place to plant the Mystery yarn doodle.  The park where we were hiking is very hilly and has lots of rock outcroppings and rocky ledges.  I left the path and planted the flower within view, but separated by a deep, rocky drop (actually, by backtracking it's easily accessible.  I didn't have to do any rock climbing to get over there).

Can you see it? 

(In person it's a lot more visible than in my phone photo).

Amazingly, even though the day was nice and we saw lots of people hiking (and even someone riding her horse), while I was planting the yarn doodle, no one walked by.  Matthias and the boys were the only witnesses.

 

I'll be excited to check on the flower every time we go hiking in this park.

Thanks, again, to Shannon and the Yarn Doodler for sending this little bit of yarn-y goodness my way.  I'm sure it will make many people smile.

I have ideas percolating right now thanks to this random act of knit art, the thought of Carmen Adams's little love notes from the most recent Artful Blogging and this awesome phenomenon.  I'll let you know as soon as I figure out how I want to do what I'm thinking.

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday.  I find it impossible to believe that Christmas has come and gone already.

12 joyful thoughts

Yesterday I visited the Dottie Angel blog and found this post.  It was the last in a series, The Twelve Days of Joyfulness, with each day featuring some sort of project how-to.  This last project was simply to write down a list of 12 joyful things.  So I did.  And here it is.

Just a simple list of twelve little bits of joy and some not so little bits of joy. 

With soup on the stove

(inspired by Sharon of The Teacup Incident) and a cup of tea beside me, I probably could have come up with 200 thoughts of joy.  I'm even feeling ready for winter (though our snow did melt yesterday and we're back to mud).  The snow was so pretty.

love that joyful leaping!

and the prettiness of the back of the house in the snowy yard

I've been feeling very inspired, for whatever reason (like Dana*, hit by inspiration, not sure where it came from, but joyful at its arrival!) and have been working on bunches of projects.  It feels amazing.

This quilt top has been waiting for me to put it together as a quilt since I finished it in April.  A challenge now with the dogs.  Having one little cat try to walk across your quilt on the floor is one thing.  But two 75 pound dogs made of almost pure muscle is something else entirely.

The design made by one such dog walking onto, turning around and walking off the layers of the quilt looks pretty cool, though.  Maybe that was their intention.

They do seem to like craftiness.  Or at least craft supplies.  Both enjoy skeins of yarn.  Someone even ate part of the label off one, presumably to get closer to the yumminess of the yarn itself.  Glue sticks seem to be pretty intriguing for them, too.  But most of the time they are doing something like this:

Take a moment today to write down a list of joy.  It's sure to brighten your day.  Thank you, Tiff, for the idea!





*Be sure to stop by Dana's blog and enter her giveaway!  

paint party friday!

It's been a while since I participated, but I finally got the paints out again and spent some time with my WIPs.  Nothing finished yet, but I like the feeling of waiting for the paint to dry, waiting for the next step.

I didn't photograph the in-between phases of my drippy circles painting, but there have been a few since that other post.  Here it is now:

And the small paintings that were just backgrounds last time got another layer.

I also worked on the watercolor of my trachelospermum plant.

And started a painting of a pomegranate.

Wasn't quite working as I wanted it to, but I'm hoping that working with the second layer will be more successful.  Even so, I like the look of the spread of the paint.  With all its bumps and shadows a pomegranate is really not so easy to paint or draw.  I did a bunch of sketches the other day from different angles and learned that fact.  Still, I always like a challenge.

If you're not too busy with holiday stuff, stop by Paint Party Friday to join the party or just find some inspiration.

non-dog news

My life might be a bit all dogs all the time right now, but I don't want my blog to be.  So I won't even mention them today.  Though, I guess I just did.

Anyway, the biggest news is that a set of my bracelets was featured on Etsy's front page on Monday!

I'm so glad that I caught it. Super exciting!

Those bracelets were also featured on the Wiley Valentine blog yesterday. The post is gorgeous as is their website and, of course, their stationery.  Go take a look.

Yesterday I also, finally, added another item to my little shop.  I've been slow to get back into the swing of things with creating for Etsy, but I found the time to whip up this new scarf.

I'm also working on this:

It might be finished or it might need a little something more.  I'm glad to be creating and full of ideas again.

winter beauty

It's not technically winter yet, I know.  But with the shift from rain to dustings of snow and sunshine (and COLD temperatures), it feels like winter.  Good winter.  We've been enjoying trips to the parks with the dogs and being cozy inside. 

I've piled up some of my blankets in the bedroom but have fantasies of putting them all together on just the right kind of display, preferably thrifted or trash picked and painted a pretty color. 

If it could stay sunshiny like this all winter long I'd be very happy.

Jerome still hasn't formally met the puppies.  He prefers to spend 99.9% of his time camped out on our bed.

I've done some creative cooking lately, but only managed to photograph the eggplant I used as part of a recent calzone filling.

There's a leftover calzone in the freezer and that thought makes me so happy.  Some evening we'll pull it out and heat it up and dinner will be done with almost no effort at all.

Another thing making happy is that there are still roses in the garden.

When they're gone I'll be fantasizing about next year's garden.  Oh, the joys of winter.

love

I'm so in love with these two dogs.

We've had a wonderful few days together.  My schedule worked out perfectly in order for me to spend a lot of time with them after bringing them home.

They're still settling in and there's been some crying at night, but I think they're getting more comfortable here.  And they seem to be getting attached to us, too (and definitely attached to their pillows!).

It took me a long time to feel a connection with Holden.  I remember being disappointed about that back when I was raising him as a puppy.  I wondered if there was something wrong with me that I didn't love him right away.  Maybe I didn't know how to love a dog yet.  If that was the case, then Holden definitely taught me how.  I still miss him.  And find it hard to believe, sometimes, that he's not here in the world anymore.  But I think that love makes it easy to love these boys.  I feel so grateful for having had Holden in my life and so grateful that these dogs are in my life now.

flowers, rain and muddy dogs

It's been busy over here.  I've been preparing for the arrival of the dogs and trying to enjoy (what was probably) the last of the good weather.  I cut some more roses just before we got more snow.

The snow didn't last and it looks like I might be able to cut a few more roses before winter is here for real.  I always need some flowers around the house.  The thanksgiving cactus keeps looking more and more spectacular.

And I'm looking forward to the amaryllis flowers from the bulb I just planted and the yellow jonquils I set in water, too.  I'll still miss my roses, but I'll take any flowers I can get.  And when I can't have real ones, I can make them, too.

In the midst of everything else that was going on, I sold some flowers that I made in my Etsy shop this week.

I love this necklace.  It was the first one I made with my crocheted roses and the first one of the rose necklaces to sell.  With this necklace I started experimenting with crocheted leaves, too.

I've been neglecting my poor Etsy shop lately.  Just gotta finish making things for the dogs and try not to fall under the spell of another quilt (for me) and then maybe I can make some new stuff for the shop.

I had one more flowery bit of excitement this past week and I'll give just a tiny peek (and a hint) of it right now with the promise of more to come.

Packages are always a good thing!  And the plans I have for what was in this one are really fun!

And now for the funnest of the fun... it was so hard to wait for the day to arrive, but it finally did.  The boys came home with us yesterday.

I love this blurry photo of them in the back of the truck on the way home.  Don't they look happy?  Kit is the white and fawn spotted dog and Kirk is the red brindle.   I know Matthias and I will be taking lots and lots of photos of them, but so far since they've been home there aren't too many good ones.  Here are a few from one of our visits to the rescue kennel:

Unfortunately we've been having almost constant rain and so our first walks with the boys haven't been as fun as we'd have liked.  It's also made for some very messy playing.  Our backyard is very muddy now and when the boys came in after our after breakfast romp they were filthy.  The other romps today have turned a couple other towels the color of mud.  But they have such fun getting filthy that all I can do is laugh and give them plenty of kisses while I towel them off.

I love watching them run and frolic.  They may have been duds on the racetrack, but they still run very fast and seem so full of joy while they do it.  They're still settling in, but I can say that I am already head over heels in love with these two. 

I could go on and on, but I'll end now.  Gotta get sewing the covers for the new dog beds.