Just taking some chill Deep breaths, deep thoughts, some action Wait, where's my coffee? My mornings have been lots of thing about stuff I have to do, while rubbing my dog on my couch, constantly losing my coffee. I feel like there;s a lot going on so I need extra time on quiet contemplation

@Alice Creason, it was dark when I took the picture, the lighter colour is actually off-white. Now that you mention it though, Gryffindor colours would look really good in my living room. Maybe the next one. 😄

Love the blanket! Is it Gryffindor-inspired, or just a coincidence? 😁

Hi @Lilly.O.4 , I love the hand lettering trend. People are doing some beautiful things with brush pens. I can understand what you mean about needing to practice it every day. I love that you're dedicating this year to learning new things! Can't wait to see what you do!

Yes, I hear ya. Here is mine for today: Staff meeting today Everyone wondering, Will the school have to close? We are on spring break this week and watching other universities announce closures for the rest of the semester. Wondering if we are going to do the same...

Way to go, Alice, it's beautiful! I'm hoping to finish my zig-zag blanket this month as well as establish a daily calligraphy practice.

Hi, I'm Lori. I spend a lot of time thinking about making things (other than dinner) but am trying to spend more time doing. I started a blanket during the zig-zag crochet-along using Kim's Craftsy/Bluprint class to learn how. I was going along great and then life got in the way and the project sat in a bag for a while. During the MIMU workshop I started working on it again and I want to keep up my daily crochet time. Also, last year I did Show Me Your Drills, learning the basics of modern calligraphy with brush pens. I went on to learn the lower-case letters and how to join them but still haven't learned the upper-case letters so I'm trying to set up a daily practice for that. It is really something that needs to be practiced every day even if just for 5 minutes I have a lot of creative things I'm interested in, all of which I little or no experience with, and my goal is to try my hand at as many of them as I can this year. Embroidery, hand applique, sewing, needle felting, drawing, painting, art journaling and more but even if I only get to one or two I'll be okay with that.

Big event coming. Will we have to cancel it? Just need to decide. This has been the all-consuming issue for me (leading to lots and lots of stress knitting!).

I finished the inner square last night on my counted canvas project. Woohoo.

I thought it might be fun to share tips and ideas for small, easy, doable things to try if you're struggling to build a daily creative habit. This exercise only takes a couple minutes each day and is for anyone who is trying to start a journaling, diary, or daily writing habit. You can use it by itself as a 2-minute daily diary entry or use it as a warm-up exercise any time you're feeling stuck. The exercise is simple: Write a haiku about your day. A haiku is a very short 3 line poem that follows this format: Line 1: 5 syllables Line 2: 7 syllables Line 3: 5 syllables --------------------------- Example: Had cabin fever The sun was shining today Went for a short walk ----------------------------- (Note: They don't need to be GOOD haikus!) Start this habit and pretty soon you'll start making up haikus for everything.

Declare an intention and/or show your progress for the month of March 2020 here! This month I intend to complete the counted canvas project I've been working on.

Hey, accountability works! Here is the progress I made yesterday evening and now today:

YES. THIS. SO MUCH THIS. This is what we need to change, everyone. We've got to start putting OURSELVES first. The laundry, the grading, the grocery shopping, the conference call...they can all wait. We ALL DESERVE to spend 5, 10, 15, 30 minutes just for ourselves EVERY. DAY.

In other news: I have complete Row 4 of the button band on my hoodie. I have three more rows to knit, then the Bind Off row. YAY! And in other other news: Reports of each row in the hoodie button band being over 4,000 stitches each are greatly exaggerated. I did a triple-recount, and the actual number is a much more reasonable 516 stitches per row. This means I have 1548 stitches left to work, then 516 stitches to bind off, then done! Thought: I must be getting royally tired of this buttonband thing if I am now counting down the actual stitches instead of rows remaining to complete...

Oh, @Alice Creason, I am sorry you have been having such a terrible time! I’m glad that the surgery is behind you, and that you are on the mend despite your difficulties. I am also very glad you posted this here, because you (and you, @Kuchylm, as well) are describing me and my challenges this past week or two—so at least I am not alone in my struggles! After the last few months of illness and snow storms and power outages and family drama and more snow and whatever, I feel as though my to-do list is screaming at me. I am so incredibly behind. I know this, because last month, I started a primitive sort of bullet list, trying to get things on paper so they didn’t keep me awake at night. That did help the nighttime anxiety some, but then...then I realized how long the bullet list of tasks was, and how many tasks there were on there which I had procrastinated about which were now pushing up against due dates, and so on. I responded by trying to do the anxiety-inducing things as fast as I could go through them—so the anxiety would go away as well. Some of these tasks I had procrastinated about because they were HARD to do, so in trying to push through the hard stuff as fast as I could, I may have knocked my own feet from beneath myself. I’m emotionally wrung out (and feeling needy, which I hate hate hate), and my energy level is dipping into reserves at this point. There’s a nasty cycle here. I try to do All The Things, lose energy, don’t have energy to be social online, so end up feeling needy, try to resolve that by doing lots of things, and then we are back around again. Then I noticed something else: I, too, put my creative time at the end of the list, because I have been using my creative time as a treat, or a reward, the kind where one says, “If you finish cleaning the bathroom and then do 3 things from your list, AND it’s close to end of the day, THEN you can go spin for a half-hour before M gets home”. (I think using creative time as a reward/bait is another form of prerequisite procrastination.) In other words, if I have energy during the middle of the day, I really ought to be using it to complete more list items, rather than “frittering away the daylight hours” (that may or may not have been a quote from a figure in my family...) by knitting or spinning or whatever. I especially feel guilty if I take creative time if anxiety-provoking items (the ones Eva calls “peace bringers”) are still on the list. Especially if they are time-sensitive. This isn’t helpful, I know. I never realized I was using creative time as bait, more or less, as a reward for getting my chores done. To be fair, this is what I was taught growing up. My mom, a SAHM for most of my childhood, had a schedule in mind for each day, and she felt very strongly that one ought to be doing “work” or “chores” during business hours. She herself did her chores and worked on her to-do list all morning until about 11:30AM. Then she would allow herself a half-hour to an hour for lunch, during which she would read a novel for herself. After time was up on lunch, she’d work again until after dinner, when we kids were doing chores. For her, after dinner was her time, time to watch TV, read, work on her own sewing projects, etc. The same was true for us: After our chores were done, we could do whatever we wanted to do. But the work had to be done FIRST. The more I think about it, the odder this seems to me, now that creativity is more or less my life’s work. Why isn’t creative time part of “work” for me these days? It used to be; or rather, it used to be something I valued enough, and felt others valued enough, for me to give it the gravitas of something which earned its own calendar slot. Now, particularly in the past few years, my feelings have shifted so that once again I am using creativity as a carrot in search of checking off as many bullet items as I can. When I put it that way, it sounds silly. But changing this attitude is a real challenge for me. The concept of scheduling creative time makes so much sense to me. If only it were so easy to re-program the voices in my head!

Ugh. @Alice Creason I'm so sorry to hear about the complications from surgery. Can nothing in life ever go smoothly? This is a question I've been asking a lot lately, with fists balled up and shaken at the skies. Sometimes mindlessly scrolling Facebook or watching videos is all we can expect of ourselves while our body is wrecked and fighting so hard to heal. Sometimes, that's exactly what we need. Sounds like you're trying to maintain life status quo even as you've been feeling dreadful. That's a tall order, my friend, and one I suspect no one expects of you but yourself. Are there folks at work who can help unburden you of your work-related obligations? Surely no one will expect you to be working hard while you recover from surgery? Please don't feel an obligation to this group right now, but please do count on us for company through the magic of the internet, and for talk of creativity while your body and mind work up the strength to make things. Sending much love!

@Alice Creason welcome to life 🙂 and way to be honest. After reading this I breathed a sigh of relief and thought "oh it's not just me floating along and feeling like I'm playing catch up and wondering what should I be doing". I'm exhausted by 8pm every day, with bouts of needing a nap but no time for it at least 2 other times during the day. Sickness, work, or anything that taxes me beyond the usual ordinary life things will derail me very easily. Getting my house packed and ready to sell while living in it has been my derailment. I've squeezed some doodling and making in here and there but could work a teensy bit more to make a sustaining habit of just 5 minutes of make time.

Okay, I posted this over in the needlework forum, but I'm posting it again here. It's the same photo. I have not made any new progress on this in the past few weeks. So, this is accountability time for me. This is a winter-themed pattern, so I would like to finish it before the first day of spring: March 19.

Hi all, I haven't checked in here in a couple weeks because I have been experiencing some not-great side effects from my recent surgery that have caused some serious diminished quality of life issues. So, I've been kind of a wreck recently, which makes it ironic that I'm the one who has started this group -- kind of a "physician, heal thyself" kind of thing. Yeah, I fell off the creative habit bandwagon in a big way the past couple weeks. I suspect there may be some "prerequisite procrastination" going on as @Kim Werker put it so well in the podcast earlier this month. I feel so behind in work -- both my library work and teaching/grading -- that I tell myself I can't work on my creative project(s) because I "have to" grade all the things/prep for class/pull those database stats/etc. At the same time, I am so wiped out most of the time that I don't do those things either and end up doing no-value activities like checking Facebook and watching YouTube videos. So, I am caught in this downward spiral right now, and I am hoping that by being honest about it and posting here, that I can begin to pull myself out of it and make some healthier decisions about how I spend my time.

Hi ladies! Thanks @Alice Creason for starting this! I did a 30 day doodling habit in January and it went great. And then February hit and I floundered with what to do creatively. I'm also moving/selling/buying a house so I didn't want to take on too much. I think drawing is where I need to go back to because I just need a sketchbook and pens. Here's to a creative habit!

I’m Sandi, and all I want for last Christmas is to finish something. ANYTHING, but preferably something for me that I could wear. That sounds selfish but over the past few years I realized that I don’t have much of my own work to wear, not in the knittables department, anyway (I’m primarily a yarn person). I discovered that stuff I have knit previously either doesn’t fit any longer or went off to live with other people. (To be fair, I have a number of pairs of earrings and some necklaces that I wear that I have made/designed, but I really want some yarnly to wear!) I’m nearly done with a hoodie, as many of you know. I’ve got about a half-dozen rows left on the buttonband, and then a couple of seams to sew up, buttons to find and sew on, and maybe then I can post a pic of me wearing it. Here’s a photo of Tim using his tail to point out things he finds objectionable (at least that is what I think he’s doing).

I'm so excited about this group, @Alice Creason! Thank you for starting it! --- So, hi. I'm Kim. And as you all likely know, I started my daily creative habit a few years ago, by doing a Year of Making. I had never succeeded at any kind of daily project before that, and I had tried many of them. I was certain I didn't have the conviction or the commitment or the creativity or whatever. Until I found an approach that worked with me instead of against me, and it changed everything about my creative experience. I did a YoM for several years straight, and at this point I hardly think about it. I probably make something every day, but my habit is strong – it's my normal now to be making things, so I may notice when I skip a day or a week, but I no longer fret that I'll have to work on reestablishing the habit. The habit is the part that's a constant. I honestly didn't think I'd ever write these words; it's a really great feeling. But. Of course there's a but! But there are more things I want to do, and I specifically struggle with putting in the time and effort to learn new things that I find difficult. For example, I have wanted to learn how to draw better. I have no, however, ever succeeded in committing to drawing daily. So that's what I'm doing here and now. Except maybe not exactly now. But I need to do this, and I'd appreciate the nudging and cheering and check-ins our community is so good at providing. There, I said it out loud. I want to do a minimum 30-day daily drawing project.

As this group gets started, let's use this month to declare intentions and share what you're currently working on. As members join the club, we can talk about what kinds of accountability and support we would like: prompts? monthly challenges? tips for tracking your projects? tips for finishing what you've started? I hope this group will provide support for all types of creatives, whether you draw, paint, sing, write, knit, weave, dance, or play an instrument. Share what you're working on this month.

This group is for anyone and everyone who wants support and a little accountability on the way to building a daily creative habit. Introduce yourself here! Do you already have a well-established daily creative habit? Have you been trying to build one? What do your current habits look like? ---------------- I'm Alice, and I've been trying to establish a daily creative habit for what feels like forever. Sometimes I get some momentum going and can keep it up for days, weeks, even months. But, then life delivers a smackdown, and I have to start all over again. My primary areas of making are embroidery/needlework, weaving, and drawing. But, I also dabble in paper crafts and other areas. I live in the far south suburbs of Chicago with my husband and our cat, Chi. By day I am a systems librarian at a private university where I am also an adjunct instructor for art history.