Feb 21, 2017

In an effort to not write from bed with my eyes half-closed, I thought I’d write first thing this morning. The upside is that I’m not falling asleep. The downside is that I have nothing specific of substance in mind to write about, so I’m just gonna ramble about whatever because that’s what I do best.

First things first, since I feel it’s my duty to tell you about every baby-related thing I buy, I should come clean and tell you that I bought this rocking chair last night. They have a model on display at our local Target that Bryan and I have both sat in multiple times while wandering the baby aisles and when I took it for another test drive last night it finally occurred to me that we should actually buy it. I think all the other times we sat in it it was more of a “oh hey look, a chair to sit in” and then the kids would go nuts because we weren’t getting them out of the cart to sit in it too and we’d move on to look at whatever else we needed to get on our Target run. But after two days of increasingly bad round ligament pain I think something finally clicked when I sat down last night and my brain switched from just sitting in some random chair to buying mode.

Other contributing factors probably included the fact that earlier in the day the kids and I had wandered into Pottery Barn Kids at the mall (which, by the way, is exactly the wrong place to go if you’ve already decided to just use your ugly pack and play instead of a crib–wah wah) and I sat in some rocking chairs there that looked nice, but not great, were way less comfortable, and about a billion times more expensive. The rocking chair from Target was much better proportioned to my body, is a glider on a base, so it won’t pinch the kids toes or ride around all over the room, and it’s nice that it can swivel in all directions in case I need to turn to grab something.

More often than not I go through thought processes like this and think, “yeah, maybe someday we’ll buy that” and then I move on and think maybe we’ll find something better/cheaper/different and I mostly end up forgetting about the whole thing and spend all my time nursing on the couch where it feels like the cushions slowly sliding away from the back are the couch’s best attempt at eating me alive. I’ve been trying to be better over the past year or two about recognizing the things I actually want and going after them when I can instead of continually pushing things aside. Which is why we now have a full size freezer in the basement packed with pre-made dinners and a rocking chair being delivered on Friday.

Secondly, (and completely unrelated to baby stuff or anything else I was just talking about), I’ve been thinking a lot these past couple days about moving forward on patterns for my quiet book pages. I started making those just for fun almost a year ago and have toyed with the idea of making patterns for them ever since, but I keep getting held up by a few things. I’m not too worried about writing the instructions for the patterns since I’ve written a sewing book and have some experience there. (In fact, between you and me, I could probably copy and paste most of the instructions for the chalk coloring pad thing in the book and then I wouldn’t even have to re-write the instructions for the base of the quiet book pages. Just one of the many benefits of being a one-trick pony. Though to actually copy and paste them I’d have to dig up the Word file on the external HD. Hmm…) Anyway, so I’m not too worried about the writing.

What I’m mostly worried about is the pattern layout and design. I’ve done janky patterns before by tracing the pattern pieces with a sharpie and then scanning that in to make it a PDF, but I kinda feel like I’ve outgrown that and it’s not what I have in mind for these charming little quite book pages. What I’d like to do is have a really simple and charming, but professional pattern layout that reads more like a little booklet that I could either sell as an e-book or as a printed half-page booklet. This is a big part of why I started trying to re-learn illustrator.

But almost as soon as I started taking my illustrator class, I realized that to put these patterns together the way I really want to, I’d probably need to learn both illustrator and in design. And being such a beginner in illustrator, the idea of having to learn in design too is pretty overwhelming to me right now. Not that it wouldn’t be a super worthwhile skill to learn, but still. And realizing that I’ve already been sitting on this idea for almost a year has me wanting to be a little more proactive and get moving forward on it. So I’m considering maybe trying to get a first set of all the patterns written up, hopefully get pattern pieces ready in one way or another, and then possibly working with someone else to have them do the layout and design work, all the better if it was someone who might be willing to coach me through the process for future product production.

Anyway, the weight of all this kind of made me put off working on it at all. And I’d considered the idea that maybe my kids didn’t even love playing with the pages as much as I loved making them, but on Sunday morning as we were heading out the door to church Olivia asked out of nowhere if we could please bring the quiet book pages and then she and Felix spent all of Sacrament Meeting playing with them over and over and over again. Seeing the pages be truly loved and enjoyed turned out to be more motivating than any of my own personal ambitions and, as a result, I’ve been thinking about it a lot these past couple days. Maybe when I get the booklet finished I’ll even put together some kits of supplies to go along with it.

So. I have a custom home portrait I’ve committed to make, but I’m hoping to finish that this week and then hopefully get going on the instructions and pattern pieces for the quiet book pages. It’d be great if I could at least get all the instructions written and pattern pieces finished before the baby’s born, but lately I’m feeling more and more physically limited, so we’ll just have to see. But in the mean time, if anyone who’s proficient in illustrator and in design wants to come out of the woodwork and offer up your skills for hire, please do.

Ok, well Felix is poopy for the third time this morning and he just asked me if I could please get out of this chair I’ve been sitting in, so I guess I’ll call it quits for now. Wish me luck in finally working up the motivation to finish that home portrait so I can move on to other things. Peace out.