Apr 5, 2017

The weather was good and Felix was down for a nap and I just wanted to MAKE SOMETHING. To feel useful and put my talents to use instead of adding another day’s layer of dust. To have something to show for myself. To feel that positive personal power that comes from creating something from nothing. 

But what?

I hastily foraged through my bin of favorite fabric and pulled out some gray linen. I had no idea what to make with it, but it felt good to hold and I wanted to keep on holding it and give it life. I mulled over baby projects and none of them were right. I looked at endless ideas on pinterest and nothing clicked. More than anything I just wanted to hand stitch something into it.

It took almost an hour of staring at those cut pieces of fabric and stressing over wasting the material on something dumb before I finally just made a decision and went for it. I made a drawstring bag. I tried to make it useful, but I got too full of myself and wanted all the edges finished really nicely and the end result was a great-looking bag that doesn’t cinch up all the way because the layers are too thick at the opening. Bah. But it almost doesn’t even matter because I stitched three little X’s into it near the bottom and it looks perfect in that random, earthy kind of way. In my endless searching on pinterest I read a blog post about how linen bags are good for storing bread in, so maybe I’ll try that. In fact, I made bread today too.

From the way I’m writing this it sounds like the bread was inspired by the bag or that the two had anything to do with each other, but really I woke up this morning knowing we were nearly out of bread and feeling like I’m always buying bread and maybe I should just make some for a change. I would’ve started right in on it this morning, but we were out of yeast, so I decided to go the self-loving route and pick up both some loaves of bread and some yeast when Felix and I went to the store later. I figured there was no rush and if I wasn’t into it, it was fine. We’d have bread either way. But then the weather was great this evening and the kids were happy playing with some bowls of water and measuring cups out on the deck, so I went ahead and got started.

There were a lot of things I didn’t know which I tried to research (like if I needed to do something different if I used my kitchenaid with the bread hook to knead the dough instead of doing it by hand), but I didn’t really look that hard or find anything, so in the end I just went ahead and tried it out. It’s currently cooling on the cooling racks downstairs in the kitchen, so I haven’t tasted it yet, but from what I can tell, it turned out just fine. I used the whole wheat bread recipe from Mormon Country Cooking and did everything like it said, I just used my kitchenaid with the bread hook to knead it instead of doing it by hand and (I think?) it worked great.

Anyway, I keep dreading working on the quiet page patterns because it’s down to all the random minutia, but I feel like maybe getting the creative juices flowing today will help me feel more motivated to get back into all the pattern design stuff I need to do. I hope so, cuz I really should be getting that done. My goal is to have it finished and in a ready-to-sell state before the baby is born at the end of June. So ideally that would mean having a finished PDF pattern ready to go and maybe 10-20 kits packaged up and ready to go. I want to release both the patterns and kits at the same time (just feels right) and that way even if the kits sell out or I need to put them on hold for a while after the baby’s born, I can at least keep selling the PDF patterns during that transition time.

So, wish me luck.

I’m gonna go eat some warm homemade bread with butter and honey and win at life now.