breaking blogger's block

I think the whole new year thing is the cause of my recent blogger's block.  I haven't made any new year's resolutions (I mentioned before that I'm no good at making decisive lists) but I do have a few things in mind that I want to achieve this year.  One of them is to keep on bloggin' (not truckin') so I'm recycling some old photos, and focussing on two good things that happened today, in order to beat the 2009 barrier.

I made this little octopus last Easter while on holiday in Islay.  My niece was fascinated by it and loved it and its two octo-friends.  She kept carrying them around and putting them on the windowsill so they could see the sea.  She was still talking about them quite recently (which is a long time to remember something when you're only three years old!) so I decided to make her her very own octopus for Christmas.  In the rush for international postal deadlines, I didn't manage to take any photos of it but Kim's octopus is much like this one: it has a purple body and legs but has turquoise suckers and eyes instead of orange.  I spoke to my niece on the phone on Christmas day and she told me I had made her an octopus and that she had called it Kim.  I took the fact that she named it after herself as proof that she had appreciated her gift but today I spoke to my sister and she told me about this little conversation:

Kerry:  What was your favourite Christmas present?

Kim:  My octopus.

Kerry: And what was your favourite part of Christmas day?

Kim:  Opening my octopus.

Aaw!  Well, hearing about that little snippet made my day today!  Sometimes making handmade gifts can be so frustrating - they take so much time and then you do start to wonder if it was really worth it or if the recipient was just being polite...  Well, this time it was worth it!  I should mention (again!) that the original pattern for the octopus is by Futuregirl and is now FREE so there are no excuses for anyone not to be making these.  I can assure you they make the perfect handmade gift for three year olds!  Yay!

The other good thing that happened today was that I made another Pat embroidery (again, this picture is of the last one I made and not the one I made today at all but they are very similar) and I seem to be getting slightly faster at my stitching.  Slightly.  Slowly.  But.  Surely.  The lovely Claire from Miso Funky has said she is keen to restock the items she has been selling for me in her fab shop.  I'm really pleased about this.  Claire was my best friend's penpal when I was at school and I wrote to her once or twice.  This year I commented on one of her flickr photos and then realised who she was and got in touch properly.  My friend's teenage penpal has turned out to be such a fortuitous contact and she has very generously helped me to achieve my goal of selling some of the things I've made.  

When I think about it, 2008 was a great year of progress towards the creative lifestyle: I started this blog and (with the help of Claire) sold my first handmade goods.  I feel like things will progress even more in 2009 now that I've made a start.  I made a joint semi-resolution with a friend to have a craft market stall this summer and even the distant thought of that makes me very excited.  Now, if only I could summon up this sort of enthusiasm for my day job...

I did it - I wrote the new year post!  And I'm only cringing a bit...

(p.s. this new year's post on bugs and fishes made me feel very excited about the year ahead, especially when I looked at her older posts and saw how rapidly and wonderfully her handmade items had evolved.  Exciting!  I do wonder what I'll be doing by the end of 2009...  I think I have the new year thing well and truly out of my system now, thank goodness.)