2020

Why is buying a house so difficult? We're now applying for a construction loan with a new bank so we can keep on the process of buying our awesome house. Lesson learned: Wells Fargo is a pain in the butt to work with. So, closing in some time in the future. We're hoping before February now. Sigh.

Crafting is still on hold, as we're starting to get things together for the move, and I just don't feel like making anything new when I have a whole new crafting room to look forward to.

COVID hit my work, knocking out my office manager and me for about a week, so work life has been exceptionally busy. I tested negative, but had lots of symptoms, so I don't know. I'm just glad that I got through it relatively unscathed.

December is my least favorite month. It's cold, miserable, and full of family events. Christmas is a giant ball of stress that seems to go on and on and on forever. So this month's blog is going to be very short.

I cannot wait until this year is over. The election has been the most stressful thing this month so far, and it's only 4 days in. I'll be glad when it's over. I'm hoping desperately that Biden wins. Another four years of Trump terrifies me.

On a better front, we close on our house on the 16th. We are buying the old house with the boiler system and the beautiful woodwork throughout. I'll have a whole crafting room to work in! All to myself! I'm going to keep my shop inventory handy so I can still ship if I need to, but all new crafting work is on hold until we get moved into the new house.

I don't know what the future holds for working at the Funeral Home. I want to continue working there, even though it'll be an hour and a half drive. I love the people I work with. I honestly believe we have the best crew ever. We call ourselves the Dream Team for a reason. I don't know if the Husband will want me to make the drive every day; the maintenance and gas are going to be a struggle, especially since my pay rate is pretty low.

But I'm full-time, with benefits and a decent retirement account, discounts on funerals for family and myself. Best of all, the people I work with are completely irreplaceable. And, I'm switching back to a DA (Director's Assistant) role, instead of Admin. I love being a DA! And I get to keep full time!

I'm sure it'll sort itself out and I'll figure out how and where I'll work.

I'm still so excited that Riding the Fox will have a new headquarters! My crafting room is huge and has lots of windows and is right across from the main floor kitchen (it's so weird having to distinguish the main floor kitchen from the upstairs kitchen, like we have some fancy sort of house). The walls are wood paneled, and the floor (unfortunately) has carpet, but at least I won't have to worry about destroying an original hardwood floor with spilled resin or paint. I won't feel bad about destroying old carpet. The room looks like it was added on to the main house, like a 4 season porch, but from the outside it looks like just another part of the house. It's connected to the attached garage and has a huge closet. We bought a table from a closing JC Penny's for $20 that I'll use as a crafting table. I'll probably need another table or two so I can have dedicated stations for resin, polymer clay, and sewing work.

Scary elections and future work questions aside, the new year has a lot of promise and should be awesome!

I love Halloween and everything October! The temperatures are delightfully crisp, there's no snow yet (knock on wood), allergies are controllable. There's apples and pumpkins and sinus-clearing chili from the husband. Fall is by far my favorite season.

I'm still working on making quote bracelets. But, since we're house hunting, going is slow on all crafting. I just don't want to haul out a bunch of stuff that I'm going to have to pack away soon. I can't wait to move, have our own space, have a yard to garden in. The current house we're looking at is very old, with a boiler heat system. It's like a maze with a complicated layout, but it's beautiful with what is most likely original woodwork. The banisters are carved, and I'm going to have to take pictures of them. There are two kitchens. The Child has claimed the upstairs kitchen, along with the bedroom. I am really hoping this house works out. I'm getting really tired of house hunting. We looked at 8 houses in a row yesterday, and that was exhausting. Most of the houses I was looking forward to were disappointing, either extremely boring, too small, or with significant damage.

Wish us luck on the hunt!

We are super close to buying a house. We're starting to get prequalified for our first home loan and just need to choose our lender. Then the fun starts and we get to look at houses! Hopefully the move won't disrupt my ability to make stuff. It will definitely enable me to make more stuff, as I will have a dedicated space to work. Pete is also planning on starting his woodworking journey. We're not sure what he's going to start with; the possibilities are endless. He'll definitely get a lot of practice in making furniture for the new house, though.

September is the start of my favorite season: fall! I love the cooler weather and all the changing colors. I love all things Halloween and spooky! And I recently learned that September is National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month. I'm going to be making some semi-colon (;) "I choose to continue" bracelets. When the store actually becomes profitable, I'll be able to donate money to mental health support organizations, like Project Semicolon, which I'm not able to find the website for anymore. I see it on Facebook, but don't know if it's still going on. I hope so. I'm also on the lookout for other mental health organizations to support in the future, preferably focusing on OCD, Anxiety disorders, PTSD, and suicide prevention.

I am currently working on:

Bones embroidery, "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt" Vonnegut bracelets, "I choose to continue" bracelets, and listing "I have been bent and broken, but, I hope, into a better shape" Dickens bracelets in the Etsy Shop. Pictures will be posted soon.

I might design something with the Vonnegut and Dickens quotes for the Zazzle shop. I need to do something with that or find another similar service. Anyone have suggestions?

I had a lovely birthday, filled with sunshine and friends I hadn't seen in too long. I got to snuggle kittens (that I wasn't allowed to bring home...yet) Birthdays usually stress me out. The expectation that builds up rarely meets up with reality. This year was wonderful, low stress, and genuinely fun.

I finally sold the running rabbit embroidery on Etsy, which made me realize I should make more embroideries for the shop. I am working on templates for embroidered necklaces, bracelets, and pendants. I'm not used to drawing on such a small scale, but it's good to stretch my skills. I don't know if I'll do a bunch of unique pieces or be able to repeat patterns. I've never been good at repeating myself. I think I've only ever knitted a second sock once. I'm going to plan out a handful of text based embroideries next. I wonder if I can design patterns to sell. I'm drawing the patterns for myself, after all. That might be a future enterprise.

My birthday is at the end of July, and I'm trying to be positive about it. I usually hate birthdays. I hate being at the center of attention. I'm uncomfortable with gifts. I usually end up feeling disappointed and depressed. It's like the expectation of a great birthday is so huge that reality never matches up. So, this year, I'm trying to look forward to my birthday and I want to do something fun. With COVID still around, fun is going to be difficult. I found a tiny feather under my car this morning, a simple gift of nature. Maybe that is what I should wish for, something small yet beautiful. Just a good day.

I've been making progress on my cat embroidery. It's going better than I thought it would. I had to get over the hump of figuring out how to actually stitch the complicated fur pattern she has. She's a hidden calico, with the colors blending in with her overall coat. She's quite beautiful, but in a subtle sort of way. I'm doing a loose cover of brown stitches then I'll go back over with lighter tans.

In the next few months, we're going to start looking for our own home. The goal is September, and things are looking good. I expect once we have our own home I'll be able to craft on a more regular basis. I've wanted my own space for a very long time and it'll be nice to have a permanent setup.

I bought a few patterns from Tailornova last month and made a shirt for the first time. The fabric I used made a shitty shirt, but I learned how to sew sleeves, and make darts. May was the month for sewing, I guess. I made a bunch of face masks that I brought to work. I'm thinking of tossing them up in my shop if no one wants them at work. Washed, of course. I have 5 more pieces left to sew that might end up in the shop. I've never bulk sewed like this. It's kind of fun in a zen kind of way. It helps that my new sewing machine is much better than my old beginner's machine. I can't wait to sew things like buttonholes.

As far as life in general, it's crazy living in Minnesota right now. There are protests and riots and police brutality. We have a curfew in place at night. It was tipped off by the death (murder? manslaughter?) of a black man, George Floyd, by a Minneapolis police officer who kneeled on the back of his neck. There were 3 other cops there who didn't stop him. Over the last weekend in May, there were peaceful protests, a disguised cop breaking windows in a store so people would be more likely to loot, people from out of town starting fires and other shit, the National Guard called in, tear gas, rubber bullets and the curfew. It was a crazy weekend, to say the least and I've never felt more ashamed of my state. Things seem to be starting to cool off and hopefully lasting change will be the result. While all lives matter, black lives matter more than ever before. Generations of systematic dehumanization and cruelty need to stop here and now. We are all human.

I made some masks for the family for shopping during the Coronavirus pandemic. It's weird how fast wearing a mask while out and about has become normal. My mask has foxes wearing glasses, Pete's is Darth Vader, and Alex has a plain white one. Sewing the masks has made me really want to sew clothes. I've been playing around with Bootstrap Fashion and their pattern maker: Tailornova. Now I want to make all of my clothes. Bootstrap Fashion also has a pattern for a custom dress form that I'm going to buy as soon as we move into a new house. I've always wanted a dress form, and having one that corresponds to my actual measurements is a dream come true. From what I understand, Bootstrap makes awesome sewing patterns available for your measurements for super cheap, like $3 cheap, and Tailornova lets you design your own patterns for free and print them for either a per-pattern payment or a monthly plan.

The only problems I have right now is, 1: the lack of time to make stuff, since I'm still working, and 2: the lack of fabric. I have tons of ~1 yard scraps of fabric for embroidering and sewing small items, but I want to make clothes, and clothes for me needs at least 2-3 yards for a shirt. Normally I would meander over to my local JoAnn Fabrics, but they're only doing curbside orders, and I like to browse and touch my fabric. What's a poor crafty person to do?

OMG Coronavirus! There is so much stress and anxiety over this COVID-19 thing. I'm trying not to get caught up in it too much. Working in the funeral home is helpful, since I'm considered essential and don't have to go into quarantine unless I'm actually sick. Isn't it crazy that quarantining is a normal thing now? The Child is doing distance learning until schools open again. Everything is different, yet a lot of things are still the same. I almost wish there was a complete shutdown so I have time to get some of these projects done.

I've started embroidering my cat, Bones. (See the WIP page for updates) I just bought some silicone pendant molds for resin. I have lots of potentially awesome things to do, I just don't have time to do them.

I am back to work on some embroidery! I've decided to work on my funeral flowers series of thread painted embroidery. Right now I'm doing purple carnations the size suitable for a brooch, patch, or maybe even a key chain.

In floriography, carnations mean condolences, while purple carnations mean consolation. I got lucky with the meaning of purple carnations, since that was the color I happened to have on hand when I started stitching it.

I am also periodically knitting, since I have found myself suddenly with a surplus of yarn. I'm making giant hexi-puffs, inspired by the beekeeper's quilt, with super chunky yarn. I'm not stuffing the hexagons, so they're flat rather than puffy, but still incredibly warm and comfortable. Each hexagon is around 5" across, so making a blanket should be relatively painless.

Another project in the dock is a set of wooden, star-shaped wood-burned runes for the shop with a sewn pouch to keep them in. Test runs on the pouch have been rough. I managed to sew a nice curved bottom, but mixed up my fabric order on the outside and lining and got a mismatched pouch with no way to close the top where I wanted to put a drawstring. I could hand sew it closed, but mixing it all up so badly made the rest of it a disappointment.

I figured out how to embed a comment section here! I'm going to start small and just have it here on the blog section. It would be nice to have feedback for each piece of art I have on the site, but I want to see how this ones goes for now. Right now, it feels like I'm talking to myself in the vastness of the internet. Giving visitors the ability to comment is both scary and exciting. If you're out there, please be nice!

I have also removed the Blogger blog from the bottom of this page. It was big and ugly and I'm starting to like how I'm handling the blog here. I'm also collapsing previous months to make the page hopefully more streamlined. A nice bonus is I started really blogging this way at the beginning of the year.

I'm starting to feel the itch to make art again. There's something about the winter that kills my ambition. Maybe it's the cold, the blank white of the snow, but I just lose all drive to create in December and January. February is often like that too, but this year I'm feeling that itch to make stuff. Maybe getting an awesome deal on a fancy new sewing machine helped. The Husband works at a craft store and a customer returned a Brother sewing and quilting machine that they didn't have in their system anymore (so they couldn't restock it) so his boss offered it to him for $80. That's a hell of a steal, considering the basic beginners sewing machine I already had cost around $100.

This new machine has 60 stitches programmed into it, with all of the various feet that all of those stitches require. It made patching a pair of torn shorts a breeze. I'm so excited to make something with it. I want to make clothes, a new purse, maybe a pouch for the wood burned rune set I made. I should make more of those to put on the shop. They are made of star shaped wood with one side painted and the other burned with an elder futhark rune. The wood blank packs even come with the perfect number to make runes. I think those will be my next big shop project along with pouches to keep them in.

Embroidery is starting to sound good again. The fact that many people are favoriting my running rabbit patch on the shop is good encouragement to pick up my needles and thread again. I need to figure out an application for embroidery that suits me. Magnets, maybe? I like the idea of embroidered jewelry, pendants and bracelets and the like, but I haven't worked that small yet. Maybe that will be one of my projects for the month. I need something more complicated to work on than just wood burned runes.

So, by the time next month rolls around, I should have at least one more set of runes completed along with pouches to hold them in, and hopefully at least one embroidery project started. Wish me luck!

A new year, a new decade, and hopefully new art coming down the line! I am having a bit of a creative block right now. Nothing is calling to me to be made. Nothing seems interesting to do. The last project I worked on was a pair of wood burned cutting boards for my brothers for Christmas. I've been looking at all of my art supplies and just feeling meh about all of them. What is an artist to do when art doesn't look appealing?

I have been working on learning how to do finer background removals on photos, with the hope that I can get a natural looking technique down to remove the backgrounds from hair especially. A handful of funeral directors I work with like to have a clean background for the memorial folders for services and I'm the one who gets to alter the photos. It's one of my favorite aspects of my job at the funeral home. It lets me make the pictures as beautiful as possible for the families we serve. I can erase dust or heal cracks in old photos. I've even removed entire people and rebuilt body parts to make the photo more natural. It's always a fun challenge to figure out how to make a photo perfect.

Next is to develop a library of suitable backgrounds to replace native backgrounds. Up until now I've taken a sample color from the picture to change the background to something solid yet complimentary. With this process, hair has been my nemesis. It's so difficult to work around the fine lines of hair, especially women's hair, while making it look like the person isn't just floating around in space. I've been fairly successful so far, which is good for someone entirely self-taught/internet tutorial-taught at digital art and photo manipulation, but I can always be better.

The program I currently work in for digital art is GIMP 2.10.14. I've always used GIMP, since it's free and open source. I've never been able to afford Photoshop. I think I dabbled with a freeware Photoshop way back in the day when I first got an ancient Wacom tablet (which I still have and works), but I never liked it. It doesn't make sense to me for art programs and computers (I'm looking at you, Apple) to be so expensive. There's the cliche of starving artists for a reason. With all the talent and skill out there, why make the bar so high to climb? Art is everywhere, why should only the elite be able to afford the tools to produce 'professional' grade art?

I don't know. C'est la vie or something.

I need to make a workable blog for this website. Then, I need to actually write blog posts. I think I'm going to shoot for at least one blog post per month, which is exceedingly low for a blog, but as it has been increasingly busy at work, I feel it's a realistic goal.

While I enjoy the Blogger platform, I don't know how to connect it to this website in a readable manner, so maybe I'll use this as the current monthly blog post and then archive it on Blogger. If anyone has a better solution, please let me know.

Further goals for the new year are:

• Develop more products for Zazzle.

• Sell my current inventory on Etsy.

• Make more items that align with my pagan beliefs.

• Make more items that are easy to make in bulk yet still be hand crafted.

• Paint more.

As to the 3rd item on the list: I've been rekindling my active practice of my beliefs, which I may develop as a separate section of this website. I am a non-worshiping polytheist who believes that EVERY belief system is true and correct, even if I don't share the particular beliefs. My path is a pagan one, full of magic and wonder. My path is not for everyone, and I firmly believe that what you believe is true, even if it's only true for you. My beliefs may very well be only true for me, and that's just peachy.

My beliefs can best be summed up with a quote from the Tom Robbins book, "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues": "I believe in everything; nothing is sacred. I believe in nothing; everything is sacred." More on my pagan path in a future new section of this website.

Overall, my goal for 2020 is to make more art, post more art, and hopefully sell more art.