New Year's Ruminations

Moving into the new year has been, as always, a journey for me.  I find myself this year in a new place, one with time, a most precious resource.  I want time, have wanted it for years.  I thought that given the gift of time I could explore my interests and develop something of real and sustaining industry for me.  Not working is wonderful, the day-to-day life is easy to live in and so I clean, take my walk, fuss about in the studio, plan dinner, etc.  What lingers in the back of my mind is that sustaining industry I want to uncover.  What plagues me is that I don't want to mishandle the opportunity of time by frittering it away.

Yesterday I returned to some journals I've kept in my past.  They're an interesting mix of ideas and notions that I wonder about leaving behind for my children to find, i.e. should I or shouldn't I?  How much of it do I reveal and how much do I keep between my past and myself.  I haven't kept a journal for many years now and looking back has been awkward in how the musings tend to mask what was happening outside of the pages while also revealing it, and they illuminate a self-involvement that was on the written page not in my activity.  The writing was an indulgence, a way to focus on me when the outside world was creating so many challenges in my life.  Sometimes the writing is downright poor, just ramblings while I try to explain my feelings to myself.  Sometimes the ideas are great, ones that I think I've subconsciously expanded upon in my life.

Well, what a muddle.  Not an uncommon place for me to be, in a quandary about the past and future while the present plays itself out regardless of my attention to its passing.  My message to myself:  Pay Attention.  Act with Purpose. Do not Waste this Opportunity.  Aha, therein lies the muddle, what is this opportunity I want to apply myself to and what will I want from it..... I must define that in clear terms so I'll know the outcome I'm looking to achieve.

Meanwhile, on the crocheting front, my new hat for Ed!  He loves the colors and the big pom-pom.  When he saw the ones I made for the children, he wanted one too!  Links to how-to are below.

Link to Pom-Pom tutorial I used:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a03BTR3_3qg

I modified this process because a big pom-pom will simply lose more and more yarn over time unless you secure it with more tying.... I made several of them then tied them together to form the larger pom-pom.

I may have given the link to the hat tutorial before but am going to list it again along with another link to an explanation about increasing or decreasing to correctly size the hat.  (Not being overly concerned with this type of thing I just kind of winged it since the head it was being made for was right next to me on the couch....)
Link to Hat tutorial I used:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3K9nbkOwJQ&feature=related

Link to sizing a crocheted hat that I didn't use but think will be helpful in future:  http://oodles4noodles.blogspot.com/2011/08/crocheting-hats-for-preemies-tutorial.html#comments