A few changes…

This year I’ve been trying a few things to get more organized. I didn’t have to do spring cleaning (after moving twice in three months I already purged everything I could) but I am in desperate need of organization of my time.

On that note I am starting a bullet journal. This is just a fancy calendar that has a few extras, like mood and habit trackers so that you can see a bit more in depth how your month went. It also has spaces for keeping track of daily tasks, and for mine I added a tracker to see how much time each day I was spending on writing, art, marketing, and other things I need to do.

A few years ago I started tracking how much I wrote daily, and that helped a lot. I still track that, but now I need to branch out and look at how much time I am spending on it as well. Word counts can’t go up if I’m spending more time playing games than writing.

The second thing I did last month was separate my writing from my art… for the most part. I created a new Instagram specifically for art projects, and set aside a little time each day to do a new sketch or finish an old one. This has been a lot of fun, and a boost to my accomplishments since I am completing a project every day, even if it’s a small one. Finishing these small projects makes me want to go out and finish bigger projects. It’s also encouraging me to learn new techniques, and just get better.

You can find my art Instagram HERE.

I’ve been working on making prints, or other items with the art. I’ve added a few things to my Etsy store, and I’ve been working on prints. I really do want to do a little more with my art then just show it online. For right now I’m going through and redoing a LOT of my old art to make it up to date. Crisper, sharper, better colors. I also need to figure out a printer soon so I can do even more.

Okay, now I need to get back to the writing portion of the day.

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We’re Moving

Bjorn got an amazing opportunity that we couldn’t pass up, so we’re moving.

Okay, not so bad…Except that we’ve been in this apartment for ten years. You accumulate a lot of stuff in ten years. But still, doable.

Oh, and we’re moving to Texas. From Seattle. 2300 miles! DRIVING!!!!

So, as you can imagine, the first thing I’m doing is throwing away as much stuff as I can because where is no possibility that we can take everything we have. Ten years of stuff is a lot, especially when one of the people works with leather and has a huge stock of leather here.

I have a few months to go through everything and sort it into keep, throw, donate, sell. This weekend I went through my books and marked three bins of them to take to half price books. I also started the big task of going through my craft room and tossing or giving away a very large part of them. It isn’t quite as hard as I thought it would be. I’ve been needing to purge my craft area for a very long time, and I’m actually happy to start getting rid of a lot of it. I mostly work in markers on paper when I do artwork so having all of this…STUFF… gets a little distracting after a while.

Still, this is going to take some time. I’m glad I have some notice so I don’t have to get rid of everything right away, but I also wonder if that’s a good idea. Kind of light ripping off a band-aid, the longer you take the more it hurts. If I had to get rid of it right this minute I would probably just go through and pick out the few things that meant the most to me and donate the rest. We’re doing it a little backwards, but I’m okay with that. I have a little more time to figure out what I really really want, and how much we can take.

On that note, I’ll be putting up some more listings on Etsy. If I can sell a few things I don’t have to move them, but also I really don’t want to send things I made by hand off to the thrift store. You’ll find paintings, hand made beads, and leather keychains. All sorts of interesting things. I’ll also be sticking the shop in vacation mode in a couple months because we’ll be moving…so grab them while you can. I’m also going to put a few of my craft supplies up there just because I hope someone will want to use them.

But stay tuned….I might have some more announcements and information in the next months.