So this is good. It’s still just mid-January, and I’m sticking to some blogness and still thinking with soft, kind thoughts about my New Year’s Resolutions. I had a nice spate of days off from work immediately following the New Year’s holiday, and I rather would have liked to get some hardcore headway made on…uhm, something. Honestly, there’s a lot of time-heavy projects that could use some attention from me: cleaning up the sewing room; weeding out fabrics and patterns (plus clothes and shoes) that I’ve moved beyond; better organizing my paper ephemera stuff; inventorying all my rubber stamps; and probably about two dozen other umbrella-level tasks. But noooo! I had a weiner sore throat that was actually a grody bacterial thing and I had to go to the doctor and cough a lot instead of sew, or clean, or sit on the floor with piles of stuff completely surrounding me, like I’d built a fort to retire in. While I didn’t get anything productive done that week, I did tweet a haiku that pretty much summed it up.

And it was right on, 100%. I’ve been thinking on overstimulatedness for two solid weeks now, how that pummels me into feeling too barraged to move much less cut out fabric and sew it up. I’ve got so much stuff that is great stuff, I mean just terrific, but there is a LOT of it, and I too easily feel like I’m carrying it all around with me and then it has ABBA-heavy dance parties when I’m trying to fall asleep at night. And I think that, with a more atmospheric-point-of-view, that’s what I really wanted to address (if not chip away at) with my new year’s resolutions. But in a sense, I’ve always got some kind of sore throat, so to speak. I watch television or bake cupcakes or drink beers and prowl ebay for marc jacobs heels under $70, and the end result is that my desire to Do Stuff gets overhauled by, perhaps, my more latent desire/s to not Do Stuff. Or at the very least it’s surpassed by my Doing other Stuff that has far less tangible results. Although … I do have like half a dozen pairs of MJs.

Which is to say, that the “sew more” thing I barely touched upon in the Offical Resolutions post? can be further broken down a little somethin’ like this.

1. Finish things. I have got to start doing a better job of this. There are some projects that I start out real excited and happy, but something unforeseen sneaks into the works and then I stuff it onto a shelf and completely forget about it. Now, I don’t only do this, I mean I have actually finished things, but too often I worry that I’ve picked out an unsuitable fabric or cut out the wrong (or unadjusted) size and instead of working on it, I scrap it. And instead of actually scrapping it, I just accumulate it in a defunct zone. So for ought-nine? I wanna get some stuff Done.
2. Sew with my other machines. So I have two whole sewing machines, a Babylock serger and an older Bernina, that I have not even touched except to move them out of my way. I’m still cranking out some time with Bettes, my plastic-fantastic singer purchase from mal-wart, but if I’m going to be doing hardcore awesome projects with kickass fabrics? Maybe I need to upgrade to a machine that’s worthy. Or at least more worthy–I mean, they’re sitting right in front of me.
3. Try new things. Yes yes, you hear this one all the time, and I do try new things even without positing it in a banter of making new year’s resolutions. But really: bound buttonholes are, like, so my style. I just need to crank some out to make sure. Also I wanna: make some non-pajama pants, sew with silk, sew up a vintage pattern, use some of my excellent button stash, finish up tweaks on a muslin and then actually SEW it, and sew a coat or a jacket. And, though I may change my mind on that last thing, I don’t think the cape will count.
4. Buy less cheap stuff. Sometimes there are prints, be they floral or abstract or vintage-y or wacked out or what have you, that I simply cannot pass up. I will accept that in myself, more or less, but for real: I have a lot of solid color, totally boring cheap stuff–and that’s no good. If it’s cheap? there has to be merit otherwise. And if it’s a solid color kind of thing? go for the good stuff, because it’ll make me happier in the long run. It sucks to have a finished garment start looking shoddy after a couple months because you cheaped out on the fabric. (Now, with this example in particular, I’m fine with owning up to having used a cheap-o fabric; the only reason I got something wearable out of that project was because I’m so stubborn ’cause the pattern was not for me, and that was my first time sewing a knit, and so on.)
5. Blog more about it. It’s nice to keep track of stuff I’ve done, especially if I don’t have to sit down staring at a blank piece of paper trying to rack my brain for things I have accomplished in, well, for example the last year. I totally did things in 2008, but you wouldn’t know the half of it if you only looked at VP. So for oh-nine, I want to be better at keeping track of things: including regularity and pictures. I will attempt to lure myself into accountability to myself, but not by being such a hardass (though that’s going to be a super challenge). Uhm, we’ll see how it goes.

I also want to get this site looking the way I want it to, so if you’re not reading this in a feed reader? Bear with my fickle sense/s of likes and half-organizedness.