2020 sewing goals

I dearly miss sewing. It's been years and several moves since I really had my sewing stuff organized and felt like I could sit down and work on a project. I've done some stuff here and there, like when I sewed an Elsa dress for my friend Tammy's daughter over 5 years ago, but that generally involves me re-buying supplies that I know I already have around here somewhere, and that's not a good feeling.

In the fall of 2017, I bought some cozy anteater flannel with the brief intention of making Annabelle some pajama pants for Christmas (the girl does love her some anteaters and pajamas!). I quickly realized that was an unrealistic goal given my time limitations, but I gave her the flannel anyway along with the promise of making the pants one day. We even discussed maybe working on them together at some future point. The summer after she graduated from college would have been excellent, as would the few months she was home last year attending a software development bootcamp. Somehow it never happened though.

Last summer I started listening to the Love to Sew Podcast in the hopes that it would inspire me to get my "sewjo" back. It did to a point, and despite the fact that my sewing supplies were still stashed in at least 3 different closets, I set out to make the pajama pants in time for my October visit to Boston. Alas, I was able to finish everything but the hem, so I took them up for her to try on so I could mark the hem, but then I brought them home where they sat untouched for another couple of months.

I have 2 sewing projects as part of my 20 for 2020. The first was to finish the anteater pants, which I'm pleased to announce I finally accomplished. Last month I shipped them off to her, asking only that she send me a video clip that I could use for my one-second project (two birds, one stone, etc.). Here she is modelling them and looking very pleased:



Here's a closer pic of the fabric:



The second part of the goal is to make her a dress out of some really cool fabric I found at Spoonflower. I'll write more about that as it develops. This is part of a larger goal of learning how to sew with knits. To that end, all I've done so far is done most of a mockup using cheap fabric to make sure I know what I'm doing before I order and cut into the good stuff. First though, I've gotta organize my sewing stuff!

Photo organization update

I used to be so on top of things when it came to organizing my photos, but the past few years are just a mess. Having a phone with a decent camera has led me to taking many more pictures than I used to, and I haven't done a very good job about moving them to my computer and organizing them there. One of my goals for this year is to finish with the digitization of my old photos and videos, but there's an awful lot of stuff that I've already got in digital format that needs to be dealt with as well.

One thing I finally accomplished a few weeks ago was finishing the Shutterfly photobook of the trip that Fred and I made to Hawaii to celebrate my 50th birthday (3 years ago). Yay, me!

There are a few basic tasks that I really need to do to get back on the road to total photo (and video) organization.

• Clean out the downloads folder on my computer.
• Run a de-duplication program on my computer to find files where I have the same item stashed in more than one location. (These first 2 items would also help me in my quest to organize my digital and non-digital files in general.)
• Clean the junk photos off my phone.
• Figure out a plan for how far back I want the photos on my phone to go. On the one hand it's nice to be able to scroll back and find an old picture, but honestly I have an easier time locating a file when it's on my computer with metadata that makes sense. I don't think I want photos on both the camera and the computer (don't worry, my computer is constantly backed up offsite, currently with Carbonite but I'm considering finding a different service), because then I will not know from looking at my phone whether a file is on the computer or not.

I need to carve out 15 or 20 minutes every day to work on this.

Climbing stairs in 2020

Last year one of my goals was to do 10 minutes of exercise every day (generally some sort of yoga or stretching routine) and get my 10,000 steps. I managed to do it every day without fail . . . until late July when my knee freaked out on me and I missed a couple days. Having broken my streak, I declared it all a failure and never went back.

I do love the motivational power of a good streak. My nephew Ethan and I are almost up to 1000 days with our Snapchat streak, and I'm approaching 800 days of working on my Duolingo German lessons. But snapping a quick picture or spending 5 to 10 minutes doing German exercises (both generally in bed as soon as I wake up) is one thing. Exercising is another. Sometimes knees hurt. Sometimes it rains or I'm traveling or whatever, and the power of a broken streak can be dreadfully demotivating.

This year my fitness goal is to climb 20 flights of stairs (as counted on my Apple Watch) nearly every day. This shouldn't be too hard for me to do--I live in a 3-story house and work on the third floor of a building with many more floors. On days when I'm in the office and need to go to the first floor, I climb up several flights first before taking the elevator down; then I climb back up to my desk. On days when I'm home, I set the timer on my watch for 30 minutes intervals and run to the basement and back each time it goes off.

I decided to track my progress with an iPhone app called Strides. This app does track streaks, both a current streak and whatever my longest streak happens to be. But it also shows an overall percentage of days on which I have met my goal, and it colors in each day that the goal is met, kind of like a child's sticker chart.

Here's my January:



And here's my February so far:



You can see from the overview in the iPhone Health app that so far this year, my daily average of flights climbed has gone way up:



I think of my 94% score as a nice, solid A.