Oh my goodness… Where did the time go? Heck with other people! *I* couldn’t handle how fabulous I was. Long, tortuous but eventually liberating, sunshiney, personal journey story left for another day.

Recently I was asked in Mindfulness Compassion Therapy (what a blessing it has been) what I want to do with my 60s. It sounds like a simple question but it’s not. I don’t think I’ve asked myself that type of question regarding a new decade of my life ever. This one simple question has really pumped up the volume of stepchild questions. It’s no longer just one question.

One of those questions that I keep revolving around deals with creativity. The last 2 years have been a bit of a dud artistically. Sort of. Creativity? What’s that? I had a very bad reaction to one of my cancer treatment medications in January of 2017. It was bad. It nearly took me out. Art? I could barely tie my shoes. Write? I could barely read. Drain Bamage. I’m 100% serious. I have been working VERY hard on getting back to myself.  It’s working. I’m back. In many ways better than when I left. And I do mean LEFT. So, now that I’m right…  Or should I say upright …

What do I want in my 60s? More. More Joy. More Love. More Art. More Healing. More Style. More Fabulous. More Family. More Health. What helps those things come into being? Creativity. Love. They’ve always been the answer and still are.

The other day I bought myself a new and fabulous pyrography machine. That sucker BURNS. I won’t be able to use it on anything other than the hardest woods. It burned through a piece of basswood in 4 seconds. Which means I won’t be using it that much right now as my current project isn’t in hardwood. I’ll share photos of the new project but I’ll be using my trusty Dagger.  I need hardwood supplies.

I’ve been looking at my fabric stash, much diminished after a major purge last year, for textile inspiration, noodling around in my head before I sleep letting ideas for textile goodness projects come and go. My Facebook feed is full of luscious needlework beauty.  Pinterest too.  (BTW, my Pinterest boards are here, enjoy)

Inspired by something I saw, a few weeks ago I sent a photo of a recent needlework project (not the one below) to a magazine in Australia, Inspirations. They have been an inspiration to me for a long time. I love their magazine, it’s soooo beautiful. And they wrote me back! Asking for a larger resolution image for their newsletter and a brief bio about my needlework journey. Stuff like this bag below. I made at least two dozen bags in the past year and most of them are sold or gifted. I’m moving on to other things…

While I was working on a bio to send to Inspirations I came here to grab some blips and quips and I realized that I missed my blog. I miss *some* things at any rate. Some things I don’t miss at all…. But boy did I need to do some spring cleaning. Like make certain posts private from two years ago. I don’t want THOSE public, I was having a rough time. A VERY Rough Time. Some videos I recorded and uploaded made me feel embarrassed. Some of them were recorded only days before the world went black. Why on earth would that be embarrassing? Well, if you’ve spent any time in the archives, you might understand why a world renowned embroidery publication might find it off-putting. There’s nothing I can really do about the archives. I lived my life out loud and in public here for a long time. All 18 of you wonderful strangers read it faithfully.  So what’s here is here. Except from 2 years ago. The videos just had to go in the Good to Know But Not Share file. I did, however, listen to them and found tidbits of goodness like 30 minutes of me rambling about what I was going to do creatively in 2017.  Let’s just change that to 2019 shall we?

The big question became, “What do I want to do with my 60s and do I want to do it here?” Is it time to focus? Is it time to get back to being productive? Is it time to be public about it? Hesitatingly, the answer is:

OH! I got married last week. OMG. Married! To the best man a gal could want by her side. At least this gal. Now that is some joyous news.

Fabulous though he is, I can talk until the cows come home. Evidently they don’t come home very often, the man never gets any peace. He’s a SAINT. He’s private. He’s mine. He might even lovingly cringe that I’m going public again. I’ve learned a few things in the past 2 years and one of them is, you don’t have to share EVERYTHING anymore. Say what?! I know, right? If It makes me hesitate, put it on the back burner. I’m going to leave the archives here because if nothing else, they will show, I hope, my personal growth. It’s done my heart wonders, this being married to such a wonderful person. The day after we got married I felt incredibly different in a very good, very supported way. In a family way, er, family kind of way. I felt so loved. I FEEL so loved. And feeling loved kind of opens up all kinds of possibilities doesn’t it? It sure beats the alternative. Right? Right.

I’m making a list of things I want to talk about and things I want to show off. Things you might like to see and read. My hard drive crashed two weeks ago and I lost YEARS of hi-res images of my work but I think I have enough to make it work moving forward. My phone takes amazing images really. I have a great camera. Let’s only show new things. There are tons of photos here already of what I did in the past. I have new things I can bring out for show and tell.

One last thing, recently I purchased colonialtailor.com, a long held dream of a demo site that mimics Medieval Tailor but with 18th century American clothing reproductions. It’s been on my dream list a long time but when I put off buying the domain and lost it to someone else and my “Master” betrayed me, precious, I kind of let it fizzle out. There were tears. And hissing. That was 10 years ago. This year it was available again for a rock bottom price and it’s now mine… So there might be things to say about that! Wait… MIGHT? Definitely some things to say about that and some of it has to do with being adopted, DNA and geneaology, Benedict Arnold, and Robert the Bruce.  I know, right? WTH.

So…  let the fun begin!