Month: July 2023

Summer Craft Challenge 2023 : Week 1

~ Making Stitches ~ 2 Comments
My first ever Summer Craft Challenge in 2016

Hello there, here’s the first installment of my Summer Craft Challenge for this year. In case you missed my last post or are new to the blog, back in 2016, when we lived in Gibraltar and I was a full-time stay at home Mum to three young boys, I was staring down the barrel of a 10 week long summer school holiday.

Whilst I loved being at home with my boys, the prospect of entertaining them for 10 weeks filled me with slight trepidation, so in order to force myself to spend a bit of time each day doing something that gave me joy, I set myself the challenge of doing something crafty every single day. I started it, not knowing if I’d be able to achieve my target, but I did. I also amazed myself at how much I actually created.

So, each summer since then (apart from in 2020) I have repeated my challenge – some years have been better than others! Here is Week 1 of this year’s challenge:

Day 1 : Saturday 22nd July

I started off my day with some calm crochet before the storm that was about to be a 12th birthday party and sleep over…. (should read ‘not-much-sleep’ over). I sat in my pjs as the rest of the house was quiet and hooked up a few rows on the prototype of a crochet commission I’m currently working on.

I also managed some crochet while I sat and waited for the birthday boy and his friends to finish their Laser Quest session!

Day 2 : Sunday 23rd July

Sunday was a quiet one. Once our guests had departed and the house had been returned to ‘normal’ I spent a lot of time just sitting and crocheting (and not feeling guilty about it due to the lack of sleep the night before).

Day 3 : Monday 24th July

No time for a long lazy day on the sofa on Monday, back to work for me but at least it was a nice sunny evening when I took Youngest to football training. I took my project with me, sat on a bench with a couple of other football Mums and chatted while I hooked – it was very pleasant!

Day 4 : Tuesday 25th July

I can’t show you what I hooked on Tuesday as it’s for a top secret project but when I saw these two balls of yarn side by side I was sent on a trip down memory lane to my childhood and some chewy mints called Pacers. Do you remember Pacers?

Day 5 : Wednesday 26th July

Time for a bit of non-commission crochet for a change. I picked up this shawl I’ve been working on for a while, my aim is to get this completed over this challenge – there’s really not much left to do, but I keep doing a bit and putting it down – it’s taking forever!

Day 6 : Thursday 27th July

It was a super busy day full of Zoom meetings for me, then a hectic evening later so I knew my crochet time would be limited. I opted to crochet during one of the 15 minute comfort breaks in the midst of my working day – it’s all looking a bit black though isn’t it?!

Day 7 : Friday 28th July

I did such a lot of crochet on Friday but alas I cannot share it. What I can share is this cute bunny who was completed exactly a week ago ready to move in with his new family 🩵. I started him at a Crochet Sanctuary away day in March (the same one I made my Mindful Mandala at which was featured in my previous post), and I held off finishing him until his new owner had safely arrived – I’m pleased to say baby & and bunny have met and are getting on together just fine!

That’s it for this week’s Summer Craft Challenge, do you fancy joining in? If so, just tag any of your photos with #summercraftchallenge2023 on Instagram and we can all share our summer of creativity together.

Thanks for stopping by!

Lindsay x

Anyone fancy a Summer Craft Challenge?

~ Making Stitches ~ Leave a comment

Hello there, just popping in to say thank you for all the kind comments on my previous post, it’s much appreciated. 🩷

This is the ‘Mindful Mandala’ I made way back in March at a wonderful Crochet Sanctuary day. I didn’t post a photo at the time as we were in the midst of everything else that was going on. It was a wonderful day of yarny fun at a difficult time.

I don’t know about you, but on the whole, crochet really helps me when things are tricky. I often turn to creativity as a way of putting a positive spin on difficult days, and that’s why back in 2016, I set myself a summer craft challenge. I was staring down the barrel of a 9 or 10 week-long school summer holiday in Gibraltar with 3 young children to entertain and I was worried I might go a little bit stir crazy.

The challenge forced me to do something crafty every day of that long summer recess and it really worked. I ended up being far more creative than I would otherwise and that did me the world of good.

A few weeks back I was firmly of the mindset that I wasn’t going to do it again this year. Things were still feeling too difficult and now I am working a lot more so my time is very limited. But then I put my last blog post up about where I’ve been for the past 6-7 months and then I published a podcast episode and life began feeling a bit more like it’s ok to have fun now and again. So, with that in mind, and the fact school broke up today for Youngest (and earlier this week for No. 2 son), I guess now’s as good a time as any to kick off a challenge.

As from tomorrow, I shall endeavour to do something crafty every day of the school summer holidays as I have done every year since 2016 (apart from 2020 – owing to the fact we moved country etc!) and as I do it, I’ll document it on Instagram each day and once a week there’ll be a weekly round up here on the blog.

If you fancy joining in, you’d be most welcome to join me! If you do, just use the hashtag #summercraftchallenge2023 and we’ll see where this crafty summer takes us! 😊 No pressure at all – I may not manage every day myself – but I’ll have a go!

Happy crafting!

Lindsay X

A postcard from a difficult time

~ Making Stitches ~ 8 Comments

Hi, I’ve been thinking about how I could find the words to write this post for months. Life has been incredibly difficult since New Year for us as a family. At times it’s felt like we’d slipped into a parallel universe thinking at some point I’d wake up and be back in my ‘old’ life.

I don’t want to go into details about what’s happened, suffice to say it’s been health related and we have lost a very special person in our lives. Grief is a tricky thing to navigate and I’m on that road now with my boys. Life will never be the same for us but we have to look to the future now.

I have always been a passionate advocate for creativity helping me in tough times, and it truly has in the past. This time though, perhaps my feelings were too big so my creativity and need to make just slipped away. I ‘had’ to make a few crochet items for a commission I was working on and that forced me to get lost (temporarily) in the mindless rhythm of crocheting, but I can honestly say that in the past six months I have probably crocheted for pleasure a couple of times – the most recent of which was last night, which got my thinking about my blog & podcast.

I had big plans for the podcast this year – which haven’t happened. In fact there is still an episode which was due to be published in early January just as our difficulties first arose. I have felt a bit guilty at times because I have a lovely audience out there (some of whom have contacted me directly to check on me – which is lovely) and I always prided myself on being reliable and regular in my podcast episodes. I don’t like to let people down.

In addition to what we’ve been dealing with emotionally, I have had to take on more paying work recently to support my family and that has eaten into my spare time which in the past would have been spent having lovely chats with fabulous creative people about their lives for the podcast. The impact this additional pressure would have on the podcast going forwards has worried me, as it’s a big part of who I am, but the podcast doesn’t bring any financial reward – only emotional and in fact, it actually costs me money to make.

With this in mind, I think the time has come to face up to the future of Making Stitches. The plain facts are that my time is a lot more limited nowadays and will be for the foreseeable future but I would like to continue with my podcast and blogging adventures albeit in a reduced manner. So hopefully, in the next few days, that outstanding episode of Making Stitches Podcast due out in January will make a late appearance and some more ‘stand alone’ episodes will follow later in the year.

If there is still anyone out there still following my blog who hasn’t disappeared since I hung up my blogging hat in January, thank you for hanging on. And to everyone who has been checking on me in my absence – thank you, it’s nice to know I wasn’t forgotten. Please bear with me, and I will pop back again from time to time, hopefully with happier news and some colorful crochet…

Lindsay X