Caregivers, Worker Bees, and Little Bits of Crafting

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have to care for an aging parent? I did not. Well...I did, but then I quickly realized I am not cut out for the nurturing care-giver and put it entirely out of my head.  That was my sister's job.  I was a worker bee.  I owned my own business, I volunteered with charities that were important to me, and I stayed busy all the time. My sister, Patsy, was the nurturing type. She went to nursing school until her own medical issues put a stop to the, and she always swore she would be the one to take care of my parents when they got old. And she did.  She took care of my dad through recovery from a heart-attack, gall-bladder surgery, and over a year of hospice care. She took care of my mom through all that, too, and I was glad for it...especially since I live 300+ miles away.

Then the unthinkable happened...my sister died unexpectedly, leaving her handicapped, adult daughter and my mother, who was already beginning to show the signs of dementia. I moved my 29-year-old niece to live with me in the city so she could get a good education and learn to live on her own (public transportation should NEVER be underrated!), and eventually, we convinced my mother to move from her paid-off home in rural Texas into a senior living community where my brother and aunt could help take an eye on her. That didn't last long, though, as her needs were far greater than I had known, and she was already incapable of independent living.  Add to that the fact that she had squandered her retirement by pulling all of her investments during the stock market crashes of the early 2000's, and then she lost her job, losing her medical and life insurance benefits in the process.  All that to say that in January, Mom moved into my remaining guest bedroom, and now we have a household of four with some very distinct, and often time-consuming, needs.

Being a caregiver has put strains on my family and me that I could never have imagined, and it's made it even more important to me to get in my crafting time whenever I can. It hasn't been easy, but I've found that if I break things down into smaller tasks, and squeeze them in whenever I have an opportunity, it really gives me the outlet I need to calm my mind, let go of stress, and just zen out for a little while.  For example, today, I had to take my niece to the doctor.  I didn't want to go inside with all the sick people, and I could have sat in the car playing on my phone, but instead I took a portable project (embroidery) with me to work on while I waited outside.  I didn't get a lot done, but it was a lot more enjoyable and productive than sitting in that doctor's office with a bunch of sick people playing "Words with Friends" (nothing against WWF).

The start of some flowers on an apron.

So whether you're a caregiver, a worker bee, or just someone with a lot of hats to juggle, the truth is there will always be things that get in the way of crafting time. Whether it's a deadline a work, a sick kid, a second job, etc., you can't let it consume your life. Making the time to craft is not only possible, but necessary.  We all need those few precious moments of space where we can let go of the stress of the day and find something beautiful in our lives to experience and celebrate. It doesn't have to be a marathon weekend of crafting, or even an hour...just grab yourself five minutes when ever you can while you're watching the evening news, taking your 15-minute break at work, waiting for the roast to cook, or sitting at the doctors office or carpool line.  Just do it. Your body needs it, your brain needs it, and you'll be really glad you did!

How to Get Your Momentum Back

If you’ve noticed a theme over the past few days, but it’s got everything to do with staying on task, keeping focus, picking up where we left off, and getting our momentum back.  Here’s a great blog article by the fabulous Christine Kane about exactly that!

How to Get Your Momentum Back (…After a Summer of Reckless Gluttony)

Written by Christine Kane

 

Here’s what a client said last week. (See if it sounds familiar.)

“Man, I was really on a roll with this project before the summer. But then the kids were home all summer, and we had vacation, and then I had to get Brian off to school and I’m just, I don’t know, not motivated anymore…”

This “project” of hers is a BIG DEAL. Maybe even something that could change her whole life and business.  It was her “thing” for the year.

But then…

Summer happened.

She “lost momentum.”

And along with it, she thinks she has lost her passion, too.

She hasn’t.

She’s just disappointed in herself for getting off track.

And that sucks.  But it happens.

The problem with MOMENTUM is that people use it as a way to beat themselves up and then never get started again.

But momentum is not a constant.

Stuff happens. Kids get home from school. Knees get wonky. Hard drives crash. You get swine flu.

Any number of things can result in a loss of momentum.

But when you use “momentum” as an excuse for stopping, it simply means you’re afraid of dealing with the discomfort of getting started again.

And getting started again is one of the most valuable success skills you can develop.

So, in honor of September and getting back on track after the gluttony of your outrageous summer … here’s my own 7-step plan to help you get your groove back…

1 – Define the project or thing.

This one’s easy. Don’t overdo it and try to fix everything in your life. Just pick one priority right now.

2 – Schedule a time.

When you schedule an exact time, you will ensure that you don’t put the activity off because you don’t feel like it or because something comes up. It simply becomes just what I do.

3 – Go for Small.

The idea of MOMENTUM makes us set our sights huge in order to “pick up where we left off.”

Don’t play this game.

The best way to get your groove back is to experience completion on a regular basis. And the best way to experience completion on a regular basis is to set your goals small. Sixty-minutes is a perfect starting place. (Sometimes I do only twenty!)

4 – Create the space.

Get the space ready before the time comes. For instance, if your “thing” is getting back into a fitness routine, then every night before you go to bed, create the space for your 6am work out. Lay out your clothes, fill up your Sigg bottle, and charge your iPhone.

If it’s a big project, lay out your task list, clear off your desk, close your email programs every night before you stop working so that you’re not distracted when you begin in the morning.

5 – Set a timer.

When a timer is running, you won’t be as tempted to go downstairs to put the clothes in the dryer, or see if the mail has arrived. It’s a mind game that keeps your butt in the chair and your focus on the task.

6 – Just do it.

Don’t stop to pause and wonder if you really FEEL like doing this today.

Cuz you know what? You won’t!

Just walk out the door, or sit down at the desk, or start going through the clutter. Taking action builds the enthusiasm. Not the other way around!

7 – (Optional) Don’t skip days.

I know. I know. We’re supposed to get weekends off. But if you’re doing small enough chunks of time, then you’ll be able to continue your groove EVEN on the weekends.

Taking a day or two off means having to start all over again on Monday. This is why you start with small chunks of time and small goals. That way, it won’t be hard to keep up your practice – even when you would normally want a day off!

—

Christine Kane is the Mentor to People Who are Changing the World. She helps women and men Uplevel their lives, their businesses and their success. Her weekly Uplevel You eZine goes out to over 26,000 subscribers. If you are ready to take your life and your world to the next level, you can sign up for a FREE subscription at http://christinekane.com.

TO SEE HUNDREDS MORE ARTICLES LIKE THIS ONE?

See Christine's blog at ChristineKane.com/blog.

Unfinished Projects

Honestly, I don’t know how other bloggers do it.  I know a few people who post on their blog every single day, but I don’t know how.  I can’t keep up.  I started off this year doing so well.  I was even a few weeks ahead of myself at one point, but here we are in September, and I can’t even manage to get out one post a week.  I have this problem with everything I do.  I start out with a great routine and the best of intentions, and then somewhere along the way, something chaotic happens that sends me into a tailspin.  My routine gets scrambled like yesterday’s eggs, and there is no putting this Humpty Dumpty back together again.

Take for instance, my 365 project.  I kept up with my daily art journal project faithfully through mid-May, but a weekend retreat with the girls side-tracked me and I skipped one day, foolishly thinking I would catch back up the next day.  Did I do it? No, but I am happy to report that I did start working on it again, eventually, and even though I am behind, I still get every bit as much joy from the process as I ever did.

So why did I start working on my project again?  Because even if it is behind, I will eventually finish it, and what a great sense of accomplishment I will have when it is finally done!  I just can’t give up on something I’ve started.  There is something in me that demands that I finish it, otherwise I’ll be riddled with guilt over the time and money I’ve wasted.  And that’s exactly what an unfinished project is – a waste of time and money. 

So go on, get out there and dig up those old projects you started but never finished.  Let’s make September the “Unfinished Projects Month” and see how many projects we can get done.  To make it a little more challenging, and maybe a little more enticing, I will offer a prize to the person who completes the most projects!  Here are the rules:

• Complete as many projects as you can between now and September 30.  Contest ends 12:00 AM CDT, October 1, 2013.
• Items can be any arts or crafts project, but must be something started or purchased but never finished.  Examples of projects might be scrapbook page kits, crocheted afghans, mini albums, quilts, paintings, etc.
• Items must be distinctly different projects; multiples of the same item will be counted as one project.  For example, if you crocheted 3 scarves from the same pattern, they count as one project.  However, if you crochet 3 scarves from 3 different kits, they count as 3 separate projects.
• Take a picture or pictures of your projects and upload them to our Flickr Project Gallery at http://www.flickr.com/groups/cn365/ before 12:00 AM CDT, October 1, 2013.
• Post on the Crafty Neighbor Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/craftyneighbor and tell us how many unfinished projects you finished.
• Check this blog on Tuesday, October 8 for an announcement of the winner (I need time to check out all those projects!).
• Between now and then, I will dig out some cool prize that I know you want and I’ll post it here.  So stay tuned, and start working on those projects!  Good luck!

The prompt for this journal entry was "Once in a lifetime".  I couldn't resist stripping down the famous Talking Heads song to a few significant lines.  In case you wondered, this is the page that I previewed on July 23 in my "Getting Stuck" article.  I layered on some gesso before using my stencils and Dylusions ink spray.

Finding the Time to Crop

I was recently bemoaning the lack of time I spend scrapbooking these days, and I wondered to myself, what has changed and what can I do about it? It’s not that I’ve lost interest in scrapbooking; in fact, it’s quite the opposite. If anything, I love this hobby even more than when I first started. I’d be scrapbooking all the time if I could get away with it! And it’s not money, because although my budget has forced me to cut back spending towards my favorite hobby these days, I’ve also gotten a lot smarter about my spending. No more buying of patterned paper just because it was pretty or because I might some day use it, and online printing services have brought cost of photos down to under 10¢ a print. So the only thing that I can think of is where I crop.

In my early days of scrapbooking, back before the XXL and the Cropper Hopper rolling cart, before I filled up five (yes 5!) Cropper Hopper Embellishment Organizers, before the binders full of QuicKutz and the totes full of Stickles and stamps, I used to sit at my kitchen table in the evenings and work on my pages. In fact, I had so few supplies that I could pull up a TV-tray in front of the television and work from there. And then I started shopping. Even after I’d bought a few things, I could still get most of my supplies into a Crop-in-Style Navigator and eventually an XXL. I was still portable. 

My neighbor, Stephanie (Crafty Neighbors, you know!) and I would take turns dragging our carts down the driveway to each other’s houses and we really loved toting our stuff to the local scrapbook stores (LSS) so we could talk to the store employees about the latest and greatest techniques, gizmos, and gadgets. We started out with a Krispy Kremes and Starbucks Crop at the LSS every Thursday at 10:00 A.M. We’d stay until we’d have to leave to pick up my son from school or until guilt forced us into going home to cook dinner for our families. We’d also hit one or two Friday or Saturday night crops a month or drop in on a store for some free crop time. We met a lot of friends that way, and there were always other people around when I cropped. In fact, I rarely cropped at home any more.

I was a lot more productive in those days, too. Since I was cropping all the time, I guess the creative juices were always flowing. We’d be at a crop when midnight would roll around, and we wouldn’t want to stop to go home. Sometimes, if we couldn’t talk the store into staying open a little later, we’d bring our stuff back to the house just to set it all up again and work some more! It wasn’t unheard of to get 8, 10, or even 12 pages done in a night. These days, I’m lucky if I can finish two. We recently had a three-day weekend, and I planned to spend most of it scrapbooking. I was so excited because I thought I might finally finish doing up all the pictures of our trip to Mazatlán from a few years back. Nope. It just wasn’t in the cards. In the end, I wound up doing two pages – just two pages!

It’s not that I’m slow. I don’t spend a lot of time bent over the page, daydreaming and trying to figure out what to do to it. I do a lot of power planning. Basically, I do all the design work for a lot of pages at once, in anticipation of what I might want to work on next. Then I gather up all the supplies and keep them all together in Cropper Hopper Page Planners. That way, I have everything ready, so that when it’s time to actually crop, everything I need is right there and it goes down on the page so quickly and easily – even for a page that’s really elaborately embellished. So I’m not wasting a lot of time trying to figure out what to do or whether I have the supplies to do it.

A few years ago, we bought a new house (don’t worry, Stephanie and I still live close enough to be neighbors). My new house had a big sunroom/den that I thought would be perfect for my crop studio. It was full of light, had beautiful hardwood floors, plenty of room for tables, and it opened right onto the kitchen. At first, it was a scrapbooker’s dream come true. Stephanie and I started hosting crop parties here at the house. It was cheaper than doing the crops at the LSS, and we didn’t have to stop at midnight. But over time, everyone started collecting more and more product, and it got harder and harder to tote. And our kids were growing up, too. We couldn’t just leave them at home with Dad for a few hours. We were spending our weekends at dance recitals, swim meets, and football games. After a while, people just quit coming to the crops. And we weren’t going out to crops any more, either. We had acquired so muchstuff that it just wasn’t fun to tote it around any more!

I realized one day that I wasn’t getting any pages done any more. And I really did miss the time I got to spend with my pictures and my pretty paper. I started getting behind. My son was going into high school, and I still hadn’t finished his elementary and junior high albums! So I decided I needed to go back to working on my pages at home, whether anyone else came to crop or not. I resolved to sit down for one hour every night and work on a page. It worked for a while. It was a great stress-reliever at the end of the day, and I was actually getting some work done. But then I noticed that I didn’t even have time for that. I’d get started on a page and it would take me a week to finish it. I figured, at this rate, I was going to be dead and buried before I finished the 3rd grade! No matter what I did, I just could not get anything done!

I’ve been thinking about it for a while now. I blamed it on a lot of things. I was too busy. I work better when I’m with a group of scrappers. I’m spending all my time working on Crafty Neighbor products. But it just didn’t make sense, because I’m really not that much busier than I was a few years ago when we cropped every weekend and came back home to huddle around my kitchen table. And then I finally figured it out--I think the problem is my house! My dream crop room has become the bane of my scrapbooking existence. The space that was supposed to boost my productivity and inspire my magnum opus is now cramping my style! The big, airy, light-filled room that opens into my kitchen has become Grand Central Station!

At first, I loved the fact that I could be in my room without being alone. My family was right there in the kitchen, passing by my room on the way to the fridge, stopping to talk for a moment while I put adhesive on the back of that picture of Christen in her prom dress. I could be doing my thingwithout isolating myself from the family, and I didn’t have to feel guilty about abandoning my family to pursue my own selfish interests. And let’s face it, we all feel a bit selfish when we spend time on our own pursuits – that comes with the title “Mom”! But what I’ve come to realize is that the open-door means Mom is still here, being…well, you know…Mom. So if I take a break for some “me” time, I’m not really getting any me time out of it at all. How could I? After all, there’s nothing to stop my teenager from coming in and saying, "Mom....", and off I go to help him find whatever he’s lost or to give his friend on the phone directions to our house. If I were at the scrapbook store, he'd just have to figure it out for himself. Right?

So, if every time I plan some time to sit down with my new stack of Basic Grey or my Crafters Workshop stencils and life finds a way of interrupting me, then what’s the answer? Do I pare down my supplies to a more totable tote? Do I drive for miles and miles just to attend a 5-hour crop party in the next town? Do the Crafty Neighbors need to buy a building and invest in one of those Crop Clubs so we can do scrap parties every weekend? Do I build a wall and lock the door to get some one-on-one time with my stamp pads? I don’t know. But if I find a way to spend more time scrappin’, I’m hoping I’ll be so busy cropping that I won’t have time to blog here and tell you about it!

--
Cindy