A 'SMART' New Start

You can take the girl out of the Learning Mentoring but you can't take the Learning Mentoring out of the girl. Or so it would seem.

One of the things my mentor training taught me was how to set Specific, Measureable, Achieveable, Realistic and Time-related targets for the children I worked with. In short, it's all about setting goals which are achievable as nobody wants or needs to be set up to fail, least of all some of the kids I came across.

That said, 'acheivable' is not the same thing as 'easy'. Once each tiny goal was reached and reflected back on it often built into something quite significant. For example, there were the very quiet children whose target was to speak once in class, or there was the hyperactive Jordan [ahhh Jordan ... a complete and utter legend who I always thought of as a real life / 10 year old Joey from Friends, of whom I could regale you with tales of sheer hilarity. Remind me to share with you his concerns about the Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi one day ....but I digress!]. Yes, good old Jordan whose targets I kind of, sort of, ended up adapting into something resembling gambling ... "I bet you can't sit still for 2 minutes"... and so on ...for an hour! Hey, it worked for him and his teacher, who despaired over who would get him to stay in his seat after I left the school!

So, what's this got to do with anything? Well, it's that time of year isn't it? Where people set themselves grand life-changing goals but which, more often than not, will probably be forgotten or 'failed' by February. Which is where my approach to target setting comes in. I don't do resolutions - they're too big, too wooly, too huge-yet-still-vague. I need to take my big goals and break them down into smaller steps ...it's all connected to that thrill of crossing something of my 'To Do' list [if that makes me sad ...then so be it!].

Here's a layout I made at this time last year, which shows some of the small targets I set myself :
And I reckon that I achieved most of that. Go me! Put a tick on my behaviour chart, slap a shiny 'Well Done' sticker on my jumper and send the house points my way, thank you very much.

So, onto the 2010 targets. Here's the layout:
[Materials used: corrugated card; mini-alphas; vintage alphas; number brads; index label; '10' card and ticket from various Gauche Alchemy kits. Patterned papers; 'Ten' tag; vintage book page; yellow index card and green cardstock from the 'Resolutions' kit from Crafty Templates. The vintage wallpaper print circles were a digital download from SooArt on Etsy.]

And here's where I will be writing those goals:

The thing is ... I haven't actually pinned any concrete targets down and I don't want to just make something up to fill a blank section on a page. So, I'll be giving it a little more thought before committing the list to paper.

But I will certainly get it done. I think it's important to put things in writing as, even if I show no one else ...it's seems more official when it's all there in front of me in black and white! I remember when I made the following layout, almost two years ago now and how, after coming up with the title I struggled so much with filling out the dreams and wishes sections:

Now, I don't consider myself superstitious, but something back then was preventing me from allowing myself to write down what it was I wanted ... in case it somehow got taken away from me. I can't remember what it was that changed my mind but eventually I wrote it all down and soon afterwards a lot of positive things connected to my dreams began to happen. Obviously it wasn't anyhting to do with creating the layout itself ... but it was related to getting those goals clear in my head and subsequently, actively, working on them.

If you make a date to check back in with me this time next year, I'll share my '10 targets for 2010' with you.

Don't be surprised if 'to be able to sit still for 2 minutes' features in there somewhere!

Happy New Year!

J x

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas
Originally uploaded by Nabview

Hi you,

Just squeezing in a last minute festive 'Hello' and and even more festive 'Merry Christmas'.

In between escorting a 12lb Goose to my parent's house this afternoon and visiting my sister later on tonight ... I made this little video with some candles I'd been keeping for 'something special' ... and wishing you a Merry Christmas is surely that!

Whether we last met this morning, last month, last year ...or if we've never met at all I'd like to thank you for dropping in on my corner of blog-land and for making it such a cosy place to be. Thank you.

Best wishes for the Christmas season, take care and may 2010 bring you more than you knew you could hold.

Julie x

Making a list.

It was around this time last year that I, like many other people on Facebook, completed a list of 25 Things About Me. When I wrote the list in December 08 I decided that it would be fun to scrap each of the 25 items I came up with and I did. I really did.

But do you know when I actually, finally, got all 25 completed? August! Yes, eight months later. I know.

Prior to this bout of extreme tardiness, I had thought it would be good to repeat the process each year. For obvious reasons, I wouldn't necessarily repeat the scrapping side of things, but keeping a record of things about myself each year is certainly my kind of thing. I've been keeping diaries, notebooks, 'About Me' books, journals and scrapbooks ever since I could write and the 25 Things - with its entirely random nature - can capture whatever is at the forefront of your mind on the day you respond.

That said, I was really pleased to get a message from TinkerTailor [at The Inked Edge] saying that she'd passed on a blog- tagging thingy - in which I have to list '5 Things I like Doing'.

I was happy about this for a few reasons. Partly because TinkerTailor is one of the rare, rare breed of online crafters who I've actually met in the flesh and she's great! And partly because listing a mere five things sounds feasible. Five's so much easier to handle than 25.

In fact that's four fifths easier. Or 80% if I'm being precise. On that scale, if I did choose to scrap them at the rate I managed the task this year, it'd only take me until February to complete .... errrm, sorry, didn't mean to drag you back into GCSE Maths ... here's those '5 Things I Like Doing':

1. I like wearing high heels when I'm doing housework. This was me last week, breaking-in the shoes I bought to wear on Christmas Day, after a trip to the bottom of the garden to sort out the recycling:

Maybe it's because when I'm in heels I feel prepared, grown-up and ready for battle. Maybe it's because I'm small and they give me the edge over the mountains of ironing. Or maybe it's because they're just darned pretty things which make a fantastic noise when I storm through the kitchen!
Please note: despite the rumours spread by Shimelle and Clair regarding my favoured heels / chores combo, I am [almost] certainly not a Stepford Wife. ;)

2. I like to read 'metafiction' [fiction in which books feature as parts of the plot/story]. In the past I've worked my way through titles such as House of Leaves; The Alchemist's Apprentice; If On A Winter's Night A Traveller; The Name of the Rose; all of the Thursday Next novels ... and many more - I find they gravitate toward me. Currently I'm reading this:

... a novel about illuminated manuscripts [I'm only on Chapt2 but it's going OK so far ..]. Several times I've attempted to read the classics of the genre - Tristram Shandy and Don Quixote - and while I may have given up on Tristram I'm persevering with Don!

3. I like sitting in front of the fire with my laptop.

Not only is that what I'm doing in the photo - it's what I'm doing as I type this. Warmth + internet = perfect contentment.

4. I like not taking myself too seriously. It's why I got James to take a photo of this street sign in York this month after it struck a chord with me: Call it one of the pleasures of getting older, not only can I admit to not being perfect ... I really don't care that I'm not. In fact, I've recently realised that I enjoy sleeping too much to strive for perfection any more! Little? Yes. Shambolic? Sometimes ... and that's fine by me. [Well, that's how I feel this week ...]

5. I like to watch stand up comedy. In 2008 I made this layout to record the comedians I'd seen: Then, during 2009 I saw more in one year than I'd seen before then. For the second time around I saw: Dave Gorman, Dylan Moran and Count Arthur Strong. Then then there was Steve Coogan, Ross Noble, Dara O'Briain, Jimmy Carr and and Jon Richardson all whom I saw for the first time this year. Now we have plans afoot to get tickets for Chris Addison and John Bishop in 2010 ... and that's just for starters.

There you go then there's my five ... you? If you share any of these proclivities I'd be interested to hear about them. Within reason.

Let's not allow things to end up as a fully-blown confessional .... expecially if it involves the inappropriate wearing of heels ....
:)

Angels we have heard ...

...that I might just have stumbled across something else to add to the list of "Things which I rather love to make" please welcome my newest crafting crush: fabric dolls.

The first one I made last week I'll be sharing on the Gauche Alchemy blog on Friday then, caught up in the 'Oh my, making dolls is sooo much fun I need to do it every single day' type of hype, I went on to make an angel as a Christmas gift for a friend:

Both of the dolls I've made emerged as a result of finding fabrics in two of my recent design team packages. While I could have used them by layering them on layouts or for making mini-book covers I really wanted to exploit the potential for creating something tactile and 3D.

The one-piece body of the angel is made from a section of the heavy cotton canvas which is part of the current 'Resolutions' kit from CraftyTemplates., as is the yellow netting I've used to make the wings and halo. [ETA: I've posted a full tutorial on how I made it here - on the Crafty Templates blog].].

Here's a close-up of so you can see the glitter cabochons [also from the 'Resolutions' kit], buttons and beads which I used to form the halo.

The irregular shape of the head section it's over-large size and it's tilt came about entirely as a result of me following what was only a very quick sketch directly onto my fabric in a pencil whose lines I couldn't really see when I was feeding it through the sewing machine ... a machine whose presser foot didn't let me follow the pencil line because of .... well, you don't really need to be on intimate terms with my sewing machine anatomy ... let's just say it was tricky!

So, not wanting to unpick it and start again [I'm really not a patient person when it comes to things like that!] I decided to work with the shape instead of fighting it and it began to .feel similar in some ways to the depictions of saints in Russian icon paintings:

When I positioned the face and began adding the glitter cabochons that I recognised a similarity between the shape and style of what I'd made and these kinds of images. Perhaps my wonky stitching was actually a subliminal result of watching the BBC4's 'The Art of Russia' series!

I don't think there's anything in that series about crochet, embroidered trimmings and velvet ribbons ... so 'm pretty sure the details I added to the angel's gown were all my own idea!

[The yellow Italian cotton lace is again from the Resolutions kit and the rest is from my own stash].

I'm so tempted to make dolls for each and every possible occasion next year and just wish I'd thought of the idea sooner so i could have a heavenly host all ready to hand out as gifts next week. But come next Christmas everyone I know will be getting a fabric doll!! Unless ....

...unless, and as unlikely as this may sound, unless I get distracted by yet another shiny, pretty, new craft in the meantime... but, really though, how often does that happen .....??

J :)

p.s: there's a smidgen more decoratively festive / festively decorative inspiration from Kirsty and I in the new Copy+Paste challenge we posted today!

Season's greetings

Hi there. How're you today?

Did it ever get light outside where you are? It didn't here. Not really. However, somewhere during the several nano-seconds between the dark dingy light of this morning and the mists and setting sun of the afternoon I did manage to snap a few photos of the Christmas cards I made at the weekend.

They're quite minimal as I didn't want to over-shadow the leaf design stamp which I bought from Make Your Mark in York last week. I added lettering using various colours of 'Tiny' Adornit and Making Memories alphas.

Then, on the cards which are plainer still, I simply stamped diractly onto the card base and stamped my wording with Studio G alpha stamps.

The majority of the inks I've used come from one of my favourite ranges at the moment: Dew Drops 'Memento' Dye Inks of which I'm gradually building up a collection. They pander right to the core of my colour-obsessed side, not only do they some in a really interesting spectrum of colurs, the've got such evocative names such as: 'Paris Dusk'; 'Summer Sky', 'Rose Bud'; 'Pear Tart' and 'Rhubarb Stalk' ... I mean really, how am I expected to resist?!

Oh and those inks also smell lovely too [don't look at me like that, I know for certain that I'm not the only craft-supplies-sniffer on the block!!]. In fact they smell exactly like a pack of scented felt tip pens I had when I was young. I swear!

OK, I think I'll leave it there before I let any other secrets out. I mean, before I know it I'll be letting it slip that there'll be a new Copy+Paste challenge up before the end of the week and also that PaperCraft Inspirations magazine have featured our 12 Days class in their latest issue.... errrr ... oops... try to forget what I've just said ...

;)