We’ve done it! We’ve successfully reached the end of January! I hope it hasn’t been too bad for you all, and you have managed to stay warm enough through that cold snap! We’ve been piling on the logs in the Rayburn, but have been topping up the heat in the evenings with electric heaters and layering on the jumpers and blankets! I actually like the beginning of January; I allow myself a little time to get over Christmas and make plans for the year ahead. Planning is fun. It’s when the actual work begins things start feeling a bit crap. Don’t get me wrong – I love my work – well, I love 50% of my work. Unfortunately the other 50% is admin, advertising and accounts, which I don’t love. So it’s more important than ever that I look back on my highlights, favourites and things I’m grateful for this month……
I’m absolutely loving one of my favourite Christmas presents: a lensbaby Trio 28 – a creative lens for my camera. It basically means I can take photos with the effects I want to achieve without having to spend hours in photoshop afterwards. If you’d like to know more about it, please have a read of this post where I look at and compare the three options it gives you. I can’t wait to get out and use it some more.
I’m sad to have taken down the Christmas decorations. I leave them up as long as possible and reluctantly dismantle the tree on the 6th of January. I have so much though, I risk the bad luck superstition as it usually takes a few days to take absolutely everything down! Does anyone else’s house look sad and bare once the tree and all the sparkles have gone?
Christmas decorations
Highlights:
* Chris surprising me with plans for a little family winter weekend getaway.
* Getting back to sewing. It feels like months and months since I turned on my machine! Oh how I’ve missed it.
* Reaching 150 You Tube subscribers. I know that’s a piddly number in comparison to most You Tubers, but we must celebrate the small things!
* Chris and I going on our very first date night! We had a lovely evening on our own (not that evenings with the kids aren’t lovely too!) and of course, a review of the restaurant will be here soon!
* Singing with Village Voices at the local Wassail. It was such good fun! If you’ve no idea what a wassail is, then have a look at this video.
* Catching up on Christmas telly. It was rather busy in this household over Christmas, so it’s been lovely taking the odd evening to sit in the living room together, wrapped up in blankets and watching some goo old-fashioned telly (as opposed to you tube videos!). I particularly enjoyed Jonathan Creek.
Michael Eavis & Morris dancers at Pilton Tithe barn
Being grateful for:
* Our new dishwasher that finally arrived a couple of days ago. I do not miss the good old days of washing up by hand!
* The surprise parcel full of carefully wrapped presents received from a happy customer in America.
* My lovely new rose gold (ie pink) macbook. Oh my goodness, I love it so much! And finally I was able to finish editing Vlogmas.
* My Dad, who kindly does our accounts and deals with the dreaded tax man for us at this time of year.
By the way, I’m probably not going to embed all my You Tube videos into my Monthly Memoirs any more. (Can you imagine what that would have been like in December?!) This year I’m aiming to upload a video twice a week; one being the usual sort of thing like I did last year – sewing and crafts mostly; although I expect I’ll be doing more usual You Tubey type stuff like fashion hauls or blog-related content such as reviews. The other one will be a weekly vlog. I enjoyed Vlogmas, am looking forward to having memories recorded to look back on, but there’s no way I could vlog daily. I talk about it more here.
I hope you’ve all had a great January. I’m going to be spending as much time as possible sewing in these winter months so I don’t feel guilty for wanting to be outside when it gets warm. So I’ve got busy, but fun weeks ahead; I hope you have too!