Creeping in

The Halloween decorations are starting to slowly creep in around here. (Much too slow for Jack's taste. He is still reminding me every day that all the other places have their Halloween out and we do not*.) When he and I had gone to Michaels to check out the Martha Halloween stuff, I fell in love with these stickers . They instantly screamed garland to me.
At first I thought I would just hole punch them and hang them up, but I can never just stop there. So I added the crepe paper rosettes from some old crepe paper streamers I have kicking around.
Of course, I couldn't stop there either. So it was on to the glittering. (Which was most labor intensive. Making a teeny tiny line of glitter around the edge of a paper ruffle requires nerves of steel.)
Then it took me another 3 days to work out how to hang it up. I had already punched holes in the stickers before I really thought this project through. At some point in the middle of the night it occurred to me to use those tiny scrapbooking brads through the holes and then punch the brads onto some old seam binding. It worked like a charm.

And most importantly, I actually finished something.

I have been trying to finish glitter a pumpkin for about 5 days. Sigh.

*I cannot seem to make any headway on anything this year. All I do is cook and clean, clean and cook and try to wrangle Jack through this most difficult period for both him and I. Sometimes I wonder if it is all in my head, how hard it seems this year. To make myself feel better (really worse), I went back and looked at the last 3 months in 2007 and the last 3 months in 2008. In 2007 I managed to make 14 crafts from June through August. In 2008? 5 if I am generous and count things I made with Jack.

I was reading Amanda's book a few months back, and the beginning really reasonated with me about the NEED to create once you have a child. (Not that some folks do not have that without a child, but when Jack arrived that is when it really started for me.) I have mentioned this before, but making things gives me a sense of true completion that mothering and housekeeping do not. I can start something and I can finish something. It won't be messy again in an hour, it won't need me again in 10 minutes.

My mental health is starting to suffer from the genuine lack of time to myself to do that this year.

Anyway, that's a lot more than I intended to go on about when I sat down to post this morning. LOL