Starting to come up for air

Is slowing down the new speeding up? And other January thoughts...

I’m still working out the shape of this Substack space, but I was thinking I might like to do an end of the month reflection & roundup so I decided today to have a play with the idea and try it on for size. Inside you’ll find…

• Joy in Progress - What did I get up to this month?

• Takeaway time - What I’ve been doing differently in January and what I’m taking from that into next month

• Patterns of the Month - Sharing what’s been getting some love over on Spoonflower in January

• Coming in February - What to look out for next month!

Joy in Progress

First up I thought I’d do a quick round up of what I’ve been doing each month so you can catch up on anything you might have missed! I used to have to do this for my boss in my old day job, every month I would dread doing it and then every month I’d be suprised by just how much I’d done. And although it feels like I really haven’t done much in January, I’m going to give it a go and see if I can surprise myself…

I made the move to Substack and shared my first monthly Feel Goodies over here - When I planned my move to Substack I thought I’d have all the January Feel Goodies stuff ready to go well before Christmas. Yet despite my best efforts I was nowhere near to done, so I came back in the New Year feeling totally overwhelmed as I tried to get my head around making it happen, and questioning if I actually did want to make it happen. However I love putting together the Feel Goodies every month, and I really did want to make the change to hosting it over here, so I just kept doing one thing at a time and somehow got it all done in the end! It might have been a week later than planned, but I did it, woo! And then a week or so later got all my mailing list subscribers over here too.

Peacocks in Love collection - Having created the Peacocks in Love pattern and the Block Print Inspired pattern for a couple of Spoonflower challenges at the end of 2023, I wanted to turn them into a quilting worthy collection, ahead of designing our February Feel Goodies. After playing about with different heart patterns I landed on one that I felt brought it all together as a blender print, figured out which colour combos to add it in, and it’s ended up being a really lovely design!

Quilt designs & mockups - This year my focus is on fabrics for quilting & crafting, and while I haven’t managed to share much of where I’m up to with it yet, behind the scenes I’ve been making progress on designing quilt layouts and making mockups with my patterns. I’m looking forward to sharing more of that with you in February - including the real life cheater quilt I’m making for littleun (which even includes a pattern she designed herself!!!)

Celebrating 2023 - Even though part of me felt like I was too far into January to be looking back on 2023, I remembered the whole thing about doing things in my own way, at my own pace and on my own terms, and created a post celebrating all the design collections that had sold on Spoonflower in 2023. I loved doing it so much I’m going to play with doing it more throughout the year!

Twinkle Twinkle Rainbow Sky collection - Back in December I created a blender print, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, in coordinating bright & light rainbow colourways, to go with the Twinkle Twinkle Rainbow Sky collection, to make the collection more quiltable. I ordered the original design to use as the binding for littleuns quilt, but there was something about the pattern I wasn’t happy with (although the fabric I sampled will still be used for the quilt binding - waste not want not!) It’s taken a good few iterations, but finally I got to a pattern I’m really REALLY happy with… so I’m hoping it’s going to be just as loved by others too!

Takeaway Time

Realising I had tipped myself into burnout at the end of last year, I gave myself permission to be slow going into January. I decided it was okay for stuff to be messy, imperfect and delayed, with the aim that by the end of March I might feel more on top of stuff again. This has been so important in helping me keep going this month, and avoid getting completely overwhelmed.

I have noticed just how frequent I have thoughts creeping in telling me how much I should be doing, where I should be at with things and that I’m never going to get anywhere if I’m going so slow with it all. However, in giving myself permission to stop those thoughts from pushing me to do more, it’s created space for me to better notice some of my other thoughts and reflections. This includes a reality check that if I had let those thoughts take over, and had tried to do more, I probably wouldn’t have made much progress with any of it.

I’ve also noticed that trying to stick to doing one thing at a time (my 2024 theme coming in quite handy there!) I’m actually feeling more up to moving on and tackling the next thing once it’s done. I feel like if I hadn’t given myself permission to slow down and temporarily drop some stuff, my head would be swimming with a whole bunch of stuff, I’d feel lost and I’d be getting nowhere fast.

I have spent a lot of time this month reassuring myself that “there is plenty of time to get to that” and “you can deal with that later” (in a healthy ‘I’m trusting myself to eventually get to it and take action’ kinda way) which has helped.

More generally, taking the pressure off has made me so aware of how much we’ve internalised the hustle culture of everything needing to be quick & efficient. How despite doing plenty it feels like we’re never doing enough. And that if we’re not making quick progress with something it’s our fault for not doing more. In all of this forgetting that it’s actually okay to make slow progress and that some things just take time.

Having an ADHD brain that wants to do so many different things, and wants to do them all now, it is incredibly easy to get sucked into that hustle mindset. Being more aware will hopefully help me pay more attention to what actually feels like a good pace for me with the things I’m doing, and notice when I’m pushing myself beyond that. I’m also going to try to get a bit more realistic with my workload, something my husband thinks it’s impossible for me to do, so maybe I can prove him wrong 😂 I feel like January has been a good start… so it’ll be interesting to see where I go from here with it all!

Patterns of the Month

January was a bit of a quieter month for me on Spoonflower, but there were still some designs getting plenty of love, and mostly monochrome versions of patterns, which I love to create, so it is nice to know people actually enjoying buying them to use for their own creations!

Coming in February

• It was nice to see Crafting Notions get some love on Spoonflower this month, as in February I’m going to be adding at least one more pattern to make it a quilting collection and it’ll go on to be the basis for our March Feel Goodies design!

• I’m planning to share more with you around evolving my collections into quilting-worthy collections, what cheater quilts actually are (including why I decided I need to “cheat”) and hopefully sharing my first finished cheater quilt, along with behind the scenes of how it came to life!

• As countries finalise their artist & song selections for Eurovision 2024 I want to start having some fun with the Eurovision inspired collection as we countdown to the finals in May!

• I will be taking part in #The100DayProject again, which kicks off on the 18th February this year. I love doing it every year, even last year when it didn’t go how I hoped! I’m doing something a little different with it this year, so look out for posts over the next couple of weeks for more on my plans with that!

Thanks for coming on that little wander through my January! I’d love to hear about something that brought you joy in January, and what you’re looking forward to in February…