Valerean

I admit, Black Friday and Christmas shopping is usually wasted on me. I try never to step foot outside the house during the madness after Thanksgiving, and I thrift or make most of my gifts for Christmas. This year I needed to boost my spirits after the bad news, so I decided to do a little shopping from indy sellers during December for someone who rarely gets gifts: me. These silver beads from LadyBirdBeadsCo are both new and vintage, and go nicely with the silver and garnet frog brooch I thrifted. I'll be using these as stitch embellishments next month for the first of my calendar project tote bags. These three mystery fat quarter bundles came from FlatWaterMuse . I (obviously) don't need the fabric, but I needed the mystery. Love all three sets. Now I'll just have fun with them. 14carrot, my favorite Etsy seller, really came to my rescue with a handmade pearl bracelet, three adorable quilt tags and two bags of charms and jewelry findings that I c...

The final lot I thrifted for 2025 arrived right before Thanksgiving, and there was much to be grateful for. Twenty-one skeins of clean, odorless unused yarn with the original labels, and four types/colors came in multiples. What I thought were five skeins of my favorite Mandala yarn in Serene turned out to be seven. These retail for $8.99 each at Lion Brand; you're looking at $62.93 in yarn right here. Lots more treasures came with the yarn: 30 small vintage skeins of plastic canvas and needlepoint yarns, 25 packages of vintage seam binding, a kit to make an amigurumi puppy, new and used knitting needles and a huge bag of crochet hooks. There was even a ball of hemp cord for jewelry making. Although I know it's worth more I'll price the skeins at $5.00 each resale, that's a $105.00 value. Everything else I'd say is worth $25.00, for a total of $130.00 for the lot. My max bid was $35.00, but I ended up paying $34.00 due to my strategies. That...

The afghan I made out of yarn scraps was meant to last another month, but my hands seized up with a bad arthritis flare so I kept working on it until it was large enough to use on cold nights. Very happy with how it turned out -- certainly colorful. I'm still hand quilting the pink only quilt, which has been fun but also a bit of a bear to manage. Crochet is good for me, too. It helps me work out a lot of frustration and aggression, like what I imagine punching a heavy bag is for a boxer. I just don't have wear the clunky gloves. :) Seriously, being able do something that I love (crochet) as physical therapy in order to keep doing I desperately don't want to give up doing (quilting) has also helped me deal with the depression over the limitations and fading abilities of old age, too. Going to the quilt show this year also helped my spirits tremendously. No matter what condition I'm in, being around quilts and the people who make them makes me happy. N...

My inner child has been crying a lot this month, but things are finally starting to calm down. Tomorrow is my guy's birthday, which is always fun for me. There is only a little over two weeks left before December 26th arrives, for which I have to think up a goofy name. Happiest Day of the Year tops the list. Then in just under three weeks New Year's will arrive, and I can start on my first calendar quilted tote. I'm really excited about this annual project. While I've been coping with the bad luck and downs of the holidays my work on the granny stitch rectangle throw has really helped me get my hands, my head and my heart in good places. I'm out of the splint now and my sprained finger is much better, thanks to the physical therapy aspect. I know the throw probably looks ugly to everyone else but I love the un-Christmasy colors, and I'm proud of myself for finally figuring out this pattern. Above all I'm glad that I didn't give up on m...

A few days before Thanksgiving I saw a little white bit of fluff on the garage doormat, but when I reached down to pick it up it fluttered and moved. That's when I realized it was a Virginia Tiger Moth, just like the one I rescued in March of 2024 . This little one was a bit more beat up, and couldn't seem to fly away, so I collected her on a piece of paper and put her in a little habitat with some Japanese maple leaves. There she can spend her final days resting and out of danger . If she happens to lay eggs, I'll look after them, too. I know it's a bit weird to rescue a dying moth. But these tragic insects remind me to be grateful for my life, and to do what I can for the helpless.

I've been watching History's Greatest Mysteries on Tubi , mainly because I love Lawrence Fishburne's voice, which falls into the very limited range of sounds I can still hear at present (I also think he's an amazing actor.) Because most of the mysteries presented have yet to be solved, I've been thinking about what the possible solutions could be. Writers by trade have to be problem solvers, and we often think in directions other people don't. So here are: Ten Solutions to Unsolved Mysteries (If I were writing books about them) Atlantis: A continent inhabited by a highly advanced civilization and destroyed by a mysterious natural or man-made disaster that made it sink under the ocean. Solution: Atlantis is entirely invented. Plato based his fiction on some real historic events and then highly embellished them, which added all those tantalizing but ultimately meaningless clues. Bigfoot: People have been chasing after this large, mythic creature sai...