As my 94 year old grandfather used to say to me when I was a young girl, "There are as many days left in the year as there are noses on your face!"
As soon as I press "Publish Post" the little ticker on the left next to 2011 will say 365 and I will have completed one of my biggest goals ever!
I hope you have enjoyed the journey with me. I have had a love/hate relationship with it - I love it when I have something interesting to post about, but then I hate it when I don't have anything interesting to say and have had to still post! Thank you for reading, thank you for sticking in there, and thank you for all the encouraging comments - they have meant SO much to me! I tried to reply to everyone when they commented, but I know some days I missed doing that, so for that I'm sorry, but please know I read every single comment and they made me smile!
For my last post of the year I want to write about the kindness of quilters/sewing folk. (It's rather long, but hang in there!)
Back on October 2nd I entered a trivia contest on the Z&S fabrics Facebook page, and lo and behold I won! The prize was a $50 gift certificate to their store. I was so excited as I had bought from them before and knew they had the most amazing prices on quilt fabrics around. Well the certificate didn't come and didn't come, even after repeated nice friendly emails from myself. I knew the son of the business owner had taken over the business and was, shall we say nicely, a little "out there"?! His posts on Facebook were something else! Hugely entertaining though!
A couple of weeks ago a mass email went out from him saying that the business was closed. Done deal, goodbye. It wasn't really shocking - I was surprised that anyone was still buying from him - he seemed so crazy! However, I was left wondering, what about my $50?!!
He had said in his email that the other company's stores, Sauders fabrics and Zooks, both in Pennsylvania were staying open and honoring outstanding orders.
I emailed them and explained the situation. They said that yes they were honoring the obligations and if I could just send them emails exchanged proving I had won, then that would be great.
I searched and searched and found a couple of emails but neither of them specifically mentioned me winning. One was the email I sent with my answer to the trivia question, but nothing saying congratulations, you won! I still forwarded them, not expecting anything at this stage. I received an email back saying they would take my word on winning and to come to the store anytime to claim my prize! Great! Except....I live about 8 hours away and they don't have an online store!
I did however know that they carry Kona cotton solids, a staple at their stores, so I said I'd love it if they just sent me a random selection of Konas and to take the price of shipping out of the $50.
Just 2 days after I sent that email, a box arrived via Fedex, with 1 yard each of 9 colors of Kona.
Kona retails for $6.99/yard, so that was $63 worth of fabrics, plus the Fedex shipping. I can't describe how that made me feel. First that they trusted a complete stranger, and second, that they were so completely generous. Who does that now days?
If I'm ever in Pennsylvania, I'll definitely be stopping in!
Which brings me to my new goals. Following the example given by Sauders, I will be showing more trust and generosity to strangers. But that isn't my main goal - the word I want to live by in 2012 is....wait for it....
MINIMIZE!
I want to minimize my life, as in minimize the amount of 'stuff' we own. I'm going to cut it by at least half. My hubby would be happy if we each owned just 100 items. A shoe counts as 1 item. A pen counts as 1 item. Yeah not going to happen (have you seen all my fabric?!) but he is going to LOVE how much stuff disappears from this house!
I'm also going to minimize the amount of things I do outside of my family. I tend to say yes to almost everything asked of me, but it's time to minimize that! We decided to minimize the amount of TV watching in our home, and 3 days ago the cable was cut off. We have zero television going on! OK so we have a ton of DVD's, but no more cable. Which leads to the next thing...I'm going to minimize money spent. Cutting off cable is a great start!
So that's the plan!
I started off 2011 with two goals I posted about on here. One was to blog every day, and the other was to stitch something every day. I succeeded at the blogging, but failed at the stitching. I was doing really well until October when we had that freak snowstorm and lost power for 5 days! Stitching just went out the window and has been quite sporadic since, so I'm not going to make that goal again!
I am still going to blog, just not every day. Look for posts from me 2-3 times per week. I'm looking forward to not feeling the pressure to say something even if I have nothing to say! Hopefully they'll be more in depth too.
My big quilting related goal for 2012 is to finally publish some patterns I've been working on. I have the drawing software all figured out (finally!) and need to get moving on that. So watch out for that at some point, along with a new name and new blog location! But for now, things are staying the same.
Once again, thank you SOOOO much for your support this year. See you next year!
-Joanna
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