In medias projectus

Projects I HAVE finished!

2010-04-02T15:39:00.006-05:00

Here we have; sweaterpants/wool diaper cover, fitted diaper, paintings, curly birds, and Patrick's bird mobile (which needs to be re-hung, which is on my list). The blue panel painting and the curly birds weren't on my list, but I did them this week....hehe....but I FINISHED them, and that is the point!

el fin!

My Project List

2010-03-22T22:35:00.002-05:00

Katie told me I should post this list on this blog (which I signed up for then promptly forgot about last September. I blame childbirth.) So here it is, my to-do list of unfinished projects, and then my list of projects I want to start....but ONLY after the first list is completed! It has given me some inspiration to finish the unfinished things just so I can work on my new, exciting projects.

Confession: When I discover an unfinished project I forgot to write on my list, I do it quickly, then add it and cross it off afterwards just so I feel like I've got a lot crossed off my list.

To Finish:

Shoulders on Spring dress (Bought fabric 2 years ago; got pregnant 1 year ago; preggo belly got to big to try it on for proper fit; now I need to alter the pattern to have detachable shoulders for nursing.)
Alter dress I got at Target to fit better (my "learn-how-to-tailor project")
Fix zipper on pink flowered pleated dress
~~Fix Patrick's short black diaper cover~~
~~fix the elastic on Patrick's long black diaper cover~~
Finish Patrick's quilt
restring Patrick's bird mobile and hang it up in a different way on a new branch
finish sewing a ton of other stuffed birds I already cut out the fabric for and put on Etsy
finish crocheting Matt's scarf (I think this is going on 3 years)
Finish altering a baby sling
~~sew covers for living room pillows~~
~~mend white sweater~~
Mend Matt's pants
~~hem brown table-runner~~
~~hem round tablecloth~~

I haven't even looked at the stash of fabric for the patterns I have in a box in my craft room.

Projects to do in the Future:

Make a green silk dress (I got some beautiful spring colors soooo cheap a few years ago! I just don't know what to make with it for sure yet. I might alter a pattern I already have....can't find a link to it, sorry.)
Figure out how to make the skirt I have in my head for some hand-dyed silks I made
Make artsy bedroom quilt...for fabric I bought 3 (?) years ago
Spray-paint and create picture frame collage in living room

Spice it up

2010-03-16T17:45:00.008-05:00

Inspired by this post on The Kitchn, I decided to make my own fancy magnetic spice storage system. But I didn't go buy jars - thankfully, I work with a preschool director who kindly gave me the hookup for about 30 baby food jars. That seemed like a lot, until I actually pulled out all of the tiny bags of spices stashed in my stove-side cabinet. I had to ask her for 15 more!

This project is relatively simple. I used:
Small baby food jars with lids*
Ceramic magnets (I got a package from HobLob with 40% coupon for $5).
Gorilla Glue or another strong glue

For the labels, I used:
ModPodge
A foam brush
An inkjet printer
Label paper

but you can use labels according to your taste (and budget!)

Glue the magnets to the outside of the lids and let sit until dry.

I started with five tiny baby food jars to see if the magnets would be enough to defy gravity. One per lid worked fine. But when I started collecting free ones, the tiny jars were at a premium, so I had to settle for the small ones (about 4 oz.). These required two magnets (or stronger magnets, but I had already bought these).

Attach labels to the bottoms of the jars.

I like seeing what's in my spice jars, so I didn't want a large round label. But I definitely wanted the herb names on there, and I'm in love with herbal illustrations and botanical prints. So I printed some portions of plant illustrations along with the names of the spices onto label paper (an 8.5x11 HUGE LABEL). I cut out each name and picture and stuck it on the bottom of each jar. I added two coats of ModPodge over this to keep them from peeling off. A few notes:

I used the label paper because it was there and I hate ModPodging tiny pieces of paper that slide everywhere.
I have used this label paper for years in various ways, and have become an expert at peeling off the sticky label part from the paper back with my fingernails.
If not for #2, I would have preferred the sliding pieces of paper. Choose wisely.

Fill jars with spices and attach to your refrigerator, or a custom-cut brushed stainless steel backsplash (Hey, I can dream, right?)

I really enjoyed this one and love my new jars. If you prefer to shake your spices, this may not be the project for you, but I always pop off the plastic rings and dump the herbs into my hands to measure, so it's great for me. And it freed up three shelves of cabinet space (small shelves, but still!)

Scratching Post-- Progress!

2010-03-01T16:33:00.000-06:00

And you thought I had given up! Last night I finally bit the bullet and recommitted to finishing this project, which has lingered so long in my house that I thought I would overcome me.

Part one of this project was cutting a large number of cardboard rectangles of the same size, or in my case, roughly similar sizes. Having finished that part in the fall, I let the stack of cardboard rectangles mature for several months.

That done, all that remained was to drill holes through all the rectangles and insert the threaded rods.

I did this by gathering together as many sheets as my C-clamps would hold, and clamping them tightly together. If your sheets are as wonky as mine, and differ slightly in size, I recommend aligning two sides so that you get at least two flat edges. Since this object was destined to live in a corner, I didn't mind having the back and one side a little uneven.

Once clamped, drilling through the cardboard is easy, although it will require a large bit. I used a boring bit that was a bit larger than my threaded rods. Be warned, cardboard will dull the edge quickly.

I added washers and nuts onto one end of each threaded rod and without removing the clamps, threaded the cardboard onto them. After about seven or eight batches, the drilling phase was complete.

So, instead of a loose pile of cardboard sheet, I know have a tightly-bolted-together pile of cardboard sheets, with an extra foot of threaded rod hanging off one end. The idea is to shorten the rods, but I realized too late that I no longer own a hacksaw.

A few thoughts: First, and most imporantly, never make this object. It involves way, way too much time. If you already have a lot of precut cardboard sheets of the same size (as was the case in my inspiration project), or a table saw that you are willing to dull with cardboard, and if you don't have carpet, then maybe this is a good project. I do not recommend doing as I did, and cutting through piles of boxes with a razor knife. It's murder on your hands and takes forever. It would have been so much simpler to just nail a board to a square of plywood and wrap it in twine.

A second disappointment is that the cats are not particularly interested in scratching this. They're big guys, and they like to scratch on things a bit taller, such as the back of my couch. They've also expressed a distinct preference for scratching it when the grain is oriented vertically, which doesn't look as good... not that anything about this looks very good!

So, any suggestions? I'd like a way to salvage this, but by this point, I'm not sure there's a way out, and I definitely understand why the commercial versions of this are so costly!

A Tisket, A Tasket

2010-02-23T20:43:00.004-06:00

I love making something out of nothing. Making bread from flour, yeast, and water, recycling old jars into funky storage containers: transforming something simple into something functional (and sometimes kinda pretty) makes me feel like a superhero.

Of course, this desire has the tendency to make me into a packrat. I can't get rid of those odd-shaped pieces of cardboard - they may be just the thing I need to make someone a journal cover. Fabric scraps are the worst! Small pieces can be perfect for sachets, or wrapping a small present, or patching a pair of jeans. But for every one of these small, incidental uses, I add five fabric scraps to my scrap-basket.

I tried to take on quilting in high school, but I lose interest very quickly. If a project takes more than 10ish hours, even if those hours are spread out over a few weeks (or months), it's just not worth it to me. I needed something faster and easier, so when my mom suggested braided rag rugs, I toyed with the idea. But I didn't need any rugs. What I did need was a nice foraging basket.

There really wasn't too much to it:
1. Cut the rags into strips.
2. Braided the strips in coordinating colors, sewing a new rag to the strip as it reached the end.
3. Sewed them together as I would a rug, just in a bowl shape instead of a flat one.
4. Added a simple cloth handle.
This was the perfect project for a week sitting on the couch watching the Winter Olympics with a cold. It gave my hands something to do besides shovel Wheat Thins into my mouth and shake my fist at a certain conceited Russian figure skater.

Game On!

2010-02-03T16:08:00.005-06:00

Confession: my husband and I play D&D.

Every Wednesday.

At our house.

Ok, maybe none of that is shocking to any of you. But why D&D on a project blog?
I'll give you a hint. It's strongly associated with the color red, starts with a V, and comes around every year to the dismay of single people everywhere...and the exasperation of those attached. There's nothing my hubby likes more than gadgets for his hobbies, so I focused on an aspect of the game that, in my opinion, needed a fix.
Like many of our friends, we had the standard grid map that comes with the book laminated, so we could use dry erase markers to outline whatever environment we needed. But dry erase markers don't erase well from lamination, especially if the markered dungeon has to sit for a week or two while we finish playing it out. Plus, the map curls and twists - if there are any bumps the miniatures slide all over the place, and if someone accidentally rolls their dice on the mat, the pieces fly everywhere. Something had to be done.
I bought a humongous dry erase board at the W for $20.* Upon closer inspection at home, it revealed pale gray dots in a 2-inch grid pattern. Bonus! I used a yardstick to put a dot every inch with a metallic silver sharpie, using the existing dots as a guide (those definitely shaved an hour off the total project time).

A few concerns:

1. The metallic sharpie can be scratched off if rubbed too hard. I can always touch up the dots, but it may prove to be not-worth-it. It might also be the silvery marker that's a problem - perhaps a regular sharpie would work just fine. But worst-case scenario I'm left with a huge dry-erase board to use in some other fashion.

2. My original intent was to draw a grid, like the original battle map. Given my unsteady hand and inattention to detail, I decided dots may be better than trying to draw a huge grid with a yardstick.

All told, it only took me an hour, and I did it while watching Fraggle Rock. No complaints here. It's heavy and completely flat, so even if we have to play on the floor, we have a level surface to map on. I also bought some magnetic tape, so when the surprise is revealed, I can put a tiny magnet square on the bottom of each miniature. No stray die will knock over Fable the Drunken Master Monk now!

*The daughter of a small-town grocer and a green-freak, I'm not a big fan of Wal-Mart and try to avoid shopping there. But I couldn't pass up the $20 price difference between Staples and Wal-Mart, so I bought it. As soon as I got it home I had to glue the corners back on (they had already popped off and broken) but I think $20 may be worth it.

Quiltin' and Dreamin'

2009-09-28T17:46:00.007-05:00

Well, I told you I picked an easy-to-finish project last week because I had a whopper this week, and I won't disappoint.

I've been working on this lap quilt for...are you ready for this? Six years. I pieced it by machine from my old jeans the summer before I went to college and decided to hand-quilt it, a decision I regretted for the next...uh, six years. I left it at home for the first 3 years of school, when I lived in the dorms, and worked on it when I came for the occasional weekend or holiday. It lived in my parents' parlor (yes, they have a parlor) clamped to some 1x2s leaned against the wall. I'd clamp it to some sawhorses when I came home and sew a few rows, then put it away again when I went back to Springfield.

When I got married, I decided to take it with me - it would never get finished at that rate! I got an extra-large embroidery hoop and I've been quilting in it, off and on, for the last 3 years. It's only a lap quilt, about 4' by 5'. But I generally quilt for a month, then get tired of it cluttering up my living room and put it away for three.

I certainly don't expect to finish slaying the beast this week, but I hope to do as much damage as possible. It will help that I finally have a designated area in which to set it up and keep it, and don't have to shuffle it from living room to bedroom whenever I want to work on it. This will likely be a recurring project, so I'll keep you posted.

I'm glad I only have to work on it for the next week - it makes it seem much more manageable!

Win some, loose some

2009-09-25T15:32:00.006-05:00

I'd like to share a small victory with everyone to begin with. I started this project before I knew about this blog so I don't have any 'before' photos but it started as an ugly, dirty, wooden spice rack I found in the cabin. With a little scrubbing and a couple coats of white paint it now has a whole new lease on life. I think it will look good against the wooden walls in the cabin and I did manage to clean it and apply two coats of paint between Sunday and Friday.

For next week I'm going to work on the project that has become my nemesis, so the outcome may not include the happy smiles this week's project gave me. This cross stitch with buttons and beads is so much harder than I imagined. I thought I could do it on the train during my commute (no way, I'd spill the beads); I thought it would be easy (I did these at age 9 for crying out loud) but nothing has quite worked out. Partially, it is my fault for thinking I could out smart the directions but I now see that they tell you to start in the middle so you maintain the same size as the pattern. Now I have to get 'creative' with how big each item within the squares are since they are different from the pattern. I would really like to scratch this off my list, though, so maybe if I work on no projects but it I can get a good way down the road next week.

Also, I think it will be extremely cute if it were ever to get completed.

Procrastination Projects: What do you turn to when you need a win?

2009-09-25T14:04:00.003-05:00

In Medius Projectus is all about those projects you start but don't finish. Some of these projects take days, and some take weeks, but the thing they all lack is good old-fashioned instant gratification. Sometimes, when you've been cutting out cardboard slabs for hours and hours, or knitting until your fingers go numb, or polishing your trumpet for over an hour... Well, you just need a win. You need the sense that you are not just a starter-- you're a finisher. When that happens, we turn to our best skills and hope to knock out a project that will give us the strength we need to get those long-haul projects done!

That's what happened to me today. When I need a win, my go-to project is food. It's always food. Yes, I know. This is not a food blog. But when I really need to jack up my mood and get my creative energies in line, I take out all the mixing bowls and pots and pans I've got and do something I call multi-cooking!

Multi-cooking goes like this: You put on your apron. Mine is a black, v-necked food service apron left over from my husband's stint in a nursing home cafeteria. Despite that, it's the closest thing aprons have to sexy. You put on your shoes because that means you're serious, or you leave them off because it's your damn kitchen. And if you're me, you queue up a couple of episodes of the Daily Show to listen to while you're cooking, because being unemployed in an unfamiliar place gets lonely and the company doesn't get much better than Jon Stewart. The idea is that you and the kitchen are going to get comfortable, so you do whatever it takes.

You start with the familiar. For me, that's bread. Bread takes time, but not a whole lot of hands-on time necessarily, so if you are planning on being in the kitchen for a while, it's a good thing to get going. I mix a bowl of the infamous No-Knead Bread dough and let it sit near the stove, soaking up heat and rising. I immediately feel less world-weary. I am playing to my strengths. I mix up a quart jar of powdered milk and start heating it up for yogurt-- another old friend I could make in the dark. These are foods with magic involved-- the dough rises, the milk congeals. You start the process and mysterious little beasties come and finish the job.

While multi-cooking, you will get hungry. Toward lunch time, I hard-boil half a dozen eggs-- one for lunch with the last slice of the day before yesterday's bread, and the rest for quick meals during the rest of the week. Hard boiled eggs are humble food, but they are a spiffy upgrade a lot of those emergency foods you wish you didn't eat but can't help relying on. The next time you find yourself staring down a bowl of ramen, imagine how much better it would be with a hard-boiled egg sliced over the top, and maybe some frozen peas and carrots thrown in. Add the leaf of something green, like curly kale, shredded up in your hands, and that orange packet is almost an actual meal as well as a blood-pressure inflating sodium bomb.

At this point in the multi-cooking process, you start thinking about cooking ahead. There are times you want to cook, there are times you want dinner, and there are times you want to go out. These do not necessarily coincide. With this in mind, I decide to go ahead and pressure-cook some dried white beans. I used to be scared of my pressure cooker until I realized that having the skill to cook with an apparatus that might explode was kind of badass. Now you would have to pry my pressure-cooker out of my cold, dead hands. I almost took it camping once. While I'm at it, I make a bunch so that I can put some away in the freezer (more emergency meal insurance), have some for dinner, and use a couple of cups for an ersatz white-bean hummus (weird, I know, but I'm out of chickpeas).

During the next stage in multi-cooking your inner artist will appear. Maybe you didn't know you had one. Maybe you are an engineer or an English nerd and you thought art was kind of a geek-chic name for hipster children. Which, by the way, it isn't. Trust me, if you cook for long enough, some kind of Martha Stewart demon perches on your shoulder and starts telling you to do appalling things, like make glazes, or make foods that look like other foods, or buy and use saffron. In general I am the most prosaic of cooks. Ninety percent of the dinners I produce can be described as curried slop over rice. But if you stand there long enough, something takes over and you start using words like "tureen" and "garnish" and "plating."

Things really start to get out of hand when I am poking through the fridge and find a couple of lemons left over from the cocktail parties I am always having. Uh, in my imagination. I suddenly realize I want to make a lemon pound cake that I saw in a magazine eight years ago. Outside, it is pouring rain and is supposed to continue all day. I realize that a slice of pound cake and a cup of coffee are the sole forces in the universe able to make this day beautiful and turn a kind of sorry week of job hunting around.

The pound cake takes some time. I put some butter in a bowl to soften it and set it over the hot yogurt milk as it cools. While it softens, I slice a lemon as thin as possible. When the butter is soft, I set the bowl under my ancient stand mixer and toss in some sugar. I slice lemon peel off the other lemon and let the blender do the work of turning it into grated zest (my hand grater is hopelessly dull). I mix the zest with yogurt and vanilla. By this time, the butter and sugar have reached the consistency of expensive shampoo. I add three eggs to it, one at a time. I mix the cake's dry ingredients together in another bowl, then alternately add the flour mixture and the yogurt mixture to the sugar/butter/eggs until it all comes together.

On the computer, Jon Stewart is interviewing Bill Clinton and all he is doing is asking questions about Hillary Clinton. This in it self is a kind of satisfying revenge for me after the indignities of the late 90s. I realize I am whistling when both cats show up, thinking it's time for kibbles.

Pound cake batter is not like other cake batters. It weighs more but looks lighter, like clingy custard. Uncooked, it tastes good enough to risk salmonella. I scrape it into a loaf pan, lick my fingers, and toss it into the oven. It is now time to turn my attention to the glaze, which is easy-- I squeeze the peeled lemon into a hot saucepan, add sugar, then add those papery lemon slices. In five minutes it's done and can sit and wait for the cake. In the meantime, I wrap the yogurt in an old army blanket and stick it into a cooler with a hot water bottle. After that it just sits for eight hours until it curdles. I take the beans off the stove and mix up the hummus-like spread in the blender, then package up the rest for later. The bread dough is just sitting around, rising higher and higher.

I get the idea that I will dry out the remaining fresh lemon zest by putting it on a cookie sheet and sticking it in the cooling oven after the cake is done. Waste not, want not. Steven Colbert is doing his preview at the end of the Daily Show. I have always thought this was a bad idea. Colbert is funnier than Stewart but doesn't have the class, so the exchange always makes both of them come off slightly pathetic.

Finally, my cooking steam runs out. I have been in the kitchen for four hours. I sit down and one of the cats immediately finds a seat in my lap. I munch on celery sticks with hummus. In five minutes, my cake will be done. I will expend my final effort on arranging lemon slices along the top and glaze the crap out of the little SOBs. When this thought hits my brain I know I am done cooking.

I look at the project I've been working on. It is looking decidedly smaller and more subdued. It knows it's next.

There is still dinner to make and bread to finish. There are still papers to file, books to read, applications to follow up on. There is still a cardboard cat scratcher in progress. But for now, I am taking a break, buoyed on a sense of having created and having been satisfied.

What are your go-to projects when your other projects are driving you crazy?

The Mad Hatter part II

2009-09-25T10:57:00.007-05:00

Ze hat! She is finished!

So I admit, I picked an easy project to start with. It's the Dave Ramsey project snowball - start with something small, so you are encouraged to keep going. Next week's project will more likely be time-consuming and tedious...and unfinished at the end of the week. But more on that later! I finished one project in the endless queue,* so I get the weekend off. Hooray!

(By the way, I know I should have cleaned the mirror before I took the picture...but I didn't, and a shot this good is hard to duplicate. It's not my fault the mirror always gets this dirty, anyway. I live with two boys.)

*this word still doesn't look right to me, but I looked it up.

Trumpet Scubbin'

2009-09-23T14:30:00.005-05:00

I have a dirty, dirty trumpet. It's so dirty that even the girls on Commercial Street won't give it the time of day. It's dirty enough that HBO censors it. So dirty that when it rains, it stains the carpet brown. My trumpet is so wretched that were it up to Catholics, it would spend a year in purgatory no matter how well it played Merchants Of Venice.

Ok, enough puns. It's about time I gave my trumpet a real bath, shined it up a little, and made sure the slides did what they were made to do and their name would imply. When I had the bell repaired at Springfield Music, they offered to do a professional job for $90, but I said no thanks. Surely I can do something pretty close to a professional job, right? My mouthpiece also has that ring, and I'd like to see how much I can do about it. The worst part is the inside of the bell, so that's the part I'm most eager to see.

Scratch Paper

2009-09-23T08:27:00.014-05:00

I have two kitty cat friends, Lenny and Steve. Like most animals of the feline persuasion, with or without claws, they love to scratch. Lenny and Steve have claws. Steve in particular has the kind of thick, scary claws that look like eagle talons and can splinter wood and rend flesh from bone. Right now their favorite places to scratch are my bed, my couch, and each other. According to The Cat Bible (not to be confused with the LOLcat Bible), if I give them a designated and sufficiently satisfying place to scratch, they will more or less leave my furniture alone. It makes no promises as to how they will treat each other.

Mr. Stevie Boo Gray Kitty demonstrates the nommability of cardboard.

My husband and I went back and forth about buying one of those monstrous beige carpeted scratching posts, which run from about $60-$150 depending on how tall they are and how many kitty crows' nests they have. Ultimately, we knew our cats would probably ignore all the kitty crows' nests and continue nesting on top of the refrigerator, where it is warm and there are plenty of interesting jars to knock down. Also, they are not interested in scratching carpet or sisal twine. Carpet is their best friend, as it allows them to reach warp speed when running across the house at 2 A.M. and induces cat nirvana when rolled upon. And they have never met a twine-based toy they couldn't unravel and become hopelessly entangled in. We have to hide the twine in cabinets with those child-proofing locks, because if we don't they will open the cabinet doors, take it out, and hog-tie themselves in a matter of minutes.

What they really like to scratch, bite, and demolish into tiny pieces is CARDBOARD. Enter: The cardboard cat scratcher.

Inspired by this lovely creation, I saved a giant stack of flattened boxes after moving with the intention of cutting them into uniform sheets and bolting them together.

Unbelievably time-consuming

We've been here for over a month and this is as far as I have gotten. Oh, sure, it looks easy. You're just cutting out a rectangle, right? WRONG! You're just cutting out a rectangle ABOUT A MILLION TIMES!!!!!! The pile above took me about four episodes of LOST to make, and I hate LOST. So to you, it may look like a little innocent pile, but to me it has begun to look more like this:

Oh noes!!! Run!!!

On the other hand, I have a giant pile of boxes in my apartment that need to find a new home at the recycling center. So, my blogging friends, I announce my intention to complete the cardboard cat scratcher by the end of the week. God willing, the cats will not only accept, but come to love this creation, and I can stop spending all my time listening intently for the sound of ripping upholstery, then running across the house to shoo them away from my quality furnishings.

The Mad Hatter

2009-09-22T15:55:00.007-05:00

Because my generous roommate let me borrow his fancy new digital camera, I get to upload the first project on this blog!

I've been working on this hat for over two months, at least. I don't remember when I started. Generally, my knitting comes in stages:

Stage 1 - Mid-September: Ah, fall. Maybe I should think about knitting again.
Stage 2 - Mid-October: Ah, crap! Christmas is coming - I have to make some scarves!
Stage 3 - Late October to December 31: knitknitknitknitknitknitknitknitknitknitknitknit...
Stage 4 - January: Ah, Christmas is over. Now I can knit something for myself...after my hands stop hurting.
Stage 5 - February to Mid-September: Ah...knitting? Yeah, I should be doing that...

Rinse and Repeat.

I haven't knit anything for myself since my second knitting project ever. I also have a tendency to lose things. So now I have one hat, one scarf, and two mittens, none of which match (including the mittens!)
This summer I got a half-finished scarf at a yard sale (apparently I'm not the only one who doesn't finish my projects) with lots of extra yarn, quickly completed the scarf, and decided to make a swank hat for myself. Here is the pattern I chose, from this book:Nice, huh? But A PAIN to knit. It's taken me so long...but this is the week! IT WILL BE FINISHED! mwahahahahaha!

In medias projectus

2009-09-22T14:15:00.000-05:00

Here we are, in the middle of things. Lots of things. Half-knitted hats, file reorganization, hammock staking, furniture staining...you name it, we've tried it, and probably have a half-finished version around here somewhere, if we could ever find it! What's more, we're not alone.

I propose the following rules:

One project per week - no more, no less.
At the end of the week, we switch to a new project, for one of two reasons:
EITHER: The project is finished! Proceed to have a small party (an edible indulgence qualifies) OR: The project is now old news and boring, both to project director and blog readers.
Projects may be revisited, but no more than once per month.
At the start of the week, post the intended project. Pictures are always nice (note to self- get a new camera).
At the end of the week, post the completed project (Yay!) Or post the project's progress (not as exciting, but life happens - and some projects take multiple weeks. Again, pictures! (again - camera!)
Don't leave a project hanging, even if no progress has occurred - just post that it didn't happen this week. There's no judgment here.
Though it may be difficult, try to pick a project that has been sitting unfinished in the back of your closet, not a brand new shiny one. Urgent projects, such as Halloween costumes or Christmas cards, are exempt from this suggestion.
Though it may be more difficult, try to refrain from working on projects other than your chosen one of the week. If you're done, take a much-needed break! If you're not, work on the one you decided to. It's worse when you put it off.

I humbly submit these bylaws for the perusal of the readers, in order that they might make suggestions and approve them (or disapprove them, I guess...but I hope not!)

Katie