Summer Plans

At the start of each season I like to make a mental list of things I want to do over the coming months. Do you do the same? They can be big or small, vague or specific. This spring I really wanted to go for a walk in some bluebell-filled woods, paint my pine dressing table, cook roast lamb on Easter Sunday, and spend some time in our garden. I managed the first three (a dressing table post will follow) and think I'm sort-of getting to grips with the garden. 

This summer (when it arrives - I'm sitting here with a scarf round my neck watching the rain and wind batter the garden) I want to make time to:

• Go down to the beach hut after school, eat fish and chips for tea and swim in the sea in the evening.
• Start my Midsummer Sprigs cross stitch sampler.
• Have lots of barbecues and try barbecuing some fish.
• Wear my new summer dress.
• Renovate the old garden bench my parents gave us.
• Make lemon curd.

If I do only two of these I will be a happy woman. But things are going to get busy around here as, after 8 years at home, I am about to start a new job and return to the land of work! I feel excited, terrified, empowered and overwhelmed, more by how I know life is going to change than by the actual job itself. I've been giving it a lot of thought and I've realised that if I want to continue blogging in any kind of regular way, I need a plan, and that plan is a series of posts called Make, Bake, Sew, Grow. While I want to post them fortnightly I think it's more realistic to think that they'll just happen when they happen. I like to be tidy, and this for me is a neat way to gather up my miscellaneous musings on the domestic and creative front into something a bit more coherent.

This is not me putting pressure on myself to be superwoman, but instead a way of gently reminding myself why I love to craft and cook, why pottering and gardening makes me so happy. My hope is that it will encourage me to make time for myself and for the things I enjoy.

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Make: In the widest sense of the word. Making plans, making changes, making a start. And not just crafting, but anything done with my hands, anything creative in the home.

Bake: This should really be Cook or Eat, but they don't rhyme with Make. Stories from my kitchen is more realistic, just a regular and seasonal look at what I'm cooking, if only to stop me falling into a fish-fingers-for-tea rut.

Sew: Embroidery, cross stitch, using my sewing machine to make things for the house...all of this. 

Grow: Not "this is what I am growing today" but more a general look at how my garden grows, at what is happening out there, what is making me happy.


I'll post my first this week. Wish me luck, with the job and the blogging!