Well hi, friends! Happy 2013. Hope the new year is treating you well so far.

Instead of a year’s worth of goals, I’m going to try something new (to me) this year. I’m going to set some priorities or goals at the beginning of each month. Hopefully that will help me be realistic, as well as on-track and prioritized. Or, you know, not at all. Remains to be seen.

So, here are my three goals for January:

1. Finish my sister’s wedding quilt. I was making good progress on it, and then WHAMMO, December totally escaped me in a blur of teacher gifts and a complete lack of plans for school vacation. But now I’ve got the back made, and plenty of batting. Time to baste, quilt, and bind this sucker. Should be do-able.

2. Finish the first of three baby quilts that need to get done ASAP. You know how these things come in waves, right? All was quiet on the baby front for a while, but now I’ve got three new babies being born to close friends within a couple of months. The recipient for this one, in fact, was born almost a month ago. Oops. Gotta get on that.

3. Catch up with my Woodland Sampler cross-stitch, from the Frosted Pumpkin Stitchery. What’s that? Oh, yeah. I’m an idiot and picked up a new craft to completely distract me from everything else I should be doing. But dang, I’m enamored of cross-stitch right now. It’s a really straightforward skill, without being so easy it’s boring. Those little even stitches are so neat and orderly. And the patterns are just so darn cute. What will I do with the finished product? No idea. But I like having a portable little project for when I get a few seconds to sit down. And I love that this is a year-long sampler project, so we get one little piece at a time. (And if you want to do it, the price goes up from $10 to $16.95 after this Friday the 11th, so sign up now!)

The goal for January is to finish up the outlines of all of the frames (I have about 3 of 13 done already), and complete the contents of the January frame.

I’ll be back soon, I hope, to report on some progress!