#yearofmaking: January roundup

I want to blog about my #yearofmaking project, because honestly so far it's been so much fun and I feel like I've achieved a lot more than I expected to. I didn't want to blog too often about it though as that's really not the focal point of the blog, so I figured a monthly roundup of what I've made that month would do!

As you can imagine I've been massively utilising Pinterest so far this year, and have a 'Stuff I Want to Make' and a 'Things to Make For Kids' board. If you're interested in following along with my daily makes as they happen (because, you know, they're hot news and if you wait a month they might be less exciting or something) I'm armchairbythesea.

So, January!

Basically, you can't see any of my pictures because I can't work out if there's a way to get them back off Instagram, so you'll just have to take my word for it that I've posted something each day! Not everything has been a finished work, and in fact at the time of writing there are three projects where the knitting is finished by the lining still terrifies me and so is sitting inside the knitted pieces, all nicely cut out, waiting for the sewing fairy to come and finish off.

I did finish some things this month, which include:

* Gluten and dairy free chocolate cake for Sam's baptism, modified from the Hummingbird Bakery Home Sweet Home book. (It was yummy but we ended up having to buy a cake to take to the actual baptism because it turned out more like chocolate pudding. Ah well)

*The title page of my One Little Word journal

* A sketch of Moomin in preparation for painting a couple of bookcases for the boys bedroom and playroom in the new house!

* A wooden spoon puppet superhero lady

* My very own homemade fabric conditioner! It's awesome and smells gorgeous but I think next time I'll go for the other recipe I found because it doesn't require me buying two bottles of conditioner and thus might actually be cheaper than buying it! If you're interested, the recipe I used is thus: get a big empty container, pour in 5 cups of hot water, 3 cups of white vinegar and 2 cups of standard hair conditioner. Shake (a lot) until mixed. Use.

* Yummy yummy yummy clementine marmalade because the farm shop were selling huge bags of clementines for 50p. Did I mention it's yummy?

* A pair of handwarmers as part of my Chase Your Dreams swap parcel, organised by the lovely Mia

* Pasta with tomato and baked ricotta from a Jamie Oliver recipe.

* A couple of lavender bags (of the many I'm making for the new house!)

* Fudge!

* The front cover for my Gratitude Journal

* A literary inspired card

* Chicken Korma, from the Rick Stein India book that Charlotte got me for my birthday. Yum.

The unlined projects are: a bag to house all of Sam's many thousands of bibs which I never remember to use because they're always in the drawer in the bedroom and I'm always not, a basket to house my current works in progress and stop them annoying the hell out of Rhys, and a draught excluder for the back door of the new house which hopefully we will be moving into as you read this! I'm writing a few days ahead of time so there's always the possibility that I'll have finished up a few lavendar bags before the month is over as well!

Still, way more than I thought I'd achieved! I'm finding this project so motivating - some days I make more than one thing. Today for example, I cut out letter for a door sign for Sam's new room, made pizza from scratch with Benji, finished knitting the draught excluder and started on the lavender bags. Other days I have to push myself to make something (these tend to be the days where whatever we have for dinner features!), but I always feel better at the end of the day for having reminded myself to make something. Creation is just empowering I guess!