Art & Crafting:

The biggest part of 2021 was devoted to daily art journal assignments. At the beginning of the year, I chose a different theme to work with each month and tried to make something every day that fit the chosen theme. An enormous amount of time and energy then went to keeping up with this goal, but I feel happy with what I ended up with – even if I’m never sure what to do with it all after the fact.

(There were a few months that didn’t squish into the journal format very well and some of the themes I committed myself to were harder to keep up with than I expected, so my art goals for 2022 are going to look a lot different…)

This is as closed as it gets:

Assignment themes: trash collecting in January, mark-making in February, thread/stitching in March, magnified photos in April, envelopes in May, mushroom drawings in June, instant photos in July, stamping in August, pin making in September, ghosts in October, and photos looking up in November. 👇 (December was canceled.)

But there were other creative projects going on in the background too. Birthday presents and party decor for two young nieces. Lasercut designs and pins and little books. I rediscovered sun prints and did a lot of stamping. My sticker maker and instant camera saw a lot of me.

Reading:

I try to read three classics or “required reading” books every year. I’m not sure when this goal started, but it’s been a very interesting experiment for at least the past three or four years now. The required reading picks for 2021 were Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, The War of the Worlds, and The Catcher in the Rye. ✔

In other book news, Goodreads tells me I read a total of 113 books in 2021 (although I have to admit that that number is padded by a handful of graphic novels and comics). God bless every single library everywhere.

The Rest:

Extras? I’m learning to build my own acrostic puzzles. I confused the heck out of Spotify by listening to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons over and over and over again.

And for almost the entire year, I spent one night every week (and therefore a good portion of the days before and after) at my family home. Acting as a buffer, helping hand, listening ear… I just felt like it was where I needed to be. My dad was fighting a lot of health issues, for one thing. And then late in December, after a surgery that was too much for his body to handle, we lost him. As stressful as it could sometimes be at their house, I am incredibly thankful for whatever was urging me to spend so much time there last year. I had no idea it would be my Dad’s last.

Even with COVID continuing to shrink life into something smaller and stranger than it used to be, I can look back at 2021 and see that it was still very full. A lot of things changed and a lot of it continues to bite and sting, but there are things to be grateful for too. So I guess that’s what I’ll take with me into 2022.