Crafting Through COVID

Hello guys and gals. Or should I say hello all you cool cats and kittens, since that’s kinda become the “in” catchphrase during this whole mess? Just in case you’re wondering, yes, I have watched the show Tiger King, like most of the rest of the country. I’m a huge true crime buff anyway, and when everybody started talking about it at the beginning of the pandemic my husband and I said, “Why not?!” All we had to say was…What. A. Circus.

Anyway, binging the latest Netflix murder sideshow isn’t the only thing I’ve been doing. Like a lot of you I’m pretty much stuck in my house as well – not only because I’m often hurting too bad to do much but because I’m not healthy to begin with and don’t want to take a risk in catching the virus. So what have I been doing?

Crafting. Of course. If you’re not new here and you expected anything less of me, then…well, you should be pretty ashamed of yourself honestly. 😉

Half-kidding, folks. But really, things are no different for me now than they were five months ago – other than now I have a valid excuse to be antisocial and avoid people trying to get within 6 feet of me. I’ve used crafting to get through my stresses for years before this, and I’m doing the same thing now.

It’s been a while since I last posted about anything crafty, so you guys should know – I took on a ton of new things.

Like diamond painting.

And pastel drawings.

And…latch hooking.

And………pour painting.

And…………………………painting by numbers.

And………………………………………………………..building dollhouses.

And…………………………………………………………………………………paper quilling.

I’VE BEEN A LITTLE BORED, OKAY?! Being sick and not being able to work affords you a lot of time to do things. It would afford me a lot of time to keep my house clean and spotless but unfortunately I’ve reached the point that I can’t do that either – because most of that requires heavy lifting, bending, standing for long periods, etc., and these are things that will debilitate me at the end of the day. My husband works long hours, and I can’t really go anywhere, so I have a LOT of time on my hands. I have never been the type of person who can lay on the couch (or in my case, the bed) and just watch TV. I have to do something while I’m watching TV. I can usually count the number of naps I take in a full year on one hand. I am a busy-body. And unfortunately I’m a busy-body who gets burnt out on one thing pretty quickly if I do it for ten hours straight every day. So I’ve spent a lot of time the last few years searching for new creative things to do, and have found a few that I really like.

Of course, I’m still knitting and cross stitching. I took a several year break from knitting when I fell in love with cross stitching. And then recently I got a little burnt out on cross stitching – I still love it but I need a little break. I picked up my sticks and string again a few months ago and fell back in love, and have now purchased so many new skeins of yarn I’m running out of room for them, and have no less than a dozen new knitting projects. Definitely not all shown here. 😛

Diamond painting has kind of temporarily taken the place of cross stitching, since it’s pretty similar, but I’m careful how much time I spend on it since it’s harder on my back than other things. The same thing goes for pour painting and building dollhouses – neither are things I can do from bed when I’m in pain, and after a few hours they cause even more pain, so I don’t do them as much as I’d like to. I randomly pick up latch hooking and pastel drawing when I don’t feel like working on any other projects, and quilling is new – I just started this week so I’m still learning.

But I really took to painting. I really enjoy that, and I think I would do it more often if it didn’t give my back a hard time too. It is, fortunately, something I can do in bed with my rolling table (which honestly deserves a post of its own for how much I love this thing) and sturdy easel. So I do it frequently, a few times a week, in short stretches until my back is waving its white flag.

But I have found another crafty adventure that a) does not hurt my back, b) takes up hardly any space, c) is practically made for doing from bed while relaxing.

I got back to digital scrapbooking.

Before I ever started this blog or was diagnosed with chronic illness, I was a scrapbooker. I started doing paper scrapbooking in high school, and after I had my son I really got heavily into it. A few years into that I found out about digital scrapbooking, and I don’t even remember how I got into it but I became a digital scrapbook designer – one of the people who designs the kits (graphics) to create digital scrapbook pages. After three years or so of that being my work-from-home job, I gave it up to spend more time knitting, writing, and with my family. Once my back started getting bad, I couldn’t really do anymore paper scrapbooking because it was so hard on me, even though I really missed it. So around October I broke down and got back into digital scrapbooking, knowing that I could still do that without leaning over an uncomfortable desk. And I’m hooked again. I’ve done hundreds of pages now and I’m starting to get a few of the pages actually printed up for books again.

Of course, I’m slowly working my way through documenting the COVID pandemic as well, because no matter what we will see some value in looking back on this and how it’s affected our lives in the future.

Oh, and this last weekend, I did take a little time to go through and tidy up my craft room. It was rough on my body, definitely, but I am trying to get back to quilting hopefully a couple hours a week and my area needed cleaned. It’s been a while since I posted anything about my craft room and since we’ve moved it’s changed. I have some things to put up that I can hopefully do this weekend with the help of my awesome husband, so I may wait until that is done and early next week I can give another small tour. After an extensive redo of it earlier this year I made some great changes and have some great storage and organization tips that I’d love to share anyway. 🙂

So that’s what I have been doing to get through the pandemic the last two months. Even for an introverted, socially anxious agoraphobe like myself, quarantine and stay-at-home orders have been pretty rough. I’ll be making some minor changes to the blog, and soon I hope to get myself together enough to resume WIP posts – it’s often just so hard with pain and fatigue to get myself motivated to organize everything, but I’m going to try! If you have anything you’ve been doing to keep yourself occupied during this madness, I’d love to see as always. See you soon, folks!