For me, looking over the coming year and reflecting on the one that’s passed begins a lot earlier than New Year’s Eve. Nowadays that includes planning my crafting, if only in a rough form subject to change. That got me thinking about crafting that is tied to parts of the year, beyond projects for gifts and holidays.
There are traditional craft observances such as National Craft Month (March), Stash-Busting Month (April) and National Sewing Month (September). May is National Photography Month. Brownielocks lists several more: National Secondhand Wardrobe Week (2/23-3/1), Creative Beginnings Month (May), Worldwide Knit in Public Week (6/9-6/17), Fall Hat Month (September), Spinning and Weaving Week (10/6-10/10), and World Origami Days (10/24-11/11), plus single-day observances. So far I have crafty themes or goals for the first five months of 2014, and I’m tying in with a few observances – including January being Get Organized Month.
If you want more inspiration for planning your crafting and/or blogging in advance, Pam of Gingerbread Snowflakes has a fabulous post about planning your blogging a year in advance, without tying yourself to a specific post schedule that you would be rewriting all the time.
Enough about that, though. You don’t come to First Friday for practicalities, you come for inspiration. Observances are inspiring, of course, especially those that have nothing to do with crafting originally, but let’s think about pretty things: symbols.
I love samplers. One of the reasons I own 365 Tiny Cross-Stitch Designs (one for each day of the year) is that many of the designs are collected into samplers – a fairy for each month, a teapot for each month, a traditional-looking mini sampler of sorts for each month… Anything can be turned into a sampler, and the different months have holidays, seasons, and activities associated with them: April showers, May flowers, the beach in August, back to school in September. On The Special Dictionary, you can look up proverbs that contain the word “month”, and if you change “month” in the URL you can look up any other word you’d like, too, such as specific months. Birth stones and birth flowers easily become samplers. Brownielocks even has fruits and vegetables assigned to each month if you wanted to go that route (the source link has apparently changed since they were added to the list so you’ll have to page through the months individually).
The Western Zodiac traditionally begins with Aries, although Capricorn is the sign covering most of January (newspaper horoscopes tend to use the tropical zodiac dates, so I am too). I just learned while putting together this post that the Chinese Zodiac animals are also associated with (lunar) months. There’s a book worth of Celtic tree astrology I was unfamiliar with. And finally, the full moons of the year all have names, as illustrated above: Wolf, Snow, Worm, Pink, Flower, Strawberry, Buck, Sturgeon, Harvest, Hunter’s, Beaver, Cold (alternate name: Oak).
As with last month’s entry, the picture at top is my own stitching and design. I stitched the designs freehand (I’m sure you can’t tell) with three colors of DMC (927, 926, 3768) on linen evenweave, starting with a pattern of 12 circles in a circle that I created with Inkscape. It occurred to me when I had stitched 10 of the 12 that they look a lot like Girl Scout badges. This is the only time I have ever had problems with floss bleeding, except possibly with red floss in my childhood. Unexpected, but it just gives the moons halos, so it’s all right with me.