As a new idea, I thought it might be fun to share an overview of my creative activities at the end of each month. Things I’ve been busy with, stuff I’ve been thinking about, projects I’ve worked on, awesome items or ideas that I came across that I loved or got excited about. Who knows, maybe there’s something you’d like to try out as well …

1. Blogging Notebook

Definitely my biggest project this month, both making it and starting to use it: A Blogging Notebook. So far it has worked quite well, I just have to remember to take it with me at all times.

This calendar-like notebook with inspirational quotes is supposed to help me keep track of the posts I’m planning, to organize all notes on them in one place so when I sit down to write I won’t have to go haunting for them. I’m super-excited to see if it’ll work.

2. Vacation Trips and Picture Taking

As you might have noticed, both posts this month come out at the very end of it. That’s because I took a two-week vacation away without internet and without my computer.

I don’t have the opportunity to do that often, but I always find it very enjoyable. I think taking some time off from now and then is vital when you’re living a creative life. It helps you to recharge and get a change of scenery and break your usual habits. In my experience, inspiration can only come to you if you leave it some room. In a hectic life with lots of input all the time it is very difficult for ideas to surface.

It’s not like I didn’t work on my blog. I hurried to finish off my above-mentioned blogger’s notebook before I left and then sat there jotting down notes while the sun was rising over the ocean. 🙂

With this comes point two: Taking pictures in a beautiful landscape. I’m neither an experienced nor skilled photographer. I’m a snapshot taker by conviction who loves the automatic function on my small, run-off-the-mill camera. But for some reason I took less and less pictures last year.

With this beautiful landscape, however, I kind of rediscovered photography. That makes it quite easy even for a snapshotter like me to take some awesome pictures.

3. Pompon Scarf and Knitting in General

Searching for the vinyl for the notebook project in the depth of my closet, I stumbled upon all these abandoned knitting projects. I was such an avid knitter a few years ago. Now I haven’t knitted in ages. It somehow vanished off my radar.

Time to start again! I got out two projects that I took along on my vacation trip: a scarf with my favorite pattern and a so-called Loopy Pompon Scarf Yarn (like this one here).

It’s a really funny kind of yarn that I discovered some years ago.

You just knit the top part and in really no time you have this awesome scarf. Seriously, you need three balls of this wool for one scarf and I knitted the whole thing in under 3 hours. I love this concept!

4. Taming the Chaos

I’m at heart a person who loves everything organized, neat, and tidy. For various reasons that I don’t want to go into, however, I find it hard to really get any sensible order into my things.

My ultimate dream is that one day I’ll get all my stuff so neatly packed away and organized that I just have to open a drawer and get that one thing out.

It’s a long way until then, a path filled with throwing a lot of old stuff away and a lot of optimizing in my storage system.

This month, however, I did have two greater achievements in this project: I managed to organize my yarn and fabric storage and to sensibly stash away some of my books in the absence of bookshelves.

5. Story Cubes

I take part in a creative writing group and recently our teacher brought something that I loved instantaneously: Story Cubes for creative writing.

The cubes have images on them and whatever pictures they show you try to write a story with. It’s a good loosening-up exercise to get you started.