Happy New Year!

As we come to the end of another year, I like to take stock of things, both in my personal life, and in my stamping life. What did I do right? What can I improve upon?  Getting organized is something I always need to improve on! Clutter and chaos clutters my mind, and I can't get anything done, so I will be streamlining my craft room, purging a lot of unused things that are just taking up precious space, and re-evaluating my blogging.

I know last year I promised more step-by-step photo tutorials, as well as videos, but that has proved to be difficult for several reasons, which I will get to in a minute. On the plus side, I did blow my previous total posts for a year completely out of the water! My old record was 176 posts.....this year it's 253! (Counting tonight's Stamp Review Crew post.)

The whole reason I started card making was for a fun filled, relaxing creative outlet. When I committed to blogging five days per week, it added pressure to what should have been a fun activity. First I had to come up with a project and create it. Then I needed to take photos, and the photos had to be edited (they never look good straight out of the camera), the watermark added, and THEN they were ready for the blog post which, of course, had to be written.

It is way more time-consuming than you would think, and there were times I was ready to throw in the towel, because it wasn't fun OR relaxing anymore. And don't even get me started on the videos! I tried three times, with three different videos, to get them uploaded from my iPhone, and never could get it to work. They weren't even very long; all were under five minutes. (And that was after wrestling the cat out of the area, because he wanted to plop his hairy butt right in the center of everything!)

So my resolutions for 2018 are:

1. SEND MORE CARDS! No point in making them if they aren't going to be used, right?
2. Purge and organize, both the craft room and the rest of the house.
3. Be better about scheduling posts in advance, especially during the summer when I'm completely overwhelmed with processing veggies from the garden. (Lesson learned!)
4. Cut back to four posts per week. I'll be eliminating Wednesday posts unless they happen to be when a blog hop is scheduled. New schedule will be Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday. So no posts on days that start with T or W. *grin*
5. Figure out the gosh darn video upload thing! (Might have to use a different camera than my iPhone.)
6. Do more step-by-step tutorials, even though it means more photos (and the extra time & editing that goes with it) and longer blog posts. I hopeful that fewer blog posts will mean I can devote more time to this.
7. Reevaluate the posting schedule after three months and see if it needs tweaking.

I wish you all a very happy 2018, and hope that you do something creative every day!