the 25th already?

Is the first month of the year nearly over? I'm still mentally composing my list of resolutions and goals and I've already missed one twelfth of the time I have to complete them!

I received the latest Quilting Arts magazine yesterday and saw two great articles by Jane Davila, the person who helped get me started in art quilting (visit her website and blog listed). One article had tips on setting artistic goals, but an important point she mentioned is looking back over the past year to see what you've accomplished. A valuable and encouraging activity: assessing where you've been before you decide where you're going. So here goes. In 2008 I:

• completed my professional portfolio of art intended as illustrations for children's books and showed it at the annual SCBWI conference in NY last February
• completed two book dummies to show at the conference
• applied for the SCBWI Don Freeman Grant
• began blogging
• submitted stories to 3 different publishers
• sent out 2 separate postcard mailings to prospective publishers/editors/agents
• quilted, designed and created 2 different Christmas cards which were mailed to friends and family
• completed about 8 new art quilts
• continued sporadically making journal quilts, some in a new 5"x5" format using scraps, paper, and recycled materials
• bought and experimented with new materials such as Shiva paintstiks, copper foil and mesh
• attended several local SAQA meetings and helped organize the group show in March '09
• attended the Rabbit Hill Festival of Children's Literature in Westport, CT in October.

I also read a lot, both juvenal fiction, and adult fiction and nonfiction. These are some of the titles I read this year:

• Left to Tell by Immaculee Ilibagiza
• The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
• A New Earth by E. Tolle
• Love as a Way of Life by Gary Chapman
• The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren
• Between Sundays by Karen Kingsbury
• Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt by Anne Rice
• Dewey the Library Cat by Vicki Myron
• The Expected One by Kathleen McGowan
• The DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons by Dan Brown
• A Year Down Yonder, A Long Way from Chicago and Here Lies the Librarian by Richard Peck
• Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech
• The Book Thief by M. Zuzak
• Twilight and sequels by S. Meyers

So that's a summary of what I did in 2008 (not to mention about 750 hours at the library, 330-odd dinners cooked, 100 or more trips to the grocery store and countless loads of laundry...Not bad for just 365 days!). Next post: Hopes and goals for 2009...