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In your own space, celebrate a personal win from the past year: it can be a list of fanworks you're especially proud of, time you spent in the community, a quality or skill you cultivated in yourself, something you generally feel went well.

1. Helped move my daughter into her first house. That went really well because we did it all without movers over the course of about a week, driving back and forth from Cambridgeshire to London several times a day in the hottest of the hot weather.

2. Made a good start on converting a sad old narrowboat - which had been stationary and on shore electric hookup - back into a boat that could function off grid. It isn't finished yet, but the fact that my son could live on it for most of the summer was down to everyone in the family suddenly learning a lot of new skills.

3. Made a good start at learning signwriting. I may still be apprentice-level, but if you needed a no-nonsense shop name painted on your building (or a name painted on your narrowboat) I now have that skill.

Making a Banyan

DH expressed bafflement as to how I could continue to work outside in the conservatory, with snow on the ground while either sewing or signpainting. It's the only place we've got a big enough table to do these things, but it's completely unheated, whereas he tends to feel cold while sitting upstairs in the spare bedroom/office.

I said my secret was the banyan (18th Century house coat) I had made for myself many years ago when I found myself cold in the house. Then I said I would make him one too. ( Read more... )