Monthly Makings: January

Talking about crafts????? On my craft blog????????

Hello Sunshines of Substack. I thought that I would reflect on the various things that I make within a month’s span of time. After all, this blog is called Brooke Makes Things, and I am Brooke, and I do make things, so I suppose we should chit chat about it. However, we’ll see how long this series lasts, because I am nothing if not noncommittal!

I made myself fucking anxious.

This month was an ass month to be a United States citizen. I don’t think I need to clarify that. Creating anything felt like dragging myself through the mud. In fact, when I was thinking up this “Monthly Makings” series, I initially thought that I would just skip January because of how much it low-key-high-key sucked. SO, the amount of stuff made this month is not representative of how much I usually create.

I made progress writing a book with my friends!

My friends and I are writing a book together, see this post I made a while ago. We wrote approximately 20 Google Doc pages over the span of a weekend, and got started on the bulk editing work. It turns out, we hate our main characters! They are decidedly boring and unloveable, which isn’t ideal when they’re the main characters. We have our work cut out for us.

My friends and I meet a handful of times a year to work on this story, and it’s incredible how we always end each writing session feeling confident in the direction of our story, only for us to realize all the holes left to patch at the start of our next session. I recently read Romancing the Beat by Gwen Hayes and shared what I learned with my writing partners. We are planning to meet in March to continue to workshop the story.

I made a scrapbook for the year.

One of my best friends in the world collects little momentos (business cards, napkins, ticket stubs, etc) from all the places that she goes throughout the year. She hangs her momentos on a cork board that we have all lovingly deemed “The Trash Board”. I liked the idea of creating a Trash Board of my own, but keeping it within a book.

There’s been a rebrand of “Scrapbooking” into “Junk Journaling”, and the only difference that I can find between the two is that scrapbooking has it’s own dedicated section of tools within a Joann’s Fabrics and junk journaling does not. Needless to say, I have started a scrapbook, or a junk journal, or a trash board, or whatever you’d like to call it.

So far I created the pages for my New Year’s trip and have the Goods to create pages for two recent sleepovers with friends. It’s been a perfect excuse to bring my Instax instant film camera back into fashion.

As much as I would love to share the inside of this, it contains photos of my friends, and I don’t share those here. :)

I worked on (and did not finish) two crochet projects

You might think that crocheting a blanket is cute and fun. Maybe you’re learning how to crochet, or you learned how and you’re ready for your next big project. You look at a blanket pattern and say, “How fun! I would love to make a blanket.” Allow me to creep out of the shadows behind you, vampire cape and all, to give you a word of warning. I too, found an adorable, do-able blanket pattern. I too, bought a paycheck’s worth of yarn to work on it.

I think I might die before I finish this crochet blanket. There’s a color change in every row, which, while it isn’t difficult, it sure is juuuuuust annoying enough to make me not want to work on the blanket in all. This month, I was blessed with being just ill and bedridden enough to be bored, so I actually made some progress. But there’s a lot left to go.

I also started a new Woobles kit. I love Woobles because, sometimes, I just don’t want to think! They give me a bag with everything I need and I just make it, no brain power required. Recently they came out with kits that have feet, which intrigued me because it’s a crochet skill I don’t know how to do. In a very me move, I did all the parts of the project that I know how to do, and have avoided working on the feet part that I don’t. Classic!

I made this doodle of my cat and I love it

She’s diabetic, and I drew this picture after a particularly stressful day of trying to get her insulin prescription refilled. This is my favorite doodle of the month, and my lil’ brain is trying to think of how to make a comic about My Girl.

I made travel plans.

In a practice of financial irresponsibility, I booked a trip to Miami (for a friend’s bachelorette), my flights to Paris, and a hotel in Maine for the summer. Unfortunately for my savings account, I deal with intense stress by Going Somewhere Else. Most of these are refundable in case the economy crashes Great Depression style, FYI.

Upcoming Stuff I Plan on Making in February:

• Finishing that goddamn blanket maybe idk ??????

• Cute Valentine doodles (the Valentine’s Day aesthetic is simply unmatched in my eyes)

• Working through some Woobles kits because I have an embarrassing amount of them

• Getting caught up on my scrapbook pages

• More diary comics and experiments with digital doodles

• Starting a cardigan?? (I told myself I wouldn’t do this until I finished my blanket but we’ll see)

• Figuring out the mystery that is a Knitting Loom

• Chugging away my writing outline for Year One, the book I’m slowly but surely writing