I’ll be returning to the Tyler Public Library on Thursday, June 26th to teach Crochet Basics in the 1st floor auditorium starting at 7pm. The class is technically already full (so I’ve also agreed to teach it again in the fall sometime), but there’s a waitlist to be found here: Crochet Class Sign-up.
I’m going to be teaching Beginning Crochet at the Tyler Public Library on April 8th, 2025, starting at 5:30pm. We’ll be learning basics of crochet and everyone will have a little project to take home with them. Hope to see you there!
I’ll be speaking tonight at the meeting of the East Texas Writers Guild on “Sounds in Poetry” at the Tyler Area Chamber of Commerce Building at 6:30pm.
Tomorrow night I’ll be leading a lesson on “Beginner Calligraphy” at the Tyler Public Library at 5:30pm.
A busy week – I’m so excited! 🙂
I’ve been asked to lead a a couple of sessions of the Tyler Public Library’s “Try It Tuesday!” programs. On March 11, 2025, I’ll be teaching a beginner calligraphy lesson and on April 8, 2025, I’ll be teaching a beginner crochet lesson. Both sessions are free to the public. They run from 5:30-7:30pm in the 3rd floor Makerspace at the Tyler Public Library. Hope to see some of y’all there! 🙂
This month, word count was down again, at 8,833 words, nearly all lessons for ODWG again. Spring Break always throws things off, especially when friends and family have the other week off for their spring break.
I also tried to design a new closet for my writing/craft studio, which would have gone better if my closet had enough studs in the wall. But mostly I started the month sick, did a bunch of stuff with other people, then ended the month sicker than I started (flu, bronchitis, sinus infection, walking pneumonia). We decided not to do Easter with family because I was just so sick.
All I managed to do really was work on a crocheted blanket for a friend’s kid/kid’s friend that is very special to our family and is very sick herself right now.
This month, I eked out 8,749 words, but a lot of it was poetry, so when I think about it that way, that’s a LOT.
I prepared and presented two lessons at ODWG. I also worked some more on the Lake House Mystery and made a whole new system for tracking my poetry and short story submissions.
I also rearranged my entire writing studio again because it turned out that one of my bookshelves could not stand up without the support of the two on either side and books were everywhere.
In real life, one of my kids had an MRI for migraines and also sliced open his foot badly, all in one month. My dad visited for a long while. I started crocheting the Pineapple Peacock shawl, took it apart and restarted it twice more, then finally gave up. Knitted a scarf for my spouse instead.
We had a polar vortex hit and had several “ice days” I started reading “Barbara and Susan Talk About Empty Nests” once a week as a kind of devotional for therapy homework. I also read “Shadow and Bone” and “Lessons in Chemistry”.
The fact that it is already summer break just astounds me. It feels like it was only yesterday that it was Mother’s Day.
May went by in a flurry of tornado warnings, band concerts and banquets, color guard contests, kids’ auditions or testing for various activities, and all the sayings of “goodbye” to people and places we’ve loved spending time with.
I started helping out the worship team at my local UU church, both developing services and speaking during services. I also agreed to serve as vice president of the church board next year.
My eldest child acquired a car, passing his old one to his younger brother, who just started driving solo, and just like that *snap* life changed overnight. I no longer have to drive anyone anywhere unless there’s an emergency.
I spent a couple weeks preparing for a speaking engagement for the Open Door Writing Group at the Tyler Public Library about writing lyrically. I read or re-read so many books on writing poetry. Two didn’t arrive on time, so I still have those to look forward to.
Unfortunately, all that activity sent my diseases into overdrive. I got a sinus infection, then my joints flared up and I spent the last half of the month in too much pain to think, let alone set down words. It took me an entire month to finish a short story that I’d had outlined and ready to go. *sigh*
Last week my father was in town, so we spent time indulging in watching “Only Murders in the Building” (while I did cross stitch, since my hands had finally returned to normal) and taking time to look over his house here and make lists of future maintenance needs.
He went back to his primary residence yesterday afternoon and now I am back at my writing desk today, updating all the social media things, preparing for my two speaking engagements that are coming up later this month, and trying to sneak in a few new words in my next novel. Hope all of y’all are having a wonderful start to your summer! Let me know in the comments if you plan to join me at any of my events this month.
I came to this realization the other day that I am a much more happy, productive Lisa when I am crafting. I really enjoyed doing those dolls, using my hands for more than just typing. When I craft, the back of my brain can work on writing thoughts while my hands do something else for a while.
So I decided to do a fall themed crocheted blanket. But I didn’t have any patterns for that, so I looked through what patterns I did own and found this one. Which looks like a lot of fun! It’s a striped sampler, basically, and has some things in it I have never attempted before.
Then I went to try to recreate the colors she used in the original, but more fall-like. That’s when I discovered I didn’t really actually have any fall themed colors on hand. So I changed a few of her colors to things a bit more muted without being oranges and rusts. Here’s what I’ve ended up with. 🙂
We shall see how it goes. 🙂 I think I’ll just crochet all weekend and ignore the weird things going on behind the scenes.
Today (or whichever day I am currently on that may or may not be the right day – it’s hard to keep track with the group calendar changing) we were supposed to make two different kinds of dolls: one a Creativity Doll and one an Inner Editor Monster Doll.
I have a lot of random craft supplies at my house because, as you all probably already know, I am a craft dabbler. So I dug out a bunch of stuff, traced an outline on some beige fabric, pulled out my mom’s old sewing machine, and I went to work. I’d made a doll once in the distant past, around third grade for the one room schoolhouse experience. And when I say “I’d made” I really mean that my mom made it while I stood by and handed her things, as was the way of my people.
The doll itself was easy to make, with simple lines and a quarter inch edge all the way around. Using my mom’s sewing machine is second nature, unlike the one that I’ve had for the last decade or so that never made sense to me (which I shipped off to a friend the moment I got my mom’s in my hot little hands). I did have a little trouble at first with the thread tension, but a little swearing and rethreading later, I was good to go.
Stuffing proved a little harder because my stuffing tool went missing, but I used a skinny handled jewelry making file instead. Then I decided she needed clothing, so I freehanded a dress pattern while playing games with the boys. Sewed that up, then painted a face, glued on some curly, colorful wool (from needle felting) for hair, and gave her a bit of bling. But something was still missing. Shoes. I had no idea what to use for shoes. But she was just about baby sized, so I hand-sewed her some felt baby booties based off a pattern I’d thought about using for Kay’s twins when they were born, but never got around too. I eyeballed it. They turned out okay.
The Inner Editor Monster Doll is where I went off the rails. I felt like it should just be wackier, I guess. I grabbed an old, much hated bra out of the dresser, cut the straps off, and sewed it into a tube. I really thought I was going to break the sewing machine, but she worked like a dream, sewing through multiple layers and a zipper without any trouble at all. The backside, the secret side I’m not showing you all, is a black and white striped ribbon with all the bad phrases we wrote down during that Golden Words writing experiment several weeks ago, all those not so nice things people, and therefore my Inner Editor, have said to me. After I was done, I didn’t like her staring at me. It made me uncomfortable. Now in this section of the book, Julia Cameron says some people like to burn this creation or destroy it or maim it in some way. Another thing you know about me is that I love setting things on fire. But I just couldn’t somehow. So I came up with option B: a sleep mask. So now my Inner Editor can just take a rest and leave me alone. 🙂
The last collage style thing we were supposed to do this week was make a treasure map of what we wanted our future to look like. I made mine a “From Here to There” style map. I know y’all are all laughing at the bottom middle one, but it’s the hardest thing to do for me. I like to help people, but I spend far more time on that than anything else. If being published is a goal of mine, I’m going to need to spend less time volunteering and much more time writing.
Lisa Holcomb 