For the past 12 years I’ve taken the last two weeks of December off. It’s been a time of self-reflection, mood regulation, stress relief, and a way to ensure I enter the new year with a fresh mindset.

Some years I work on making the last of my Christmas cards to send to family and friends. This year it’s been about getting the last of the medical visits for the year out of the way. But it’s also been about getting back into crafting.

Last month I started a cardigan for myself. I’ve been working on it off and on, impressing myself with how meticulous I’m trying to be in following the pattern exactly, while learning some new to me techniques.

However, after finishing a portion of the cardigan, and recognizing that I had made some mistakes, I put it to the side for just a little bit. Mostly because I didn’t know how to fix the mistakes without unraveling a good portion of the work. It’s in temporary time out. 

After hanging out with my knitting group last week, I suddenly realized that I wanted to make myself stitch pretty stitch markers. Well, actually, I wanted to buy some. But after finding ones I liked on Etsy and finding I would be charged more for them in shipping costs than what I would have paid for the markers themselves, I decided that there wasn’t any reason for me not to make my own.

This drew on my skill of basic jewelry making. When I was about 14 a friend of my mom’s taught me how to make earrings from beads. For me it was pure joy to play with all the different textures and colors. And I never forgot that lesson.

Over the years I invested in more beads to make necklaces, bracelets, and of course earrings. I never perfected the skill, always finding it a bit confusing on how such intricate things could be made. I even bought myself a couple of jewelry magazines to try to learn more, but the bug never quite bit me as hard.

Many years ago I decided that I was not going to make jewelry anymore. But I kept all the beads because I thought that while I was not making jewelry at that time, I might at some point get back into it.

And so, that brings me to this week.  I hit up Michaels for their online sale of jewelry beads and strings, thinking of the new stitch markers I wanted to make for myself. Additionally, I wanted to try out the idea of making a row counter I had seen online. Two nights ago I spent a couple hours making stitch markers out of beads I already had, along with the new beads that I bought specifically to make the markers with. I made a total of three full sets, started a new set, and then because of the colors of the beads, decided to make myself a pair of earrings.

I’m still not great at it. But I did learn why jewelry artists and stitch marker makers use certain size eye pins to make them, and in some cases just cut the eye pin down to where they need to start the loop. Making those loops at the top is definitely a technique I need to get better at.

Overall though, I’m very happy with what I made. And so I’ll continue to make them until I feel like I don’t need to make anymore. It’s the joy of crafting and the happiness the colors and textures give me that make it worth the time spent.

And that is what winding down the year is all about. Taking time for myself to be creative, reveling in the joy, and allowing myself to feel what I need to feel.