A Year in retrospect

Happy New Year 2021! It’s the beginning of another new year! Another chance to do all the things we didn’t get to do last year, another chance to try new things, another chance to love more, laugh more and…craft more! I could say that I hope we have a better year than 2020, but personally, 2020 was a great year for me for learning new things… and connecting with people!

With all the free time I had when I lost my teaching jobs cause companies were scrambling to put in place home office infrastructure, I used it to create a learning management system for a company to create online courses… for which I spent countless hours learning how to do, and even more hours creating the asynchronous courses! I also got certified to be an online teacher and once companies were equipped to send all their employees home to work and people got used to working online, I got even more jobs teaching online. Not having to spend hours travelling from companies to companies, I could spend more time teaching!

On the crafty side, after spending afew months thinking I wanted to take my art to a professional level, I decided that it was taking all the fun I got out of painting and reverted to just painting for fun and starting a 100 day painting challenge to learn how to paint more intuitively and from the heart. I am at day 16 and counting and I can feel my art getting looser, more intuitive and personal.

I also felt finally ready to learn how to sketch…by sketching daily. I decided that I didn’t care how it looked, as long as you could vaguely make out what I was trying to draw, that was fine with me! I would learn about perspective and dimensions along the way. So here’s one of my first sketches of my decorated door.

As for connecting with friends, we hooked up more often over Zoom, chat or one to one. As we don’t have our extended family in Germany and our closest friends here were only allowed to see their family, we spent Christmas Eve with a Spanish family that we only met once before, but with whom our kids are close, and hung out with more (teenage) friends of our kids on Christmas Day, and we had a great relaxing time!

So all in all, 2020 was a very productive year for me and I look forward to doing as much in 2021…and perhaps more! I will definitely continue making Christmas cards for the Merry Little Christmas challenge as this was what allowed me to have enough Christmas cards by the time Christmas came round…and this year I even managed to send them off in time…almost!

So what have you planned for 2021? I look forward to reading them in the comments. Thanks for stopping by and have a great start to 2021!

Lots of love,