Whittling away...

One of my New Year's resolutions - I think - was to declutter and finish up projects and get them out the door.

One big project has been to go through old college documents. I'm finally scanning in two file boxes of article photocopies that were used for my masters thesis. Which I finished in 1995. I have been reluctant to pitch them because, well, I didn't want to ever have to re-order them and waste more paper. Of course, now the information is historical and I don't think that when I go back for a PhD, I will be focusing on female political elites in Mexico (though the subject of political elites still fascinates me). To appease my inner librarian, I'm scanning as much of these as I can and saving them as PDFs, to go up on my website (and backup drive) with all my thesis files.

Next big project to be wrapped up is the quilt. I got it mostly pinned and need to start doing the topquilting and finish it up. I should be able to do that by next week - that's my goal, anyway.

Next new project is to scan in my mom's baby album, which I have had for an embarrassingly long time, and some old family photos. Those can't be scanned with a sheet feeder and will require some correction, so I probably will just do high res scanning and fix stuff later to get the pictures back to her sooner and out of my house sooner.

Then, I'm going to make two more queen-size quilts -- I have two more batts and plenty of fabric. This is "use what you've got" -- at least as far as materials, if not time, is considered. I want to put together some nice quilts and use up some of my stockpiled fabric.

Along with all these other projects, I need to clear out my drawers, closets and shelves - and am doing this in bits and drips. I hope to really tackle this later this year after I get the quilts done. I'd like to have some space to store all the food I'm canning!