Monthly Goals Update and This Week's Goals

Well, as weeks go I feel good that I did get a decent amount accomplished this week, although not as much as I'd hoped.  With as little sleep as I've been getting, honestly, I feel good about the amount that I did get done.

1.  I made curtains for my son's room. 

This project turned out to be a HUGE mess.  I went to close my son's curtains for the night and something caught and tore in the ancient pinch pleat curtains that he had in his room.  So at six o' clock in the evening I had to figure out how to make curtains, which of COURSE when you are down to the wire is when everything goes wrong.

First the original blue material I had to make the back of the curtains ended up being about six inches too short, which blew my mind because I was using a twin sheet for the front and had bought a queen sized sheet for the back (darned shrinking sheets!!!).  So, I ended up using the blue material that I'd bought as a backing as a lining for the curtains instead (which now the lining is missing in parts of the curtains, but what are you going to do?).  I then had to sew three curtain panels I'd bought to hang up in my husband's and my room eventually, sew them together and then cut the now super huge curtain panel down to make two curtain backings for the two new curtains.

I used some fabric I had on hand to make the stripes down the sides of the curtains (for the extra width as the windows in my house are pretty big).

So, overall, lots of breaking thread, lots of cussing and lots of thinking to make sure I made every scrap of fabric go as far as it would go and my son now has curtains that block out the sun a LOT better than his old curtains.

Why do we need sun blocking curtains you might ask?  Well, here's a shot out of my kitchen window at midnight the other night...

So, yeah, room darkening blinds are kind of important.

I did think that the curtains turned out pretty well overall though.

Please ignore the weird angle on the curtains, they are even.  My son's bed kind of gets in the way and the swing will mess with your head on where the curtains end (and yes, we have a therapy swing hung in my son's room for him).

2.  I managed to process the kale I had picked, so far, for the freezer, so that got done.

3.  I managed to can fig jam earlier in the week and canned apricot jam today.  Still got a lot of canning to do, but at least I'm making progress.

The apricot jam is seen above.  It turned out well.  I used unsulphured dried apricots, though (I'll share that recipe soon), so it did turn out really brown, though.  Not quite as pretty as those pictures you see of canned apricot jam online.

4.  I got my shopping goals for the month figured out, but ended up amending them to include apple cider vinegar and sugar (for canning).

My goals for this week are incorporating some of my goals from last week that I just plain didn't get done.  For instance:

1.  Mend four items.

2.  Darn husband's socks.

3.  Make more cloth napkins and handkerchiefs.

My other goals are...

4.  Work on gun case for husband's birthday (his birthday is at the end of July, so at least I have some time to get it right).

5.  Get as much canned from canning list as possible.

6.  Clean out more of 40' van and find soap crock pot for making soap later.

7.  Continue to harvest and process kale.

8.  Pick fireweed blossoms and process into fireweed juice to use later in jelly.

9.  Work on reorganizing pantry. 

And there you are folks.  My goals for this week.  What are yours?