2022 was a year with mixed results for me. As I reflect on my 2022 goals post from March of this year I am struck by how different my year turned out from where it started. I started the year gung ho about my career and moving up the corporate ladder then a family member got very sick and my priorities completely shifted. It is crazy how one event can change the direction of your life. I took some time off shortly after I wrote this post because I was experiencing major burnout and at the moment I do not see myself going back to a corporate type environment any time soon. To be clear, my coworkers were fabulous and I loved my team but I realized in taking some time off that I love working for myself and being able to set my own pace.

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2022 Goals

Our goals from last year were:

1. Max out IRAs
2. Increase our 401k contributions
3. Save, save save.
4. Decrease our grocery spending
5. Be more mindful of our spending

After looking them over again I would say we met most of our goals for 2022 which is surprising. The only one I am not sure of is our 401k contributions. We did initially increase them but then decreased them for a few months and then increased them again towards the end of the year so I don’t know where our ending percentage was for the whole year but we are increasing my husband’s for 2023 by 1%.

As far as grocery spending goes we definitely made huge progress on that. We started out the year spending $1000 plus a month on food even though we were also getting free lunches from the universal free lunch program. For the last few months we have kept our spending to between $400 and $700 which is amazing progress. You can check out my grocery content on my Oscoey YouTube channel linked here. Below is our last grocery haul of 2022.

I am really proud of our grocery progress and filming as much of our groceries as well as a weekly fridge and freezer recap has been helpful to keep track of where we are at. I am going to keep up with it for 2023 as well as work on some self-care goals such as doing more puzzles!

2023 Goals: Puzzles

I am using my planner more diligently this year to help me keep track of everything. I use the Commit30 planners and love them. I love that they have goal setting built in every month but there isn’t a lot of pressure to keep up with it. The website can be found here. They are currently on sale so check them out!

That’s it for my recap of our 2022 goals. Short and sweet this time. Look for more posts surrounding our puzzles, cross-stitch and of course, finances!

Links:

Commit30 Planners

New Year’s Puzzle Start: If Fish Could Walk

Puzzle Trays

Stitching update time! My goal was to update once a month but we were so busy in the garden that I barely got any time to stitch until a couple of weeks ago. I had to pause all work on my birthdate alphabet sampler to work on a present for my mom for Mother’s Day.  I didn’t finish it in time but I should have it complete in the next week or so.  I found this cat butt pattern in the Freudian Stitch shop on Etsy. My mom is not a fan of cats and I have been giving her cat things just to make her laugh.  She loves my stitching so when I saw this pattern I knew I had to stitch it.  I showed it to her on Mother’s Day (unfinished) and I should hopefully finish it soon.

I am really enjoying stitching the cat butt pattern.  It flows really well and I love how easy it is to count the stitches in between the cats.  I have had to substitute a couple of colors since I could not find them in my gigantic boxes of thread and I didn’t have time to go to the store until after Mother’s Day.

I went through my stitching boxes yesterday to see what I could find in there and I am ashamed to admit I have several WIPs that I had forgotten about and several patterns with thread in various stages of being kitted up.  I am a huge fan of the Heaven and Earth Designs website and have purchased quite a few (ie more than 10) of their patterns.  To date I have finished exactly one of them.  It still isn’t framed properly but it took me three years to stitch off and on and I am super proud that I actually finished such a big project.  It was the Cairns Bird Wing pattern by Teri Rosario and I loved stitching it.

I have this huge project I started about three years ago called “Computer Wizard” by Randal Spangler.  It is a gigantic project with about 90 full pages of stitches to do.  I have completed about half of a page of it which seems crazy with all of the time I spent on it.  I have not worked on it in a few years though but I hope to put it back in the rotation soon.

Here is a picture to show the scale of “Computer Wizard” My cat butt project is on a standard hoop and will fit into a 4×6 picture frame when it is complete.

I worked a little on my alphabet birth date project but most of my limited time was spent on the cat butt project.  I am really please with how the alphabet project is coming along.  I just wish I had more time to stitch it but as soon as the cats are done I will switch back to this one since it needs to be finished ASAP and it doesn’t require using a magnifying light. My eyes get tired really fast using the light so I can’t stitch as long as I want to.

Progress! I extended the blue border and got some of the yellow squares complete.  Hopefully I can finish this block and another by the end of June.

Half kitted thread set for “Sundae Delight” by Randal Spangler. I have quite a few of his pieces.  I love his work!

This is a piece I bought of of Etsy a number of years ago.  It is a Halloween Dachshund sampler I got from Plum Street Samplers that I started when I first started stitching and forgot about.   I spent more time than I should have carefully placing these stitches but I looked at it again and I am not sure if I cut my fabric large enough so I will have to measure it out again to double check.

This is another Randal Spangler piece.  It is a quick stitch, which in Heaven and Earth Designs means it doesn’t always use the full picture and the colors are not as detailed but it still has quite a bit of confetti and details.  It is called “Literate Dragon“.  I am having a really hard time with this one.  I picked the quick stitch so that I could finish it in about a year.  There are only four full pages and a few not even half pages so the pace wasn’t super fast but it is proving very difficult to stitch.  I am having a hard time finding my rhythm and every time I pick it up I just get frustrated and barely make any progress.  I am going to try again in a couple of months depending on my progress with the alphabet piece.

I have a few other pieces I have sort of kitted up, patterns that have been printed but no thread purchased and possibly a couple of starts still stashed away but I was a little overwhelmed by how much I need to work on when I went through everything so the rest of it will stay on the back burner for a while. I also need to desperately organize my extra thread, fabric and random stitching accessories and hopefully now that we have a dedicated sewing space I will finally be able to organize it instead of having my stitching stuff stashed all over the house. My goal is to have the sewing room organized this fall once everyone is in school and I have more time (ha ha!).  Now off to work on my cat butt project!

Happy stitching!