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Last year while I was still working in an office I started diamond painting during my lunch. At the time we had hour long lunches and I wanted something easy to work on while I chatted with my coworkers. A lot of my coworkers were […]
It’s that time of year again! The new patterns for the 2026 HAED SAL have been released and sign ups are open through December 14, 2025. Don’t miss your chance to join me in stitching a new pattern this year! There is a Facebook group […]
When I first say the concept of a Personal Curriculum on YouTube it was like something clicked in my head and I finally had a name to what I was trying to accomplish in the next few years. I have been trying to find things to learn while I am unemployed as I do not function well without new and exciting things to learn. I was roughly planning out what I would work on for 2026 when I came across a video on something called a Personal Curriculum and everything fell into place.
The concept of a Personal Curriculum was first coined by TikTokker Elizabeth Jean at xparmesanprincessx and has become more popular this fall. I do not have a TikTok account but it has made its way over to YouTube where I first heard about it. The idea is similar to homeschooling where you pick a few subjects to study over a period of time and complete projects or “assignments” that you have created. Some people do monthly or quarterly and I am going to go with quarterly because following the seasons seems wildly appropriate and is what I am used to with the colleges in the United States that I attended. I am not going to be very serious with it and assign large projects as I am doing this more for personal growth and I don’t want to stress myself out to the point of abandoning the project entirely but I do want the accountability of it so I will keep track of what I work through and post regularly on the Cozy Oscoey channel.
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For November and December of 2025 I am going to continue with the French studies I started in September by adding in a couple of more formal textbooks such as the one pictured above “Learn French Fast for Adult Beginners” and Short Stories in French for Beginners. I will be working on a few chapters a week for the main book and reading one story a week from the short stories book. I am hoping to push hard through the end of 2025 with French so I can learn it pretty fast. I do need a lot of repetition though and I am absorbing it very slowly. We are thinking of visiting France at some point in the next couple of years and it would be very helpful to know some of the language.
I also got a copy of the dual language version of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll with both French and English next to each other so we can practice our reading out loud. We have been casually taking turns at dinner once a week or so just for practice and it has been super helpful. Sometimes we run it through Google Translate afterwards to see if we were correct. We will eventually go to the library and check out a bunch of books in French to practice but I thought this would be a good beginning or us. Fun fact I learned when we started reading this book was that my kids have never read Alice in Wonderland or seen the movies! We are also going to read it in English as I am sure this in an abridged version.
We are also as a family taking French Lessons with a tutor once a week through the Preply app to help with pronunciation and boy do I need it! My kids are both taking French in school now so they get plenty of pronunciation help there but I really need to work on it. The sounds definitely do not come naturally to me at all and we are very lucky to have a fabulous tutor that has embraced the chaos of our family trying to learn at all different levels. I do have a sharable link for it and do get a small amount back if you subscribe to lessons but it gives you a coupon code for 70% off your first trail lesson linked with the following link: Trial Discount for Preply Lesson. I highly recommend finding a naturally speaking French teacher and checking out the reviews before you settle on someone. We picked someone based on the reviews and it has been such a good fit for us!
This site participates in affiliate links and receives a small fee for affiliate recommendations at no cost to you. As always we only recommend products we have tried ourselves. We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.
Another class I decided on for the end of the year was Art. In November and December I will be working on creating original diamond painting art for these blank notebooks I bought from Amazon. I have the blank diamond painting canvases I bought over a year ago to use and tons of extra diamond drills from projects I have already completed so I am super excited to get started on it sometime next week. I have already started taking French notes in this book but it will still work to add some sparkle to it! I picked these notebooks because the outside paper is a little rough and I was hoping the glue would stick better when I glue my finished pieces onto it. I will post updates to this project both here on the blog and on the Cozy Oscoey channel as I work through it.
The last class I want to focus on for the end of 2025 is Fitness or Physical Education. I am still taking it slow through the end of the year with my fitness as I continue to recover from my many foot and knee issues along with leftover asthma issues from our run in with Covid last June. It will probably be spring again before I can fully get back into the swing of things and return to my triathlon training but for now I am just going to continue to do slow gentle exercise and maybe add in some core work. My eventual goal is to do a small triathlon and I will be focusing on swimming this winter with possibly some stationary bike riding and snowshoeing. My goal is to check back in with myself mid-January prior to starting to intensify things or start running again but I am an impatient person so we shall see if I make it that long!
Looking ahead to 2026 I will be continuing with French, reading through a list of books, working through some of the above Historic Sampler book, learning some sewing and working on my piano technique. I would love to eventually learn the cello but that is pretty far out there in terms of time commitment. There are so many topics and directions my 2026 learning could go it is going to be hard to chose. I may end up just choosing something for the first quarter of the year and then adapting as needed.
What types of things do you want to learn in the future? How are you going to make that happen?
Great Videos to Inspire you to Start a Personal Curriculum:
Building a Personal Curriculum for Fall by Liane Likes
My Personal Curriculum: Books, Cooking & Cozy Projects by BIBLIOLIFESTYLE
Planning a personal curriculum for September by Ruby Granger
Self Education: Your Best Defence Against Brain Rot by Thought Couture
Thank you for reading and I hope you find something you enjoy to learn about this year!
Links:
Check out our video on Cozy Oscoey: Introduction to Personal Curriculum
Preply: Get 70% off a trial lesson: Preply Trial Discount
Elizabeth Jean on TikTok: xparmesanprincessx on TikTok
Books:
Learn French Fast for Adult Beginners by Speak Abroad Academy
Short Stories in French for Beginners by Olly Richards
Dual Language Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (Author),
Items I Bought:
Blank Notebooks for Added Sparkle
Blank Diamond Painting Canvases
This week I am reviewing The One Kingdom: Book One of the Swans’ War by Sean Russell which is not the next book I listed in my last review of On the Beach.It has been a year since my last review and I wanted to […]
Hello my stitching friends! I thought I would post an update on my progress for my 2025 Heaven and Earth Designs Stitch a Long project, Innocent Dreams by L&L Designs. I started this at the beginning of the year and although I made great progress […]
Hello my friends! I am looking ahead to 2025 for my goal planning and I thought I would share one of them with y’all a little early since the window to participate closes on 12/13/24. This year I am going to work through one of the charts for the 2025 HAED SAL. It is a looooot of work since these charts are so dense and have thousands of stitches but I have already purchased my spot and am committed. Here is the link to the SAL page on their website. I am not an affiliate for HAED but I would love to have some fellow stitchers join in the fun!
I am going to working on Innocent Dreams by L&L Designs for this challenge. It is super cute and has tons of great color shading that looks fun to work with. I have never done one of these stitch a longs before so I am curious if the pattern will be released horizontally or vertically four pages at a time. The goal is to finish 6 pages by the end of 2025 to receive a copy of all the charts available for the SAL with the stretch goal to finish the whole chart by the end of the year with a prize of one additional chart from their website. HAED is releasing four pages at a time so I am guessing each chart is 12 pages with the last set possibly being partial pages. That is a page a month of stitching!
For context, here is my current WIP from HAED. It is the Quick Stitch of Randal Spangler’s Literate Dragon (link) and on 1/1/25 I will hit the 10 year mark for working on it. This is most of one page done with some of the bottom and page to the right of the first one. My original goal was to finish it within one year but I had small kids at home and very little time to work on it for a long time. I have made a lot of progress on it the past few months and hope to at least finish the first page by the end of the year.
Floss can get very expensive for these large charts and typically the charts have between 80 and 90 colors to them. HAED does provide a floss estimate on the listing page so everyone can see what is needed and order ahead of time so we are all ready to go on 1/1/25. I am one to “borrow” thread from other charts since a lot of the time you only need the skeins for a few stitches but I will definitely be shopping sales to get a full set for this design. I have had a hard time finding all of my threads at places like JoAnn but I have had good luck getting both fabric and threads from 123Stitch. They have excellent customer service and I always receive my order quickly! HAED is currently having their annual Black Friday sale with all patterns 50% off so if you find something you like you should snag it while they are on sale. I did order a couple of other patterns I have been pining for but I know those won’t get started for a while.
Watch for my progress on both Instagram and Threads as well as our Facebook page. I will try to post regular updates on the blog as well.
I hope you join me in participating in the SAL!
Links:
My goals for 2023 revolve quite a bit around self-care and doing things that make me happy such as cross-stitching, gardening, puzzles, hanging out with my family and reading. I am also trying to make them pretty open ended so I don’t feel to rigid […]
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 […]
It’s that time of year again for goal setting and reflection. I am hopeful for 2023 and one of my focuses will be self-care. I love puzzles so I am setting a goal of working on my puzzles for 2023. I was very inspired by Karen Puzzles on YouTube (link here) with her journey towards the puzzle championships. I had no idea there were competitions!!! I have not found any in my area yet but I am definitely keeping an eye out. All puzzles mentioned in this post are listed at the bottom so if you are here for my 2023 list feel free to scroll on down.
This site participates in affiliate links and receives a small fee for affiliate recommendations at no cost to you. As always we only recommend products we have tried ourselves. We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.
I started my 2023 puzzle journey in 2022 with some practice puzzles. We have a bunch stashed from over the years so I dug through our pile and started puzzling. I timed my first one which was Grandpa’s Garage at 300 pieces and it took me 1 hour, 18 min and 56 seconds to complete. If that seems fast to you, this was a super easy puzzle with large pieces. For comparison, in 2022 at the World Jigsaw Championship the fastest times for this 500 piece London Postcard puzzle was 34 min and 25 seconds which is amazing!
Next I tackled the 1000 piece The Craft Cupboard by Colin Thompson. This one took me about eight hours but, huge caveat, I had help from my husband with sorting for the first four hours which is when everything is the most difficult. No doubt if I had done this on my own it would have taken way longer. I loved this artist and I’m already thinking about which ones to add to my list for the future. I would really like to do the massive 18,000 piece Magical Bookshelf but one, it is super expensive and two, I have no idea where I would put it to keep it safe from dogs and kids. I am sure it is the size of my living room (or bigger) and logistically I don’t know how it would work.
I pulled this 500 piece Home for Christmas Puzzle out of our stash and it was unopened. We got this one out of one of those random Woot boxes many years ago. Did you ever do those? My husband was really into them for a few years and we did get a few good things out of them but it was mostly stuff we gave away. I will put a photo of the box below but I could not find this one on Amazon although it looks like you can find it on Ebay if you are interested.
I found a similar one on Amazon here. I didn’t time this puzzle because my daughter really wanted to help with it and honestly if she had not helped me it would still be sitting there undone. The quality on this one was not great and it was hard to tell if the pieces fit together correctly and with the glare I was having a really hard time seeing the colors. If I did another one of these I would try to change the lighting up a bit and see if that helps.
Lastly I started this 500 piece Golden Gate Bridge puzzle of unknown origin from my family room. This is the brand Costco carries so we probably got it from there. I had a great time sorting this one and had it sorted in a record 15 min into edges, the bridge, some sky and then the rest of the pieces.
Unfortunately I quickly remembered why we don’t buy this brand of puzzle any more. The pieces do not fit well together and I really struggled to get the edge put together. I gave up after about an hour and started working on the clouds. I am really glad I didn’t time this one because it will probably take several hours. My kids have been helping me a little bit but they are also discouraged by how difficult it is to see if the pieces actually fit together. I will post a photo here on my Instagram when I finish this one, hopefully before the end of the year!
To keep track of my puzzles I will be filming as much as I can and posting it here on my YouTube channel. I have created some boards on Pinterest linked here and below. The completed list is currently blank but as I work on my puzzles I will add them to the completed one. For now, I am finishing up what I have started and trying to pry out of my kids which puzzles they bought me for Christmas. Ha ha!
Happy holidays and puzzling everyone!
World Jigsaw Champions Website
World Puzzle Championship Individual Puzzle:
The Grandpa’s Garage puzzle is a Goodwill find and I could not find a copy but here is an interesting 300 piece substitute:
Usually this time of year I start looking over our finances for the year, project our income a year ahead and start setting some goals for the year. I don’t do New Year’s Resolutions because I am not great at following through with them but […]
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