Taheerah Atchia

Hi everyone! Happy New Year!! I hope you all had a wonderful and safe celebration!

Last year I set myself some Crafting Goals. You can click here to see the original post. It was the first time I’d ever done this and I didn’t know quite how it would pan out! But I found they gave me great focus and I intend to post a new set of goals for 2014 a bit later today. Before I do though I thought I would conduct a bit of a post-op on last year’s goals and how I fared with them.

So, in reverse order…

HAVE FUN WITH IT… 


I set this one to remind myself not to be brought down with a sense of ‘failure’ if I wasn’t as successful with Design Teams, publications, challenges etc. I wanted to keep the ‘fun’ in what I was doing. I was fortunate enough to have had an amazingly successful year, but of course it was not without its own disappointments. However with this goal in my sights I did find a shift in perspective accompanied such disappointments and I chose to embrace them more healthily as learning opportunities. I did still put pressure on myself at times, but it was never unhealthy in my opinion.

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BE A BETTER CRAFTING COMMUNITY MEMBER…

I set this goal to remind myself to be more supportive, to comment more and to explore more of what was out there in our community. Though there were some times where ‘real life’ got in the way of being able to comment every day or visit blogs every day, I definitely did incredibly well at this and have always been very supportive of my fellow designer friends.

I was once asked how I managed to get around to commenting on so many blogs on a pretty much daily basis. My answer was simple – I dedicated a certain time of the day (eg first thing in the morning, or over my lunch break) to catch-up on and comment on what was out there. Even 15-20 minutes of doing this meant it became built into my daily routine and became easier to do. So, if you’re wanting to do this yourself, you definitely can!

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PUT MYSELF OUT THERE MORE… 


A scary one, this! But how do you get anywhere if you don’t keep trying and putting yourself out there? Last year I submitted my work to more challenges, publications and Design Teams than ever before. Sometimes the results didn’t go my way, and other times they did. Above all though I put myself out there in the form of new techniques, styles, trends and so on. It helped my creativity and growth immeasurably.

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SUBMIT TO MORE CHALLENGES… 


This one goes hand-in-hand with the one above, really. I set this one because I had become almost paralysed by self esteem issues when I didn’t win challenges. But I was missing the entire point of challenges with that attitude! I was missing out on actually being challenged, being stimulated, growing and learning and trying new things. So though the ‘defeats’ did sting a little when they occurred, I kept trying. And I did end up with some ‘victories’ along the way too. *wink*

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And finally… 

MAKE AND POST A CARD EVERY DAY… 

By far the craziest, most ambitious and toughest goal to achieve, I wanted to make and post a card every day. Now, a year is a long time, and there were some days when I was going through some very dark times and it was almost impossible to do anything at all. But, I stood steadfast in this goal. I really wanted to achieve it. And I found along the way that it actually helped my creativity to keep it exercised. The hardest thing about this goal were the sort of sub-goals I associated with it of keeping the consistency and standard in my work whilst I was at it. I’ll let you be the judge of whether I managed that aspect as it it a subjective thing, but I believe I remained true to it. It brings me a huge sense of accomplishment, validation and delight to say that I not only managed to post something every day, but that on some occasions and some posts it was even more than one card a day, and I think it was something more like 400+ cards I ended up posting in the entire year. And that doesn’t include the cards made for publications which were accepted and I couldn’t share. Or the 100 cards I made for Christmas to mail out. I don’t even know how I managed it. BUT I DID IT.

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So there you have it – my 2013 Crafting Goals: all achieved!! I do hope you will join me a bit later today to see what goals I’ve set myself for this year! Thank you so much to all of you who helped support me throughout 2013. I couldn’t have done it without you.