26 before 27 - Wrap-Up

Tomorrow is my birthday (hooray! ^-^), so it's high tide for a little wrap-up post of my 26 before 27 list. This wrap-up post is purely as a matter of form, because I haven't done anything extra since my last update. This past year was so much busier then I'd ever expected. I had to go to class almost each day and when I got home I had to work for school assignments. The next 5 months will probably exactly the same level of bat shit crazy school life (seriously, my master studies at the UGent are peanuts compared, I had tones of time back then) and I'll be less ambitious with my next list. I even contemplated just skipping a year, because I finished so little of the points on this list, but that's life and I can't let it beat me down.

NL // Morgen is het mijn verjaardag (hiep hiep!) en het is dus hoog tijd om mijn 26 before 27 lijst nog eens te overlopen en af te sluiten. Om eerlijk te zijn is er niet veel meer afgestreept sinds mijn laatste update. De afgelopen 365 dagen waren zo belachelijk druk voor mij, dat het mij niet echt verbaast dat ik zo weinig heb kunnen afstrepen. Naast naar school gaan en 's avonds aan mijn opdrachten werken, was er niet zoveel fut meer over om aan andere dingen te werken. De volgende vijf maanden zullen wellicht niet veel beter zijn en ik heb het overwogen om gewoon geen lijst te maken en een jaartje over te slaan. Alleen, onverwachte dingen zijn een beetje onderdeel van het leven zeker? Ik kan toch niet opgeven vooraleer het jaar goed begonnen is? Neen dus. Die nieuwe lijst komt er aan, zij het misschien minder ambitieus dan de laatste.

01. Make some 365 - I was meaning to make something new and creative every day for 365 days, but then I failed a couple of days in. I just had too much other things to do.

02. Draw something completely with my Wacom drawing tablet - Nope, also didn't happen. I drew things for school, but I don't want to count them.

03. Make 52 illustrations - I made a couple of illustrations, no more then 8. Allas.

04. Make one skirt every month - I thought I would be able to sew in the summer, but I only made one skirt and then it was back to working on assignments again.

05. Read thirty books - Yes, this one I did complete! I read 38 books in 2014 and I'm pretty excited about this.

06. Work out for an hour, two times a week - I'm not sure everyone will agree with me on this one, but I think I completed this one. I didn't exercise like I was planning to, but I went to school by bike for the whole of the year. My school is about 7,5 km's of my house, so I think that's pretty bad ass for somebody who didn't do any exercises before and never used her bike for trips that were longer than 15 minutes.

07. Drink Vodka in Moscow - I did this and I even enjoyed it. I also still need to blog about my trip. Bad blogger.

8. Organise a craft party - This one hasn't happened yet, but it's not for a lack of trying. Me and some of my classmates still want to do this, but since we have so much school assignments it has been hard to find a good date. We already had to reschedule it tree times.

09. Go through the 100 Things Challenge - I didn't literally follow the 100 things challenge's rules, as in: I didn't count the things I threw away and maybe I didn't do it in just tree months. I did a whole car full of goods to my local thrift shop, I threw away tons of old magazines and stuff that was broken and lost it's importance. And right now, there are two boxes filling up again with things for the thrift store. I did well with this one.

10. Finish my Chores list - The Chores list is something of a never ending list. You'll stripe one thing of and the next thing will pop-up. So I didn't finish my list, but I made a lot of progress and that's what this was all about.

11. Design a (non-school related) poster - Didn't happen

12. Make a Boomerang card - Also nope. I didn't make the time for doing this one or the one before.

13. Prepare a five courses menu - On the Boy's birthday I made him a five courses dinner, which was, even though I say this myself, extremely yummy (and way too much ;)).

14. Get my driving license - I went driving two times and then it never happened again. I seriously need to make this happen next year.

15. Discover some cool new café's and resto's in Ghent - We went and discovered ourselves some good places. I'm planning on putting a new Ghent City Guide online, so some of those places might make it there.

16. Read my Printmaking Bible and use them techniques - Boohoo, sadly no. This is the coolest book I own and I contemplated doing my CREARES about manual printing techniques so I could experiment with this book and different techniques, but I picked the book cover design instead. A girl had to make choices.

17. 3 out, 1 in challenge: For every piece of fabric I buy, I need to give away or use three fabrics I already have - This one I also completed. At the beginning of the year I went through my fabric stash, made a selection and decided to give away or sell 24 pieces of fabric. I bought only 5 or 6 pieces of fabric this year, a couple of which I immediately used. Later in the year I didn't had the time to make new things and I also didn't buy any new fabrics any more.

18. Keep a visual journal - I started a journal and I used it a couple of times, but it didn't become a habit and most of the time I just didn't know what to do with it.

19. Go hiking in the High Fens - We went to the Hoge Veluwe instead, so this counts for me. I just wanted to spent some time hiking in nature and that's exactly what we did.

20. Read the Game of Thrones - I'm not sure why I failed this one. After I read my 30 books I should have started on the first book, but instead I read other books and tried to reach 40 books. I'll just have to read them this year.

21. Go a weekend away - We went to the Hoge Veluwe and had a great time hiking and cycling.

22. Go sketching on location - I didn't do this as much as I wanted to, but when we went to Planckendael in November I sat in the elephant quarters for a while and tried sketching them.

23. Create my dream wardrobe: Find out my clothing "style", keep the things I love and wear, get rid of the rest - I put a whole bunch of clothes in a suitcase, so I could think about keeping them or giving them away and I wrote a blogpost about finding my perfect wardrobe. And then I forgot all about creating my perfect wardrobe. Oops.

24. Do a photo shoot with our kitties! - Hasn't happened sadly enough. Although I still want to do this very much, I think Loki & Schrödinger would look dashing with a little bow tie.

25. Read one Dutch literary classic - I managed to do this. I read De Aanslag by Willem Elschot during the read-a-thon week in September. It was the only dutch book I read this year and if this wouldn't have been on this list, I would have read no dutch books.

26. Design a fabric pattern - Nope, never happened.

Eentje dat niet op mijn lijst stond: Lori's voederen! Nochtans wel heel erg leuk!

So that was my 26 before 27 list. I managed to finish 12 things, I started some that I never finished and some things I never started at all. It seems that this is the thing with these lists, they're always very ambitious and I never complete them. Maybe I'll do better next year. Although, to be completely honest, making them and trying and having fun during the year is always more important than actually finishing.

NL // Zo, dat was mijn 26 voor 27 lijst. Ik slaagde erin om 12 dingen af te strepen. Sommmige puntjes begon ik, maar raakten nooit af en aan anderen begon ik zelfs gewoon nooit. Dat is iets wat heel typerend is voor mijn lijstje: ieder jaar ben ik te ambitieus en ik kan ze nooit voltooien. Misschien dat het volgend jaar wel een keer lukt, al moet ik toegeven dat het daar eigenlijk niet om gaat bij mij. Ik vind het leuk om een lijstje samen te dromen, te proberen, te vergeten, maar ook gewoon om mij te amuseren gedurende het jaar.