Planning to love winter

A thirteen step plan for avoiding despair this season.

If we met yesterday at the Rockaway Makers Market.. welcome! Thanks for subscribing, you’ll get an email from me on Sundays about my art practice, cool stuff I found online and just general stuff about life.

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But first, some current projects.

Some darning: socks, a baby shirt and an adult t-shirt.

Close up of the adult t-shirt hole repair.

The basket / bag that I started a few weeks ago.

More socks, my favorite SmartWool socks that I received about eight years ago have finally given in to wear and tear.

My cushion cover went from 2D to 3D this week and that was an extremely satisfying moment!

One more hole on another t-shirt. These are my favorite shirts from Richer Poorer and they tend to wear out around the neckline. It’s only a matter of time before the entire neckline needs repair.

Winter survival kit

Working my way through Jacqueline Suskin’s book, A Year in Practice.¹ She opens the book with the winter season, but I started the book in October. So I began the book at the end. The fall season is about preparation. Storing food, gathering supplies for winter.

I am inspired to take a different approach to winter this year, a season I used to dread. I have identified as a summer girlie since I lived in Seattle and experienced my first bout of seasonal affective disorder. However, I plan to live through many many more winters, and I feel as though I cannot keep going with the attitude of hating five months of the year. That’s a lot of life to dread.

I’m putting together not just a winter survival list, but more like a winter thriving list.

A few things I love about winter:

• Wearing my sheepskin booties at home (a gift from my dad and stepmom when I was probably only 12 or 13 years old and they are still going strong). The same family that made my booties all of those years ago is still making them!
  Get your own booties! Or enjoy the ones you already have!

• The warm wind that blows through the house when the heat kicks on, and the slightly toasty scent that comes with it.

• Those first joyful snows (which we haven’t actually really experienced in NYC for the past several years).

• Warm beverages

• Knitting. I’m a seasonal knitter and usually only pick this hobby up in the cold months. Thinking of making a sweater for myself!

• Watching movies under a blanket

My go to toddler activity is just to go outside: talk a walk, hit the playground, literally anything outdoors. But, our neighborhood experiences long and tough winters (not like, Maine tough) but hard in their own way. The intense wind makes it miserable to be outside most of the time. Some days, it’s windy enough to knock a toddler right over!

Adding a toddler to the mix changes the math, too. If it were me, alone, I would lock myself inside with a sewing machine for four months and then see you in April. But with a little one, we need to get out and enjoy new experiences and move our bodies!

Some of my plans to make winter a little more bearable

1. Find things to do with a toddler indoors

   1. Go to the TWA hotel, a magical place where kids can run around inside with no obligation to buy anything. Even the photobooth is free!

   2. Community center toddler play dates

   3. IKEA, he loves to open those kitchen cabinets in the model apartments

2. Let my art practice be completely exploratory and joyful, follow the fun

3. Take a class in January

4. Potluck club

5. Invite children over during the day, accept invitations to others’ homes

6. Bundle up and go to the beach and playgrounds anyway

7. YMCA swim and sauna combo

8. Family quilt. I have been saving up some old clothes with happy memories and I want to turn them into a couch quilt for our house.

9. Finish up projects that are stale, or decide to move on from them and clear them out of the house.

10. Go on a trip to southern California

11. Make social plans and keep them

12. Pizza night! EVERY FRIDAY!

13. Suck every inch of joy out of the holiday season in the way that feels good

    1. Buy a Christmas tree DONE!

    2. Make cookies

    3. Make eggs benedict for breakfast

    4. Drive to see the lights in Ditmas park

    5. Skip the stressful parts (gifts for everyone, obligatory parties)

Of course, there is always the daydream of moving somewhere permanently warm, but we have never found a place where we feel more at home than here. This is the place where we want to live for years ahead, so it’s time to find a way to winter besides despairing about it all alone.

Links!

• Katy Smail On Feeling Like a Failure, a post so relatable to me as an artist who relies on her work to pay bills and how we mix up our art with our livelihood and the complicated relationship there.

• A book that speaks to me! Working Boats by Tom Crestodina

• My kid is still a tiny bit too young for activity books, but this is a genre I’m really looking forward to geeking out over soon. Youngna Park’s mega guide to Activity Books for kids.

• I just want all of these books by Alice Provensen for my kid (for me, let’s be real).

• Ummmm, the coolest shelving units I have seen on the market in a long long time. Affordable, flat pack, rad! Lucca House.

• Jeremy Matthew’s art making manifesto. Yes! To the whole list.

• Feldenkrais Project: Freeing your Breath and Spine I swear my lungs could open more deeply for two weeks after doing this.

That’s it for the week!

See you next Sunday :)
Bekka

1. Link to A Year in Practice is an affiliate link and I may receive a small commision if you purchase from Bookshop.org.