Gratitude and Stitching

Maybe you all have seen posts like these, but I just discovered a Blog Hop by Stitching the Night Away - and prompt #12 is "When it comes to the stitching part of your life, what are you most thankful for?"

For me, I'm most thankful that I have the ability to create a gift with love that doesn't cost a lot of money.  It takes a little more time and planning to complete them, for sure, but the satisfaction of knowing "I made that" goes a long way.  My children have actually asked for handstitched gifts from me (a dog picture, a biscornu, legwarmers...)  It feels so good to be able to provide for my family in this way, and knowing that it's something they'll love and appreciate much more than something I bought already made in a store.

I've been thinking about gratitude a lot lately - at least I was for most of this month.  Yes, I was one of those annoying people on Facebook posting about things I'm thankful for.  I wasn't going to participate; you guys know how I've been with other month-long challenges, right?  But with everything negative and stressful going on in my personal life I decided to focus on one positive thing every day in my life, in the hope of changing my attitude and making this month much happier than September or October were.  And for the most part it worked - I was able to enjoy the holiday and celebrate the positive things that happen every day.  I found myself looking for good things.  I managed to post every day (without doing catch-up posts) until this week - Monday and Tuesday I didn't post any gratitude.  And the reason kind of demonstrates why I was doing this experiment to begin with - I didn't get some news I was hoping for, I was disappointed, I allowed myself to get into a funk, and couldn't muster anything positive to share!  I'm happy to say I'm out of that now and back to looking for positive things in every day.

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