Cleaning day! Also...is crafting in my genes?

Whew!  I've been a busy bee at home all day today.  (I don't work on Mondays.)  I have been cleaning like a fiend!
The first thing I tackled in the apartment was our bedroom closet, which truly has been an utter disaster until this afternoon.  I wish I'd taken a "before" photo, but here's the "after":

Honestly, the carpet was not visible prior to the clean-up, and there was no space to actually stand.  Clothes and shoes and other randomness were littered everywhere.
Now, though...so much better...sigh.  :-)
I like tidiness.  It keeps my stress level down.  I'm not even a neat person by nature, and it does take conscious effort for me to keep things organized.  (J is even worse.)  But I am much more calm when things are spic-and-span.  I don't want to live in a sterile, uber-hygienic space.  I'm definitely not a germaphobe, and I abhor anti-bacterial household chemicals and all that crap.  I just want things...neat.  Easy to access.  Not all over the floor waiting to be tripped over.  Not cluttered. 
After the closet purge, I cleaned George's cage, vacuumed the bedroom carpet, did laundry, did the dishes, and swept the living-area's floor. 
As I did so, I pondered my love of knitting and other crafts.  I started to think about some of my relatives and their own love of crafting.
My maternal grandmother's mother and her sisters were ardent quilters, crocheters, knitters, and "tatters" (that is, they liked tatting).  I've been told that they often entered their works into county fairs and such, and won prizes.

My great-grandmother and her sisters as young women in Sparta, Illinois.  This photo was probably taken around the end of WWI.  I'm not quite sure who is who. 



I am fortunate enough to have some quilts and other craftworks made by my great-grandmother and great-aunts.  Here's my favorite, a quilt made by them together and other women in their community:

(Bella and Willow are helping by increasing the cute factor.)

The quilt was made between 1938 and 1940:

My great-aunt Gladys's piece on the quilt:

So, I come from crafty stock.  My grandmother was a knitter and crocheter like her mother.  My mom is quite the seamstress, while my aunt likes to cross-stitch. 

When I lived in Chicago, I used to make soap from scratch and sell it sometimes at local fairs.  I called my mini one-girl company Scrub No Evil.  In my run-down apartment kitchen I'd brew my soapy concoctions of lye and olive oil, and use essential oils of patchouli, bay rum, peppermint, and lavender for all-natural scents.
I taught myself how to make my soap, using a few Internet-acquired recipes as basic guidelines. 
I also taught myself how to knit.  It was the fall of 2000 and I was in Americorps, doing wildlife management stuff (specifcally, feeding local elk herds) in rural Washington state.  I found a battered copy of a Vogue knitting book from the 1970s, went to Wal-Mart in Yakima to buy some cheap #6 needles and Lion Brand yarn, and the rest was...history?

Here's a patch I knitted "free-hand" in 2007, sitting on a bus en route to Latvia from Lithuania:

What should I do with it?  Sew it on a sweater, maybe?

I'll get going for now...gotta get some other things done, like start dinner, do some homework, check the ol' e-mail...

Till next time!