Since I mentioned some volunteer projects recently, I thought I’d talk about the one that launched last month.

I work for Salesforce. It’s a fairly large software company; as I write this it’s growing and for the last several years has been in Forbes magazine’s list of 100 Best Companies to Work For. One of the things that earns the company that ranking is Salesforce’s 1:1:1 model, which is this: 1% of Salesforce’s product is free to non-profits in the form of donated or discounted licenses; 1% of the founding stock was placed in a foundation to be used in grants; and 1% of each employee’s time is made available to volunteer with non-profits of their choice.

That last part means that each Salesforce employee receives 6 paid days off per year to volunteer. But during my first couple years at Salesforce I found it hard to make time for volunteering outside of the 2-3 corporate team-building events my team participated in. So this year I made it a goal to use all my hours.

Enter the Bay Area Association for Disabled Sailors (BAADS), a local non-profit that offers sailing programs to people with disabilities, fostering independence, confidence and a whole lot of fun.

Ironically, BAADS’ website wasn’t accessible to members with certain disabilities: the screen reader software used by blind and visually impaired users to read web pages couldn’t access some of the content. Additionally, the site was full of broken links, and the content was outdated: any time BAADS wanted to make a change they had to pay the consultant that had developed the site to do it, so they’d save up several changes and then there would be some delay before the changes were actually done.

One of the things I do at Salesforce is participate in a workgroup that works to make our web-based software accessible to users with disabilities. I’m also a bit of a WordPress geek (the content management software I use for this blog). And one of BAADS’ board members happens to be my neighbor. So I devoted my volunteer hours to setting BAADS up on WordPress so they could update their own content, and creating a WordPress theme (the wrapper that handles layout and style for a website) that would be accessible to all of BAADS members.

Last month, after many hours of work, the new BAADS site went live. (Yay!) The visual design was provided by one of Salesforce’s visual designers, Grant Anderson. There are many things that I could explain about why the new design is more accessible than the old one, but I’m saving those for a post on my other blog, where I usually geek out over such things.

I’m pleased with the way everything turned out. Between this and another volunteer project this year, I turned in more than 100 volunteer hours — well over the paid 1%, but totally worth what I learned through the process and the satisfaction of helping a great group of people. And BAADS is thrilled. Everybody wins.

Last night I was watching the animé series Honey and Clover and was struck by this soliloquy from Hagumi Hanamoto, the (somewhat disturbingly) child-like painting student, as she ponders a Rodin sculpture in an art history book:

There are so many things I want to try to do. There is an endless amount of things I want to try to make scattered inside of me. I chase after each of the images that fly by, catch them, wrestle with them, verify the taste and drink them down, name them, and return it to the appropriate place…. I want to open all of these boxes, but a human’s life is too short to open them all. There is a limit to the number of boxes that one human can open in a lifetime.

There are a lot of things I would like to do, and many of them revolve around making things. I’d like to be better at some things I already do, and I’d like to try new things. It’s very easy to close the door on these things and ignore them, to lie down with my iPad and read whatever comes up on Twitter, Reeder, Zite or Pinterest — or to watch lengthy animé series, for that matter. And I think that sometimes that’s okay; sometimes work and other commitments take up all my energy and all I want is to be distracted for a little while. But these kinds of distractions tend not to be very satisfying, so I want more — I subscribe to more feeds, follow more people, install more apps, keep hitting the refresh button to see what’s next, and then it’s more of a habit than anything else. And then I’m not opening boxes.

My friend Dinah emailed me after the On Simplifying post and congratulated me on my positive Discardian shift. Dinah came up with the concept of Discardia — a holiday that celebrates letting go of things that are getting in your way — about 10 years ago, and she recently wrote a book about it. I wasn’t thinking about Discardia when I wrote my post, though I’ve known about it for years and have sometimes even deliberately celebrated it. But when I read Dinah’s book there were parts that echoed some of the things I’ve been thinking about lately, and she gave me some ideas for moving forward. So if I’ve touched a nerve with you at all, you might want to check her book out for yourself.

Speaking of things that go well with onesies and stress-induced ADD requiring mindless handwork, more baby items were in order for this particular friend. It seems like it’s easier to find somewhat hip baby stuff these days — beyond the pink and blue and media-branded items — but who wants to pay $20 for something that baby is going to outgrow in a few months? So I used this übersimple gathered skirt pattern to throw together a couple of skirts to pull on over the onesies.

The bicycle skirt is a nod to the daddy-to-be:

The leaves are something that the mommy-to-be would probably wear herself:

The fabrics are Michael Miller Citron Gray Bicycles and Nature Walk Organic Leaves Crimson, both purchased from Fabric.com. I ordered half a yard of each fabric and made the 12-18 month size. For the smallest size, you could get two skirts out of a half-yard — I had plenty of fabric left over. For the bicycle skirt I used the full width of the fabric (44″, less selvedges), but I felt it was a little too full, so for the leaf skirt I cut about 6 inches off the width.

(I also grooved on this tiered gathered skirt for babies, but lacked an infant for measuring and didn’t have enough coordinating fabrics around to pull it off.)

A coworker told me that when she had her baby boy last year, that in spite of all the baby clothes they had been given, the only thing she ever put him in for the first few months was a kimono-style wrapped jacket and a onesie, because they were the easiest things to get on and off. This was exactly what I wanted to hear, as I had already planned to make this kimono jacket for a friend’s expected baby. The pattern is the free simple kimono wrap from Habitual; I made the 6-12 month size. I wanted a print that was fun and suitable for a girl or boy, and I think this one fit the bill.

I was a bit confused when I added the ties, and had to rip out the one that’s supposed to tie on the inside and insert it so it went–you know–on the inside. I also tried to use a technique I learned from one of my Japanese sewing books to serge each side seam in one go, but I had to snip the stitches in the corners a little and resew them with the sewing machine. I need more practice on that one. The end result was still pretty darn cute though.

Recycling content a little here, but I finally gave away all the stocking ornaments I made a couple of years ago, so it’s time to make some more.

You can make some too, with my downloadable PDF pattern and photo tutorial.

This has to be one of the most elegant exposed stitch bindings around: it’s the Woven Chain sewing from the second volume of Keith Smith’s non-adhesive binding series, 1- 2- & 3-Section Sewings. I used it some time back for Jane and Patrick’s wedding guest book, of which the baby-themed album above is pretty much an exact copy, aside from the paper.

The baby album and Jane and Patrick’s guest book both have three sections of Rives BFK cover-weight paper totaling 24 pages. The black album above has only two sections, so there’s only one line of chain to link the sections together. I think this album, with the elegant paper and slubbed, silky bookcloth, suits the elaborate nature of the stitching better than the matte bookcloth and bunnies in the baby album. But both are nice.

You may recall that back in January I laid out a few goals aimed at, among other things, not overcommitting myself and acting more consciously. Before the month was out I’d blown both, somewhat impulsively agreeing to take on two volunteer projects for a local non-profit.

I’m glad I did it. I learned so much from both projects, it was completely worth it. I learned about managing projects with volunteer-run teams. I learned more about working with my company’s software than a year of research taught me. I learned new technical skills. Somewhere in there I also decided to change jobs, taking on a role with more responsibility and different skills, and that’s also involving a lot of new learning.

I love learning, but it’s a lot of work. It takes focus. It means that I have less energy to devote to creative projects. It doesn’t stop me from producing — I’ve been making things almost feverishly, but it’s more to calm my mind than to enjoy the process of creating something. Which is how I end up with entire stacks of long stitch books.

Today my volunteer team handed off the second project to the NPO. The first project launched a month ago.  I still have a lot going on with work, but it’s manageable. For the first time in years, I don’t have any external commitments; I’m saying no to all requests. Focusing on my own projects.

I’ve been culling all my streams of incoming information, like Twitter and RSS feeds and other aggregates, getting them down to the people I care about or who inspire me. Cutting out those things I use to fill the gaps with, those motor-memory checks for updates. It’s kind of disconcerting to realize how I rely on some of these distractions — the habits I’ve created around them.

Not sure yet what’s going to fall out of all of this.