Because all the other bloggers are doing it, I felt that I, too, should offer a Year in Review for Wisconsin Magpie … So here it is.
Let me start by saying, I don’t have a whole lotta posts to choose from when compiling my “Best Of” list because I fell off the blogging bandwagon for a while.
Thankfully, my husband and I took a couple of vacations that helped me get back on track. I love writing posts about our travels. They’re basically a digital scrapbook for me, but hopefully a few other people find them entertaining or informative, too.
Personally, I love to read other people’s travel blogs, especially if they’re writing about some place we’ve gone to before or are thinking about going to in the future. (The best part of the travel blog is that if you get bored, you can just close your browser window and walk away, unlike in the old days when you’d have to sit through your Uncle Frank’s entire slide slow, and just when you thought you were free, he’d pull out another carousel of Grand Canyon pictures.)
Anyhoo, if anybody is still with me, in March we went to the U.S. Virgin Islands. Then in September we went to Mackinac Island.You can click on the links if you want to read the posts. Or not.
In addition to my travel posts, I did some fun project posts. One of my favorites was my Ohio Star Quilt Square Chair.
I love the chair, but when I shared the post on Hometalk, most of the comments were about the table I had it sitting next to. Some of the commenters said the table should be my next project; others said the table was stunning as is in all its weathered, chippy glory. For the record, I am in the “stunning as is” camp.
Another favorite project post was the one about my Twine-wrapped Dog and Cat …
… mostly because they were thrift store rescues. (Cue the Sarah McLachlan ballad here.) I am a sucker for a good thrift store rescue.
In October I made this Halloween sign …
… and in November I made my little Turkey Robot (from a vegetable steamer and various other metal parts). The Turkey Robot is my all-time No. 1 most-viewed and most-pinned post.
If I die tomorrow, I’m pretty sure my obit will read, “Lisa Cestkowski, inventor of the Turkey Robot, died at her home today, surrounded by her beloved cats, Calvin and Hobbes, who are also the two prime suspects in her murder and stand to inherit her entire fortune, which, unbeknownst to them, consists wholly of knickknacks, geegaws and broken thrift store ‘finds’ that, much to her husband’s chagrin, she had stockpiled in the couple’s basement with intentions to make over into ‘something fabulous.'” Or something like that.
My post about my collection of Secondhand Stars also got a lot of page views and comments. (And by “a lot” I mean 285 and 8, respectively.) (Quit judging me.)

I ended the year blogging about this little Train Case Makeover …
… which garnered (even by my standards) very few page views. (In part, I think the low page views were due to the fact that I forgot to put links to it on social media, so I’m including it in this post, in hopes that at least somebody sees it.)
My last post of the year (except for the one you’re reading now) was about a shirt that I stenciled for a university that doesn’t exist.
So there you have it. Thanks for following along. And please, share links to any posts you love/like/are not totally repulsed by. It is great for my ego when I go to my analytics page and see that someone other than my mother has been reading my blog.
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