Happy Birthday, Grandma

Two years ago today my Grandmother passed away. It was an emotional beginning to an emotional weekend as I sat in the car beside my husband that Friday, pulled over beside a park with a lake that I had run around countless times, on our way to Ikea to pick up a few things before we moved into our very first house the next day, two days before we were to pick up our brand new puppy.

At Ikea, I could not - for the life of me - find a cooling rack. And be it the situation or the timing or the horrendous amount of people (all of whom I didn't know and didn't care about) I nearly lost my mind trying to find a damn cooling rack (and didn't, and never bothered to look for one again until a few days ago).

My mom called me to tell me what happened. We all knew it was coming, as you usually do with an elderly loved one. But it's like anything that you expect to happen, you prepare yourself and you wait and wait and then when it finally does happen, all the preparation or whatever you were doing before goes out the window with the bathwater, the bathtub, the baby and your ability not to cry in public.

March 8th is International Women's Day and I had written a blog post for my Grandmother. In it I said:

"So how do we know what makes a woman great? When she is gone and all those things she was, things she said and did become little holes in our day."

I still find those holes in each day, although now I don't look for them quite as often. Edna St. Vincent Millay once said:

“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night.” 

There is something said about time healing wounds (or whatever) but it doesn't. We get busy and have to think about other things, and although I guess the pain isn't so focused and sharp as it once was, that doesn't change that it is still pain.

All that to say although there are still little holes in my day, now I am seeing parts of my Grandmother in other things - such as my niece who sometimes says "Heeeey" like my Grandmother used to - and that fills in a little gap and keeps out the cold wind a bit.

In keeping with the idea of holes and sharpness of things, I leave you with this thought (a sad, yet comforting one):

"Your absence has gone through me like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.” — W.S. Merwin

The World in Which We Create - Part III - Build and Rebuild

I will keep my words to a minimum today.

Get off the computer. As quickly as you can. Turn off your notifications, your Facebook, your Twitter (or Hootsuite or TweetDeck or whatever), log out of your email, turn off your phone, put your phone in the cupboard, hide the remote, put away the chips from last night, go outside, clear the leaves off the ground, plant some sunflowers, plant a squirrel's wayward acorn, put your hands in the dirt, water the dirt (even if there's nothing in there, there might be something in there that you don't know about), get your knees dirty, get your hands dirty, breathe in the outside air, don't listen to music, listen to the birds, the trees, stop thinking, stop thinking (seriously, stop it), stop looking for inspiration, it'll be there when it needs to be, stop forcing the moment, don't take any pictures, don't give this moment up to anyone else, this moment is yours, yours only, keep it, put it away inside you, save it for yourself, yourself only.

Week 7 Round-up

My mom and I are trying to get into a local craft fair, so my creative brain cells are all focused in on the jewellery end of things right now. If we make it in, it's going to be hard to sell these pieces. I really love them and want to wear them all the time.

It's refreshing to let go of something that you love, so that someone else may love it.

But it isn't easy.

1. Business Card Prototype
2. Rain Cloud Fingernails
3. I Heart Combs 
4. Yellow Bracelet  
5. Yellow Daisy Ring 

The World in Which We Create - Part II - Inspiration & Creativity - Begin at the Beginning

Beginning something can be really difficult. If you’ve ever sat and stared at a blank sketchbook, or an empty Word document, or a block of clay or any other sundry of things, you know what I’m talking about. 

It’s difficult because there is such pressure to start something that is GOOD. Do you know what I mean? Like I will feel that I have wasted my time if I spend a few hours on something and it doesn’t turn out. And if what I do doesn’t turn out, then nothing I do will turn out - obviously - and then why did I ever think that I could do this thing in the first place? Or anything? Then I go have a nap because this train of thought is leading me down a dark, dark tunnel.

This means we have to change our expectations of what we are doing. We are not sitting down to write a novel in a single night. We aren’t going to compose a symphony or complete a whole painting or anything like that. We are going to sit down (or stand, or roll around on the floor avoiding this moment) and play. 

Don’t you remember that creative time is playtime? Maurice Sendak said that he loved going into his drawing room and shutting the door because it was playtime. Like when you’re a kid and you just drew whatever the hell came to mind with NOTHING IN MIND. Or you just made stuff because making stuff is fun.

You have to let go of the thought that everything or anything you do needs to work out perfectly because then whatever you do will suffer the consequences for it. It will look abused and beaten down like the pickles at the top of the jar that are a bit misshapen and kind of soft instead of crunchy and punchy, like they should be.

So where do I start now that I know what I’m going to do is probably going to blow chunks?

Good use of a 90s-ism. You dive in headfirst. YES. Not feet first, and not with your eyes closed. You just start doing. When I’m making jewellery, I hover over the random crap I’ve amassed, like the megalomaniac I am, and start picking up things that jump out at me. Then I start putting things beside each other to see if they go well together. And if they work out, great! And if they don’t, I take them apart and use them for something else. I start again. Because continuing to go down a dead end road will always lead in a dead end.

Okay, but I need an idea EVENTUALLY, right?

Sure. I’ve found that I get at least (AT LEAST) 50% of my ideas WHILE I’m working on something. Whether it’s for the actual thing I’m working on, or for something else. Doing begets more doing. Ideas beget more ideas. The more begetting, the better. Kind of like in the Old Testament. Put your ideas together in a softly lit room with some nice pillows, close the door and see what emerges from it.

Now my ideas are breeding like rabbits! I have too many ideas!

I know, right? I have ideas A LOT because I’ve trained my brain to open wide the flood gates, like a brothel (ew). It doesn’t mean they’re all good, but they are varied and can be interesting and I like to keep them even if they are crap. I have an Idea Box that I use to keep all the notes I’ve scribbled down, or drawn out quickly while I’m at work, or doing whatever. I know my ideas are safe there because a) they won’t be forgotten and 2) I can let them simmer and come back to them later when I might have a new insight on something.

This is also important to do because it frees up more space for the brain to produce more ideas. If you just leave them in there, they coagulate like a scab and then NOTHING can get out and you have to pick past the old, crusty ideas to get to the new, fresh ones*.

To sum up the moral of the story for this post I will give you some tidy bullet points:

• Don’t expect perfection in the beginning. Or ever.
• Do expect to have fun or else why are you doing this?
• Don’t think too hard at first – just play and see what happens.
• Open yourself up to as many ideas as you can, and take good care of them – you don’t know what they’ll become.

Thanks for reading.
*Descriptive imagery for our visual learners.

The World In Which We Create - Part I - Changing Tides

I love to paint. It's the first thing I mention whenever anyone asks what I do on my days off. As of this very moment, I haven't painted since September.

And every morning since September I wake up with the icy, guilty feeling of EGAD WHAT AM I DOING?

Back in September, when I was thinking about getting a job, I had an overpowering sense of Not Enough. I realized that the things I was creating didn't satisfy that pesky tremor in my gut saying: You can do better than this, you can do more (FYI - that was Frank talking).

I needed to evolve what I was doing and how I was doing it. I had to begin again.

Oh dear Lord, not again. (Yes, again)

For me, that required stepping back and rekindling the spark (at first I wrote "sparkle", which would be equally accurate).

That meant not making jewellery, not painting, not drawing, nothing.

I sat down with myself and Frank and the three of us began a list of what I wanted to change about my work to make it more fulfilling to me. How did I want to evolve? What work did I admire and want to strive towards with my skills? Where have I failed in the past and how would I achieve those goals in the future?

It was time to set the bar higher.

You have to understand that the small event of just sitting down and writing whatever I wanted to do was freeing. It was only for myself to see and to know. I recommend doing this.

While I've been letting my work simmer, I've let my creative mind go somewhere else completely. I joined up with the fine folks at Three6V.com and began creating in a way I hadn't done in a long time. I began making little things for myself; a recipe book, a mounted doll's head, and this is when I started to let myself dive back into jewellery that I wanted to wear, which is on my list of How To Evolve So As To Not De-Evolve (un-evolve?)

Another thing that has helped me find my direction was a rejection I received from a gallery. The most important part of this is that they told me why they didn't accept my work, and it was exactly on par with what I had written down for evolving my painting skills.

So I guess the moral of the story for Part I is: figure out what it is that you want to be doing and how you want it to be done. That's why I recommend sitting down with yourself and outlining what you want to be, what you want to do and how you want to do it. Push yourself to do that thing better, because it deserves to be better.

And if in six months you no longer want to be doing that thing, then change it. Allow yourself to change. Your creativity and ideas SHOULD constantly be evolving, so don't feel bad if all of a sudden you don't like something you did a couple months ago. It would be a failure to look at something you did forever ago and think that THAT is still your best work.

It's always time to change. It's just a matter of the doing.

Thanks for reading.

 

The World In Which We Create - Prelude

Back in October 2012 I got a job. A real job. The kind with a commute and 30 minute lunches and responsibilities that had nothing to do with me other than that I had to make sure they were done.

I pulled back from blogging, Facebook, Twitter and emails more so out of necessity than anything. I still wanted to get my own work done at home when I wasn't at work.

The biggest difference for me is that my financial dependency no longer rains all over my personal work, but is cleanly kept in a perfectly squared little box at my job. Also, that my time management has changed drastically.

I had some astounding (and some less momentous, but still important) thoughts and realizations that I want to talk about. Because I think it's important. And I think it will help other people with their Creativity Issues (you know what I mean). And it will help me.

I'm calling this series of blog posts The World In Which We Create because the world in which we create incorporates the convoluted and foggy plain of our minds, the tangible and confusing world around us as well as the infinitely informative and destructively distracting World Wide Web. Etc, etc, etc.

Reading this series probably won't make you more creative, but hopefully it will help you make fewer excuses to avoid your creativity. Your Creativity That You Have That Is Yours.

I'm going to end the prelude on this note: you're allowed to change. You're allowed to begin again. And again. And again. The other day I said on Twitter: you have to keep finding the fire. It will ignite and disappear just as quickly. Don't sit in the dark, go to where the fire is.

So we'll see where this takes us.

Thanks for tagging along.

Week 6 Round-Up

I'm waiting on some orders to come in so I have some half-finished pieces that I didn't post about, like a Trilobite locket (I KNOW! I want one too), and a giant sunburst locket headpiece, and a cloud pin, etc. But here is what I DID accomplish.

1. Matryoshka Dolls
2. Big Red Balls
3. Horse Bridle Inspired Headpiece 
4. Rain Cloud Pin