Tag Archives: varying degrees of progress

Mar3

Apparently I lied

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Yeah, remember when I said I’d be posting again soon? Two months ago? Um.

I also may have said I was high class, but that was just a lie.

I’ve been in a bit of a funk that I keep thinking is going to waft away like the smell when you drive past the water treatment plant, and it hasn’t quite gone away. Maybe I need to be detailed.

I’m especially disgusted with myself this weekend, since I really need to get started on an art project that has an actual deadline. I got juried into the Habitat for Humanity ReStore art show, and I’m planning to work on a piece that I’ve had in my head for at least a year. (Oh by the way, this blog marked its 1-year anniversary last month. Apparently without me.) Some procrastination was actually helpful, as I’d been about to start with the basic piece my collage/assemblage will be made from, and thought I was going to have to use a plan B piece. But a friend turned up with what I wanted all along, which is a window of the size that falls within the guidelines of the show. So yay. But it’s way past time I got started, and there will be some weekends I can’t work on it, so I’ve just painted myself into a corner where I’ll have to be working on it before and/or after work.

And dammit, I don’t know where my box of ephemera has gotten to. How very ephemeral.

And as a side effect of getting Plan A materials, I thought of something really cool to do with the plan B piece, a pallet.

So that’s where I am at the moment. I will keep track of the progress of this piece and eventually show it here. I’ve got a month, so it won’t be terribly long.

Oh! Yeah! I got into the show using photos I snagged from this very blog. Wooooo!

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Jan2

Happy new year—and more dangerous crafts to come!

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Nope, not dead yet.

I have been organizing my kitchen, a heroic endeavor, which is not only taking place at the expense of my crafting, but the entire rest of my house. Sigh. Organizing really does suck the creative life out of me. Or maybe it is a creative pursuit, but a whole different type. I’ve had to do a lot of thinking about where things should go in a way that makes sense with what kitchen things I need where. It’s incredibly slow, and has involved spending a lot of time with my kitchen looking absolutely horrible while everything was pulled out. So that’s why the radio silence.

However, I have a project in mind that dovetails with making a nice little room for a new cat I’m hoping to adopt. We’re having a trial weekend coming up this weekend (if the weather stays good), so I need to be ready to keep him separate from my cat. So I’ll need to keep them from spotting one another through the French doors that lead to the room. I have what I hope is a clever idea, so stay tuned….

And soon I hope to get back to my stash of craft goodies and make something awesome. I have some new materials and some ideas (including something that goes with that kitchen reorganization), I just need to get the time (or to have some energy when I have the time, which has been an issue).

So, in short, I’m behind but I’m not through by any means.

Nov1

::waves hello::

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I’m posting from the thick of GISHWHES, plotting, reporting, emailing people, sourcing, etc. etc. etc. This weekend many creative things will be made, but I may not be able to post them immediately.

Just letting y’all know I’m still here but barely have a moment to catch my breath.

Oct10

Hitting the fan

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Believe it or not, I am not projectless, just fairly wordless. Spent one weekend away, then every night and half of last weekend madly writing a story that turned out to be an epic. I opened windows several times to post, then just stared at blank screen.

The weekend away was at a gathering of fans in a nearby city. If you think ComicCon or DragonCon, you are WAY off-base. There were fewer than 20 of us, but we had a fantastic time. And luckily one of the activities was the making of a bracelet themed around the CW show “Supernatural.” Profound exhaustion precludes me from getting off my ass to photograph the bracelet, but I’ll do so within the next couple of days.

At any rate, this weekend I encountered a cool multi-fandom craft challenge to make something related to the object of one’s fannish obsession. Anyone reading this who wishes to check it out (either to sign up or to bookmark to check out the resulting crafts) can go here: http://imadeathing.dreamwidth.org/332.html
There are prompts you can choose, but it’s pretty loosey-goosey and you can just use it as general inspiration with a deadline if that’s what it takes to get you moving.

And speaking of fandom and craftiness, GISHWHES is returning this year to haunt us again. Actor Misha Collins and cronies create a list of bizarre things to make, do, document, and send his fans forth to accomplish them. I suspect my craft rate will go way up, but I probably won’t be able to show off what I’ve done until the competition is over.

Sep28

Antici…pation

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Because of commitments, I won’t be able to post the final results of the chest of drawers project for a few more days. While I’m otherwise occupied I’m leaving it in the garage for a little more drying time. When I was finishing the last drawer-front, though, I was thinking, “This is going to look fantastic,” which I had not at all been thinking at any point during the pink version.

Sep23

Not-quite project post

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Is there anything more tragic than realizing 80% of the way through a DIY project that you really want it to go in a completely different direction?

Absolutely correct! The answer is “about a million things.”

But it is a large pain in the ass.

I bought this 3-drawer chest for $15 at St. Vinny’s, planning to use it for a night stand. It’s old and beat up, but real wood and the whole deal.

It’s going to be AWESOME!!

My bedspread is burgundy and I’ve got some burgundy accents around, so I decided after obsessing over various ideas at Pinterest that I would do the ombre paint thing that looks so cool here (http://poppytalk.blogspot.com/2012/06/love-is-like-apricot.html), starting with burgundy. I further decided that, instead of buying 4 different shades of paint, I would get a quart of white and blend the tints myself so I’d know they would work together.

Tints of burgundy are pink, yo. I am not so much a pink girl anymore.

And I realized early on that my medium pink was coming out a putrid shade that reminded me of my grandmother’s habit of getting humongous rocks when she and my grandfather would travel in the southwest, then bringing them home and painting them an obnoxious pink, then in gold paint label them with where she’d found them. Urgh.

But I couldn’t think of what else to do or what other color would go with the room, so I kept going. Yesterday I painted the drawers, and today I started on the frame early enough that I could get the second coat of everything in today, but halfway through the frame it occurred to me that I really really wanted to do a black and gray ombre thing. Which made me very sad.

But the idea of starting the whole project over with several coats of paint made me even sadder, because I am profoundly lazy and this project is already stretching the boundaries of my tolerance for painting stuff. So I kept going.

Painting, however, is a very meditative activity — thus the big epiphany about what I wished I were doing instead, and several smaller epiphanies like I suck at wielding a paintbrush and always have visible brushstrokes. I played with various ideas on what to do to improve the chest, like decoupage Victorian crap on it (gag! Plus I am creeped out by a great many bits of Victorian ephemera), or seashells (blah).

See what I mean about, well, everything?

When I was almost at the end of the second coat on the drawers, it occurred to me that I could repaint the fronts of the drawers and the whole frame in the ombre thing, but leave the sides and interiors as they are, for what the magazines call (far too damn often) a pop of color.

The knowledge that I can fix this with little effort, and not have Mexico-rock pink in a visible spot in my bedroom, has cheered me up substantially. So I’m done for the day. I may even get spray paint to finish the job, because boy does my brushwork suck.

Even my helper Harriet got paint in her hair.

Aug11

Those days when your eyeballs hurt

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Somehow my full day of housecleaning evolved into me goofing off all day and getting a sunburn and a migraine and then goofing off some more. Which is unfortunate, since I invited a friend over for tomorrow, and she’s never seen my place.

It started out innocently enough. I had a couple of things to take to the flea market stall I rent, and when I got there I realized that ermagerd! the outdoor flea market is this weekend. And of course I had to make the rounds, where I did score some epic crafting type stuff. Oldish yardsticks with advertising for $2, $3 and $4. Shutters for $5 each. A couple of pairs of jeans for $1 each, which I got mostly to be nice after I picked some stuff out of the same people’s free bin. (Including some awesome, though completely broken down, cowboy boots, which I plan to alter like mad.) Oh, and a wheelie bin that’s probably meant for gardening but will be good for schlepping things down to the basement via the hill outside and not the stairs. Also chatted with some people and enjoyed that thoroughly. Though it was a beautiful day and not too hot, I got a little fried, and after I came home and put stuff in the garage, I sat down to catch up with a friend on the phone and cool down, and by the time we’d talked for 1 1/2 hours, I was reeling a bit from not having had lunch. By the time I finished eating, a migraine had set in already, and so I napped a while, and then have mostly lounged and eaten ice cream.

I am partway through a craft that’s a bit of a quick one, and maybe it’ll be postable tomorrow at some point when I’m not madly grabbing up things and hiding them somewhere, or hanging out with my friend.

Aug7
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Well, besides the time-suck thing.

The trouble is when you find a project you really want to do, then when you click the link you get a warning about how Pinterest is not gonna let you go there because the site has malware, and every other source gets blocked because it has content from a site with malware, and all you’ve got is a series of tiny photographs that someone has made into one big pin. I’m trying to go on with just such a project, because I’ve done plenty of felt creations before, but there are two pictures in the strip that I just can’t quite figure out what’s going on.

SIGH.

And I’ve been very low on energy the last couple of evenings, so I’ve cut out my project, but I haven’t gotten further than that. Please be patient, and I’ll try to get this done and posted soon.

For now, I’m going to grab my Kindle and head for bed.

The trouble with Pinterest…

Jun3

I am in a funk and I cannot find my Velcro[TM]

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Tis totally beyond me why I should have a massive case of the blues today, but I do. Perhaps because I pinned a bunch of hopes on having lots of things done this weekend, and next to none of them were done (note the impressive use of passive tense in that last phrase). I need a day or two where I can get a massive running start on doing things I don’t necessarily want to do. If there’s somewhere I need to be in the middle of the day, it pretty much ensures I won’t get anything done before, and I’m not so likely to do so after, either. (Note lack of agency implied by phrasing here, too.)

Yesterday I did some volunteering that completely sucked dry any social energy I had. I’ve long thought of myself as shy, but as I’ve gotten older I think it’s more that I have a finite amount of social energy. In small groups or one-on-one, I can go for quite some time, but big parties where I don’t know many people deplete that energy faster, and going from one thing to another can mean I don’t get the recharge I need. So last weekend I was at Wiscon, where I did tons of socializing (though not as much as in previous years, as the art show prep kinda wore me out), and then I slammed right into the work week, then Saturday I made phone calls for a get-out-the-vote drive. This is completely outside my comfort zone. Three hours of that was enough to send me home to bed at 4 pm instead of to the party I’d been planning to hit. I told the campaign volunteers it wasn’t in my comfort zone, and they were awesome to coddle me and ply me with sweets and say I was doing great. Still, I think I’d rather have a root canal.

It’s interesting, considering Friday I did another volunteering gig, my Meals on Wheels run for the season (we have enough volunteers I don’t get to do more than 1 or 2 runs per season). I was having a morning that, to say the least, lacked in awesomeness, but I was looking forward to the meal deliveries. There you’re knocking on doors, but people are so glad to see you and the smiles you get are so genuine. It makes me happy that I am contributing to older people being able to live on their own, and to know someone checks on them every day (or nearly so). I don’t know if it gave me energy, but it gave me a mood lift, which I needed.

This doesn’t have much to do with creativity, except why I’m just thinking about getting started on something crafty. And I have no idea where my Velcro[TM] is. There was going to be a massive amount of clearing off spaces and organizing and decluttering, but I’ve been spending time with my funk and my laptop most of the day. I did go to a graduation party for an hour or so this morning, and did see the friends who tend to energize me, but I came back to sporadic fits of dishwasher loading, bill paying and piddling away the afternoon online.

I do have a project that’s a hair away from being finished, so I’ll get to it as soon as the cat gets off my arms. Just needed to talk about this energy stuff.