Flagrant Foundering

I was walking Scout, and listening to a Craftypod podcast, an interview with the Burdastyle women. It was a lovely interview and I was enjoying it quite a bit. And then I experienced a weird deja vu. Not the usual deja vu that's not weird, no. A weird one.

The women of Burdastyle were talking about their site and their training. About how accessible their non-copyrighted patterns are and how malleable the patterns are to each sewer's creative whimsy. I'm not a sewer. But as I was listening to those women talking about the creative process and the joy of individual vision, I felt myself becoming uncomfortable in a familiar sort of way.

(Not in a bizarre Criminal Minds type of way, where I turn around and the latest serial killer throws a plastic bag over my head. sheesh. I mean, I can do that all by myself. And have.)

No, I found myself, yet again, feeling afraid of my own creativity. Deja vu!

You see, last night, I pretty much wrapped up the matchbox advent calendar project. A fairly fixed, step-by-step project that has rules, and is done when it's done. Here are the results.

(Tablecloth not included.)

Each drawer is filled with sayings and/or treats and/or trinkets. It was fun to do.

But that doesn't mean I'm done! Oh, no. I have a ton of stuff to work on, and I'm glad about that. Most of the projects have firm parameters. But, now that I've finished a fairly involved project, I'm embarking on a scary thing. Because in order to begin work on the next projects, I have some foundation work to do. And that involves having a vision, and then making it work. (Tim Gunn for: 'don't cop out'). Which, in the case of these projects, begins with making backgrounds.

Here, by the way, is the work table as it will look in some way or another for the next three days, at least:

So, in the course of thinking about these backgrounds, I had decided to start listening to the podcast, because I was hoping it would give me the inspiration I felt I needed. By 'inspiration', I mean, 'courage'. Because, for some strange reason, regardless of the years of striving to create art in one form or another, I can't seem to face a blank page or a blank project or a non-regimented task, without a deep sense of dread and the desire to run to a store and buy a lot of crap I don't even need, just to avoid the fear.

My latest purchase:

'Nuff said.

Those of you who've had to listen to me prat on (British for: 'to blather ad nauseum (Latin for: 'to invoke vomitousness) about stuff no one else is interested in') about the trauma attendant in writing the novel, know that the unfettered creative project makes me plotz (Harriet M. Welsch for: 'wretch').

So, feeling a quietly rising but undeniable sense of panic, I realized my mind was beginning to look for any alternative to returning home and facing the stencil, the brush, the paint, the canvas, the watercolor paper, the spray paint can, or even the weird mass of cobweb accumulating under the settee out on the patio, threatening to affix it firmly to the concrete.

To make a short story long, I walked Scout round and round the park, pondering all this, and I really felt that the best thing to do would be to chronicle it here, send it out into the universe (meaning: to my one reader, you faithful thing, you), and consider my fears appropriately expunged so that I can go right ahead and throw stuff onto surfaces and make mistakes. But they will be uniquely MY mistakes. Which, as the two of us know, can have a brilliance all their own.

Next up: Chris points the spray can in the wrong direction.