P365 - Day 249 - special activities

Juniordwarf loves talking about how they do ‘special activities’ at school, so somehow anything that is remotely crafty that we do at home has become a ‘special activity’

Today the Salvation Army was holding a ‘crazy crafts’ session through the Communities for Children program. That sounded like a whole morning’s worth of ‘special activities’, and when I asked Juniordwarf if he wanted to go he was very keen.

He had a fun morning. He made a sheep, did some footprints, painted a picture for me, did some tile painting and helped out with story time.

I’d also promised him a special activity to do at home today as well.

On Saturday when we went to his swimming lesson he wore his goggles all the way there, and was amazed at how they turned everything blue. I thought it would be fun for him to make a mask with coloured cellophane over the eye holes so he could see how the different colours changed his view of the world.

He was very excited to be making a mask and, based on something he’d seen on one of his DVDs, has decided that the purpose of a mask is to scare people! So he said he’d make a mask to ‘scare Dad’.

He coloured it in and decided he wanted blue and red ‘lenses’, so he ended up with purple.

(Attempted purple tint on photo to simulate
what he's seeing!)

As soon as we’d finished it he raced into the bedroom to scare Dad with a huge roar. Dad was suitably terrified, as was I when he came back to scare me.

He then proceeded to wear the mask for the rest of the day. At bed time he put it on his bed head, presumably so that he can put it on as soon as he wakes up in the morning – and come into our room to scare us.

P365 - Day 240 - some of what we did today

This morning I looked into Juniordwarf's room and this is what I saw:

He said he was lining up all the numbers. He'd obviously run out of room at the bed and had to continue the sequence under his bed. He was taking one number or one picture under his bed at a time, then emerging (backwards) to get the next one.

Today was a pretty quiet Sunday, so I decided to post a few pictures of what we did.

Inspired by an Instagram friend, we did chalk shadow drawings.

Slabs created his own artwork.

Juniordwarf and I went on a two hour walk and explored the (disused) local railway line along the way.

I wasn't sure if we should go, as the sky looked like this:

We looked at the daffodils when we got home.

And after all that collapsed on the couch.

P365 - Day 199 - a flower for mum

A couple of weeks ago I was having a moan on Twitter that I couldn’t think of anything to take photos of for this project and one of my Twitter friends suggested that I check out the Hipstamatic app. She’d been posting some really lovely photos, which were very inspiring, so I decided to devote this week to learning all about how it works.

Hipstamatic is different to the other apps that I’ve been using, as you select a film and a lens before you take the photo, then the app processes the picture with those settings, instead of you applying filters and effects after you’ve taken the normal photo.

It looks like a cool retro camera, with a little viewfinder. Cute hey!

Once you have the app, you can buy extra lenses, films and camera cases, and occasionally they release some promotional freebies.

For my first attempt at using this app I went for a walk down by the docks at lunchtime to see what I could come up with. I got some lovely photos and some really crappy ones too – mainly because it was quite glary and difficult to see what I was actually shooting on my phone. But the good ones were well worth the time I spent down there, even if I felt slightly ridiculous walking round taking photos. (Why is it that I feel so self conscious taking photos around my local haunts, but if I was a tourist I wouldn’t give it a second thought? It’s not like anyone cares!)

I was going to put some of the photos on here, but then when I got home, Juniordwarf presented me with a flower that he’d made at daycare today, and I knew that had to be the subject of today’s photo.

He chose pink because he knows it’s my favourite colour, and when I asked him where I should put it, he said it was for my study.

Slabs said Juniordwarf was so proud of his flower and it was the first thing he showed him when Slabs went to pick him up from daycare. It deserves pride of place in ‘my’ study.

Juniordwarf also drew me a picture. I asked him what it was a picture of, and he said ‘coloured squiggles’.

Of course it is. 

P365 - Day 126 i love mum (6/5/2011)

Earlier in the week, Juniordwarf told me he’d made a flower at school. I said that sounded lovely, and asked if he was going to bring it home so I could see it. He said no.

I didn’t give it much more thought, and then today when I picked him up from school, all the kids were being given something wrapped up in green tissue paper before they came outside, so it was taking ages for them to leave the classroom. I saw what the child of the mother sitting next to me gave his mum.

It was the flowers that they’d made. Three flowers in a little bouquet.

The first had a picture of the child in the middle.

The second had a heart.

The third had the word ‘Mum’.

Put them together and you get ‘I love Mum’.

It was so sweet it brought a little tear to my eye and I couldn't wait for Juniordwarf to come out so I could see what his flowers looked like. 

They were beautiful. 

My first hand-made Mother’s Day gift.

The flowers are laminated and have magnets on the back too, so I can stick them to my fridge or the magnetic whiteboard in my ‘studio’ and be inspired by them.

P365 - Day 91 books

Today at lunch time I didn't have anything I needed to do, so I headed out to the Hobart Bookshop to browse for a few minutes.

I love bookshops, even though I rarely buy books these days because (1) I already have several overflowing bookshelves and (2) I don't have as much disposable income as I used to.

There are many sections that I love in bookshops: photography, fantasy, cooking, self help, craft, picture books for kids, spirituality, sport and music. I look at other sections, but I think these are the ones I gravitate to most often. But on top of these, my two absolute favourite sections are the gardening section and the section that has kids' arts, crafts and activities.

I love the kids' creative books, because they don't take themselves too seriously and the emphasis is on having fun and on the process of creating. I think I could learn a lot more from them than I can from some of the creativity books for grown ups.

P365 - Day 88 thinking offline

Way back in January, I was looking for the perfect notebook to use as a journal/planner for this year. I’d seen a couple of things I liked, but that weren’t quite right, so I put a call out on twitter to see if anyone had any suggestions.

The lovely Amy pointed me in the direction of Notemaker which has a divine range of notebooks, journals, pens, pencils and much much more. 

If you like that sort of thing go and have a look. I’ll wait . . .

. . . 

Well, as I wrote back then, after spending several hours admiring all the beautiful books online, I ended up using the cute stripy notebook that Lil Sis and Mr Tall got me for my birthday as my new notebook.

Fast forward a couple of months and I found out about Notemaker’s ‘Think Offline’ competition.

The idea is quite simple – turn off the computer, get out a pen and some paper and ‘scratch scribble, doodle, draw . . . a letter, a word, a picture’. Show them how you ‘think offline’.

So an entry could be anything from a word on a scrap of paper to a full blown drawing.

You might be aware that I find it incredibly difficult to ‘create’ something, and making a mark on a lovely piece of paper, or the first page of a new book is something that I’m very reluctant to do in case I make a mistake (more on this little issue coming up). But the fact that all this competition required was a letter or a word on a scrap of paper was not intimidating at all. It was something even I could do!

In the end I came up with a concept a bit grander than a single letter or a word, sketched the initial design in pencil (can’t go stuffing it up now, can I?) and then went to town with my beautiful brown pen. 

The third version is the one I was happy with, so this is my entry that I finished off this morning and mailed (you have to snail mail your entries – in the spirit of being offline) this afternoon.

My idea was pretty simple: a single letter, filled with symbols that start with that letter and then surrounded by words that start with that letter.

I quite like it.

And yes, I quite appreciate the irony of posting my offline project online ;)

P365 - Day 83 feeling kinda arty* (aka 'on art & writing' part 2) 24/03/2011

Part 1.

Writing is a major part of my work, and has been in pretty much all of the positions that I’ve held during public service jobs in various departments, both federal and state government.

But it’s not the type of writing I enjoyed as a child, so even though I get job satisfaction from finishing a report or discussion paper, writing for work doesn’t fulfil my desire to create.

I often joke that [ahem, cough] years in the public service has completely stifled my creativity and my ability to write anything other than bureaucratese. It also seems to have changed me from someone who prefers spontaneity to someone who kind of prefers routine. (If you are a Myers-Briggs aficionado, what I mean is I’ve moved along the Perception-Judgment spectrum from a strong P preference to a much weaker P preference, or even a weak J preference.) Although maybe that’s just something that would have happened anyway as I got older and gained more responsibility. It’s more fun to blame work though. People blame the government for everything else, so why not that?

So in a roundabout way, I am making my living from writing, just as I imagined I’d do when I was a child. An open plan office in a CBD office block is not the environment I’d imagined and certainly not the environment I prefer.

(Speaking of the environment I’d prefer, there is a tiny town in country NSW called Majors Creek.  When we lived in NSW, we used to love calling in to the pub any time we were in the area.

Every time we went there I imagined that it would be the perfect place to set up a creative writing hideaway. I imagined a small cottage, with polished wooden floors, floor to ceiling bookshelves to house my library, a window seat with a lift-up lid for reading in the sun (inside the window seat would be the entrance to a secret passageway, a la the Famous Five), a big cosy chair to curl up in when it got cold, a big old desk, a rather impressive computer with a mega screen so I could edit my photos. 

Outside would be the garden of my dreams (where oxalis never grows and snails are atomised as soon as they hit the border of my property), with a random interplanting of vegetables and flowers and a magnificent herb garden.)

But I digress . . .

Sitting in an open plan office at a grey formica desk up against a garish red partition that clashes stunningly with the orange speckled carpet, snippets of overheard conversations and phone calls . . . it’s definitely not my preferred environment.

I once heard someone say ‘a grey formica desk inspires grey formica ideas’. That quote always comes into my mind whenever I’m confronted with a grey formica desk (which, let’s face it, when you work for the government is pretty often).

So where does that leave me?

On the one hand I could say that I’m stuck in an uninspiring environment doing uninspiring work, wishing I was in my little dream cottage.

The problem with that is that I need a day job. The ‘starving artist’ stereotype might seem romantic and initially quite attractive, but if I really think about it, I quite like my lifestyle and there’s not much I’m really prepared to give up to pursue a vague dream of working (doing I know not what) in my little cottage.

(And to be fair to work, I have done some interesting things, been involved in some great projects and am always appreciative of them letting me design my own work hours to suit my family responsibilities. A lot of people don’t get to do that, so this is not a complaint about my work.)

But sleepydwarf, I hear you say, surely you have spare time? You don’t work 24/7. You seem to have enough time to write your blog. You take photos, you scrapbook. If you wanted to write or draw or something like that without giving up your day job, what’s stopping you?

If you really wanted to do this, you’d find a way. So why don’t you stop moaning about how much you wish you could do this stuff and go out and do it? Seriously! Get over yourself!

Um, yes. And you, my glorious inner voice, have just reminded me of yet another quote I picked up from somewhere – maybe a movie – where one character laments that he can’t play the piano (or whatever it was that the other character did brilliantly), and says to the character who can, ‘I wish I could do that’. To which the artist replies, ‘no you don’t. If you wanted to do it, you’d be doing it.’

Simple words, but so powerful. ‘If you really wanted to, you would.’

So does the fact that I don’t draw mean I don’t want to draw? Because I don’t sit down and write a story, does this mean I don’t really want to write? Is kidding myself that I have a creative block just another way of saying I really don’t want to do this?

Possibly.

I look at sketches that other people do, or paintings, or even doodles or beautiful handwriting, and I wish I could be as artistic as them.

‘I wish I could draw’. I don’t know how many times I’ve said that. Yet I never pick up a pen or a pencil.

So the other way of interpreting that quote is if I really want to draw (or write), I should just do it. Here and now. Who cares what it looks like? The very act of making marks on a piece of paper is drawing (or writing, if that’s what I want to do). Sure, I might not like the result. It might be terrible. In fact, I’m pretty sure it will be. But I don’t have to show it to anyone. It might be full of ‘mistakes’, but that’s how you learn – by doing it, making mistakes and learning from them.

But then if I don’t want to draw (or write) – if I’m only saying I want to because I think I should want to, or I wanted to a long time ago but I don’t any more - then I need to give myself permission to let go of the idea that I want to draw (or write, or both). If I don’t want to, I don’t want to - simple. And then I can stop wanting to.**

(You may need to read that paragraph again. I know I did.)

So with that in mind, I've been wondering which way I'll go.

Well today I did draw something. (No I'm not going to put it on here.)

I was at my mother's place and she has a rather large collection of pencils that belonged to my father, who, we have already established, did have some pretty good artistic skills. She also has - and I never knew this until today - an old wooden drawing board that belonged to her mother. She dates it at 1915 or thereabouts. When Juniordwarf wants to draw at my mum's place he uses the drawing board.

It's a thing of great beauty and history with pen marks and ink stains as testament to my grandmother's work.

So I couldn't help but line up a few old pencils on the board and take a photo, to remind me that there is talent in my family, and that yes, maybe I can do this.

* with apologies to Dave Graney.

** Gretchen Rubin came to a similar conclusion in The Happiness Project. Somewhere.

P365 - Day 66 pushing papers (AKA 'on art and writing part I')

When we were kids, Lil Sis was recognised as the artist and I was the writer.

I don’t know if this was a deliberate thing on the part of our parents, or if it just turned out that way. It seemed like her artworks were always on display in our house and any ungainly attempt on my part to produce a drawing or painting was rather quickly dismissed. (Or at least, that's how I remember it . . .)

Now the funny thing here is, I was going to quote a couple of my Grade 7 reports from art class to demonstrate my lack of skill in this area. However, having just referred back to them after many many years of them sitting in a shoe box, I was extremely surprised – nay stunned – by comments like this:

‘work displays an obvious artistic talent’

‘work is sensitive, mature and finely detailed’

‘a talented student who has an instinctive sense of proportion and perspective’

‘has the ability to retain a clear visual image and is able to draw from memory’

This is quite the opposite of what I expected these reports to say, and I certainly can’t remember producing any work that demonstrated any of this so-called talent.

I was expecting words similar to my Phys Ed reports, which said things like ‘works to the best of her ability’ (this one came up more than once), ‘continues to apply herself well’, ‘gives her best performance’ and so on. Reading between the lines (as if you had to!), all of these comments are nicely summed up by this one, which appeared one year: ‘skills are still quite limited’.

Possibly the only subject I was less competent in was typing.

Anyway, Mrs Art Teacher’s comments obviously didn’t mean a lot to me at the time. They certainly didn’t sink in or I’d have remembered them, and I was convinced that art and me were not a good mix. I was a writer after all, not an artist, and as a result, I never studied Art at school after the compulsory Grade 7 class.

Meanwhile my writing was encouraged, to the extent that my mother organised for me to spend my Grade 8 summer holidays with our local paper, because I said I wanted to be a journalist.

I don’t remember a lot about that summer, only that there was a lot of time spend hanging around the office, and that I was really excited to get my first (and to date only) by-line at the age of 14.

One week they were looking for space fillers, so I wrote an anonymous letter to the editor that I knew would stir my mother up. It was published and she was so annoyed that she wrote right back not knowing, until after her letter had been published the next week, that I’d written the original diatribe. Everyone at the paper got a giggle out of that one.

Anyway I grew up knowing that my father could draw, my grandmother (on my mother’s side) could draw and my sister could draw, but that I couldn’t.

Instead, I wrote, but as I went through high school and university even my creative writing petered out, in favour of essays about books we’d read in English class, reports on the history of computers through the ages, the life of Katharine Hepburn, assignments on the meaning of life, morals and Nietzsche’s theories . . . and the list goes on.

I didn’t end up as a journalist, or even a sports scientist, which became my obsession in Grade 12. Instead I joined the public service, thereby fulfilling my mother’s prophesy in response to my claim in Grade 10 that I really wanted to be a mechanic. She said I’d be much more likely to end up as a bureaucrat pushing papers on a desk somewhere.

Oh how right she was!

So here are some of those papers.