Plucky Daily Creative

DAY FIFTY EIGHT If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. We've all heard the old adage.  I'm not sure how much I believe in it. Of course giving up at the very first hurdle is probably a bit daft; no one should expect to get a new activity perfectly right first time out. But let's say you've tried and failed at something fifteen times, or fifty. It would then seem reasonable to throw the towel in and find something better suited to your talents and interests.  Which brings us to my history with knitting.  It is a case of always succeeding in the end but by gum it can be a tortuous path getting there.  The picture is of the start of my latest endeavour, a sort of tam-o-shanter cum beret, from a pattern I actually bought from a newish designer. It doesn't look like much now I'm just on the ribbing for the brim, but it will end up with twelve segments coming together to form the crown. Now so far there have been five attempts at casting on. It's an u...

DAY FIFTY SEVEN  Why do we own the things we do?   I woke to automated emails from my library saying that a number of the seventeen books I have on loan are about to become overdue. Handily, unlike in years past it only takes a few groggy presses on my phone and they are renewed. This is a double-edged boon. Without physically going to the library how will I pick up another seventeen books which I am almost certain not to read. This has been a life-long habit with me. Of course some of the many thousands of books I must have borrowed will have been read, but many many more will not have been. Same goes for the books I have bought and which now ornament my shelves. The big question is this: Why do I need a constantly replenished supply of borrowed books not to read when I have my own collection of books not to read?  There is, inevitably, a Japanese word for the buying of books one doesn't read: Tsundoku. It originated in a satirical sense so I understand but is now used ...

DAY FIFTY SIX Do you prefer to open the door and let people make their own mind up about entering, or do you grab them by the hand take them through and show them around each piece of furntiture?   Not sure one should ever start a post with a metaphor, especially one for which the inferences haven't been properly thought through yet. But I shall live dangerously.    I've been lurking around a small corner of social media of late, one occupied mainly by creative types working in a wide range of media. Ninety percent of the postings are people showing pictures of their work, or simply pictures which are their work. I've noticed that some - I would say a majority - like to give chapter and verse about their making: size, materials, what it's about, when it was made, why it was made, struggles they had with it, lessons learned from it, what they would do differently next time, and so forth. Is it wrong of me to say I really don't care to know all that and prefer to jus...

DAY FIFTY FIVE It's Christmas Day,   So many opportunities to be creative for Christmas.    There's the presents which I'm always intending to make but somehow never get around to; the decorations which I mean to put up but somehow always ends up as the minimalist piece of holly on the front door; there are the exotic stuffings and trimmings to go with the turkey which somehow always end up as my favourite old stand-bys plus bread sauce.  That's the true spirit of Christmas as far as I'm concerned, so I very belated season's greetings to you.   Onwards...merrily.

DAY FIFTY FOUR Do your creative and making efforts have to be wholly original?   In asking this I'm not talking about working from patterns or plans - though for some reason I've always had a problem with people who work from woodworking plans - I'm talking about working from kits, or any other medium where the job has already been started for you. One of my most cherished mementos is a painting of a labrador made by my youngest son when he was about eight years old from a paint by numbers kit. He was very into them at the time. I also have a collection of Airfix models my children made. I can remember my nieces making embroidered samplers from kits. There are 'starter kits' of various kinds in my local hobbyist shop, many of them seemingly involving balsa wood. My mother loves doing jigsaws, which is a form of kit, I suppose.  I had a cousin who was a model train enthusiast and built whole towns with stations and sidings and heaven knows what else, all of it from k...

DAY FIFTY THREE "Infamy! Infamy! They've all got it in for me!"    This is a line from the film Carry On Cleo, and according to some sources was voted the best one line joke in film history. By people who hadn't seen many films presumably.    It's not so much infamy that's been on my mind today, but rather fame, or more precisely, the desire for such, which for our purposes here I will conflate with vanity.  You'll need to be patient for a moment or two while I give some background; I have to tread a little carefully because I am speaking about a family member.    This person produced a small book some years ago, of which more below, and while they would not for one second consider themselves vain, and indeed do not fit what I imagine is many people's mental image of a vain person, is nonetheless one of the vainest people I know.  Unwittingly so. For this person to be knowingly vain they would need to have significantly more self-awareness than th...

DAY FIFTY TWO "I wear my heart on my sleeve, I'm not afraid/To say what I mean, mean what I say/ Set myself up, let myself down/I may be a fool to spread it around..."   Some of you may be inexplicably unaware of Gallagher and Lyle's 1976 paen to self-flagellating honesty in matters of the heart and conscience, but you have just read the first verse.  I woke up with the song on my mind for no reason I could name, and it's been burrowing away in the best earworm tradition all day. Might as well try to make use of it here in the hope that I can somehow exorcise the demon. In all seriousness wearing one's heart on one's sleeve does have a fairly sincere connecton with creativity, making, and so forth. Even if your making activities are purely for your own interest and pleasure you will be putting something of yourself into them, you will be making some sort of artefact which will evidence something about you and which should it be shared publicly, by accident...

DAY FIFTY ONE Indecision. Not sure if I should write about this or not.    It will be a quickie today as I am travelling.  I've written before about how it can take me a lifetime to get started on a project. Sometimes I would describe the situation as procrastination, but yesterday I experienced a different form of the problem, indecision, or perhaps it was trying to 'improve' on a perfectly good idea: I had a thing planned, I needed some bits to do the thing, on the way to buy the bits I thought of another way to do it not involving the bits, I didn't buy the bits, on the way home started to have second thoughts about the new improved version, and now today I'm stuck between two ideas and will probably go back to the shop to buy the bits, just in case I change my mind. Chances are that having bought the bits I will either go back to the improved version or end up doing neither, out of pocket for the bits. I hope this does not sound in any way familiar to you. Onwar...

DAY FIFTY Do you fly solo or with others?    I have always thought of crafts, making and creativity as largely a solo thing, activities pursued by indviduals. That is the popular image I would say, whether it's the tortured genius, the artist starving in a garrett, or the contemplative master it is always an individual. Going one step further, even when an artist in question is a member of a group, it tends to be a group which they are rebelling against, trying to step away from, transcending its boundaries and restrictions.    Perhaps I'm being overly influenced by literary and cinematic traditions which, after all, are in the business of storytelling with one of the most popular story archetypes being that of the singular hero/heroine facing hostility, setbacks and overcoming challenges. This is rather at odds with the reality and the history. A book I'm reading at the moment vividly describes the situation of the very first 'artists', we're talking people who...

DAY FORTY NINE "Love me with your head and heart", as John Martyn once said. Had the relevant science been more advanced at the time he might have said 'love me with your head, heart, intestines, or any one of the other fifty (I think that's the number, from memory) putative types of intelligence which govern our minds and bodies'. See what I did there? Immediately reduced the matter back to a question of minds and bodies when in fact it is so much more involved than that.   Is making and creativity a matter of head or heart for you. The answer for me and I suspect many people is sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both, sometimes neither so far as a name can be given to it.   This head and heart business is the basic dualism which has held sway over much of western thinking for milennia. Or at least since Francis Bacon had something to say about it, and definitely since Descartes stuck his oar in. Indeed it is sometimes called Cartesian dualism, which I...

DAY FORTY EIGHT Colouring inside the lines.    Whatsapping with a youngster today, she proudly showed me her colouring book, and especially the page  where her teacher praised her for colouring inside the lines. I oohed and aahed appreciatively, as one always should.   Later on I started to wonder: what's so great about colouring inside the lines? The mundane answer is that it shows increasing mastery of hand-eye coordination and what in one of my old trades we called grapho-motor skills. Normal development, in other words. Why this should be deserving of such praise is a bit of a wonder, particularly as at some point the praise dries up; no one congratulates me on getting older and the concomitant normal stiffening of my joints.   Mundanity aside, I worry about the unspoken message being communicated in this situation. No doubt some would say the message concerns the necessity of taking care, or applying onself diligently to the task in hand, of taking pleasure...

DAY FORTY SEVEN A little update on the two current writing projects mentioned in the early days of this blog. I know you've been wondering. Well the short answer is that there has been very little progress since the early days of this blog. I don't think the two events are connected, the starting the blog and the stalling of my other projects, at least not directly. There may be an indirect connection, which I'll come to presently. The works in progress are first a novel, based around an event I witnessed some years ago in an art shop and which is at heart an examination of the nature of spontaneity and freedom in action which some people seem to have and others not so. Second there is is a memoire cum social history which I've been tinkering with off and on for about twenty years.  When I started the blog forty-seven days ago I was in the middle of quite a productive writing period, for me at least, when I'd managed to keep up a regular daily routine for a whole 10...

DAY FORTY SIX Doing what you love, loving what you do, making a difference, getting by. The dream of many people is to have all the time in the world to devote to their making, arts and craft acitivities. Such a thought may be accompanied with one or more 'If onlys...': If only I didn't have this job...; If only I'd studied harder...; If only I'd taken the risk when I was younger...; If only the kids were a little older...; If only my partner was a more supportive... . Fill in your own versions. The list is probably endless.  I have to say I wasn't personally prone so much to 'If only', the monkey on my back was 'I should', and in its even more pernicious version, 'I should be able to...'.    Regardless of reality, life and the other demands and contradictions it brought, I thought I should be able to do everything, and I felt a failure when I couldn't (i.e. nearly all the time). I cut myself no slack, at least as far as the voice in...

DAY FORTY FIVE Validation. Nice to have and worth taking when it comes. I don't think it's going out on a limb to say that it is a very rare individual indeed who doesn't welcome some form of validation, from time to time at least. Validation is one of those slippery words I think: Its meaning can too easily veer into the dangerous waters of approval, recognition, praise, and if a person is too enthusiastic in their search for it it can become attention seeking. But I see validation as somewhat more neutral.   My old school (and oldschool) dictionary defines validate as 'to confirm or corroborate'. That captures the matter nicely as that is exactly what I felt on seeing the two 'toots' as they are called on Mastodon, on the left.   Now, there is a thing called confirmation bias which as is now well known is a process whereby we tend to accept and magnify statements which confirm our already held views of the world while discounting those we disagree with. We...

DAY FORTY FOUR Do you have a favourite time of day for making or crafting? Does your brain feel more limber at some times rather than others?    Nowadays most of us are run by the clock and other commitments so we don't always have a choice of when we get to do the things we want to do; to choose when to work is something of a luxury. It's tempting to think that things were different in the past, back before the factories and railways and the standardisation of time, but maybe it really wasn't so much. Back then artists and crafters were very dependent on natural light and so were governed by the seasons and the turning of the sun. That or I suppose they laboured on myopically by candle and torchlight. I'm writing about time because I'm drafting this post outside of my usual rhythm. I normally do these in the afternoon but today it's an early morning job, for no particular reason than I am waiting for a tradesman to call and having tidied the kitchen and put the...

DAY FORTY THREE Is making or creating things a subversive activity?    Gandhi thought so, making spinning and weaving a central part of his political image, and a handy way to demonstrate his identification with the rural poor of India.   In a talk I once described my sister's insistence on making all her own christmas presents as an 'insurrection' in the face of the seasonal capitalist onslaught - it was intended as a lighthearted throwaway line - and was surprised to be approached afterwards by a member of the audience who said she would never think of making her own things in the same way again. I suppose I have to admit, on reflection, that the line wasn't quite so throwaway as I thought and though I didn't realise it at the time revealed something of what I truly feel about the nature of doing things for oneself.  Previously I'd put it down to an independent/creative/miserly streak which generally resents paying for something or someone to do what I think I...

DAY FORTY TWO Some questions about 'Mastery'. What is mastery? Is its achievement something one can decide for oneself or must it be recognised or vailidated externally?    Are there different levels of mastery? Can we award coloured belts like in martial arts?    Is it an end state or somewhere on a continuum that has novice at one end and master at the other? Can it ever be acheived or are we looking at a lifelong process and practice?   I'm sure I could go on in this vein without too much difficulty. The question comes to me having seen the title of a YouTube video which says something along the lines, "How to be a Master Knitter - follow my journey". In fact that immediately raises another question: Can one follow another's journey to mastery or is it a road that at least in its later stages one must travel alone? Which leads to: Are there reliable signposts or is it a journey without maps? This rather assumes that the person in whose steps you are followi...

DAY FORTY ONE They say the simplest jobs are the hardest - at least I've heard it said, and it has been proved true more often than I would like to recall.   It was proved again just now while I was putting up a curtain pole. What could possibly be simpler?  I'd been in a rush to get this job done all day as I wanted to put up a curtain across the back door to try and insulate things a little more. And to rush is the first of many mistakes which can be made while doing a 'simple' job. Often it's practically inevitable - one is lulled into a sense of false security by the word, or the thought, 'simple'. One approaches it, if one is foolish, without the usual degree of planning and forethought.  And so first, I couldn't find the brackets to support the pole; I knew I'd put them somewhere 'safe' a few weeks ago when I first thought of doing the job. Twenty minutes later, brackets found, pole in hand, I go to my stash to find some suitable screws...

DAY FORTY There is a door on my patio which is not a patio door.  It's been there for almost a year, leaning against the wall. It's a heavy duty, formerly external door, in fact the front door, which at some point became an internal door by the addition of a porch to the front of the house. It's glazed, fifteen small panels, and the stiles and rails are made of thick hardwood. It's on the patio because earlier this year I replaced it with something more suitable for the interior of the house. You could say that the door was recycled from it's duty as a front door, and the reason it is still on the patio is because I have plans to recycle it again, this time using the frame of the door to make another door to fit the space under the hall stairs. Almost every day I say I am going to set about dismantling it, removing the glass panels to be reused in some as yet unglimpsed project, and cutting the remainder to size. One day I shall be correct in that statement. This so...

DAY THIRTY NINE "Today's theme is creativity. It seems like every day, we are bombarded with messages telling us to be more creative. We are told to think outside the box, to push the boundaries of what is possible, and to come up with new and innovative ideas. But what does it really mean to be creative, and how can we tap into our own creativity on a daily basis? One way to think about creativity is as a process of generating new ideas or perspectives. This can take many different forms, including writing, painting, singing, dancing, or even just daydreaming. No matter what form it takes, creativity requires us to let go of our preconceived notions and to open ourselves up to new possibilities. One way to cultivate our own creativity is to set aside dedicated time for creative pursuits. This could be as simple as carving out 30 minutes each day to do something creative, like writing in a journal or working on a art project. By setting aside this time, we can give ourselves t...