When did I stop feeling – and being – creative?
It’s mystery, really. Does creativity gradually shamble off as we get older, going into hibernation for some or other reason? Or does it just run its course – the allotted ration used up at some point, the well running dry? Research says this isn’t the case, so perhaps I just got used to doing the things I do and stopped looking around for new inspiration, ideas and alternatives? I can blame work, life, commitments, etc., but the reality is that the blank page stays blank, the art/craft workshop is tidy, the mosaic project unfinished. Why?

I’m increasingly conscious that it’ll be curtains down at some point no matter how many things remain on my to-do list. So, how do I sidestep the procrastination bandwagon that seems to have rolled into town and moved in lock, stock and all barrels loaded? How do I get back to a version of me that I recognise – one that enjoys being creative and actively seeks out opportunities to do so?

Ah yes, how indeed? Tomes have been written on this topic, from academic papers to new age self-help books and everything in-between. There are any number of tools out there for the self-confessed procrastinator to use – it’s just a matter of getting around to finding them, acquiring them and implementing them… Right.

Instead, I decided it was time for me to have (another) close look at the what-when-why-how of my specific procrastinations to find a pathway through them – hopefully back to the creative me that’s been hiding out somewhere. It turns out that this process required a teensy bit of effort. Surprise!

I started by making a list – yup, a boring old list, but a list of EVERYthing I’ve been avoiding, from mundane things like household tasks to work-related goal oriented activities, from exercise and fitness activities to keeping up with friends. That bit wasn’t too hard – it just took time to figure out all those WHATs.

The next bit was a more complicated; it involved annotating each of the things I’d listed with two WHYs: 1) why it was even on the list (it’s an allocated chore, it’s a hobby, I need to get fit, etc.), and 2) how it’ll benefit me if get to it or, better yet, complete it. This took some serious soul searching, some WTF moments and some embarrassing realisations… but I got there in the end.

Onwards to WHEN I procrastinate? I had to figure out whether it’s as I set out to do item X on the list, or before then… when I think about doing the thing. Got it in one: avoidance in all its various guises has become my go-to. There always seems to be a plausible ‘reason’ to have a Scarlett O’Hara moment – to decide to put it off and ‘think about it tomorrow.’

And we’re almost there. To close the loop and move on, I had to figure out HOW it happens. What is it I do INSTEAD of the thing I’m avoiding? Am I putting the thing off completely, i.e. replacing it with another thing to fill the gap, or actually rescheduling? Thinking about it, I realise that, more often than not, ‘rescheduling’ turns out to be just a variation on a theme of a rolling, ever-expanding avoidance. Ouch. This introspection thing can be a real downer!

Anyhow, down to the nitty-gritty now: what to do about it. Well, every week we (Himself and I) write a to-do list up on the whiteboard in the family room. It serves as a memory jogger as well as a prompt, making it more likely that the various things will be remembered and be factored into the week. The list usually goes up on Sunday and includes work, appointments (personal, pets and for others, medical and other appointment with MiL / FiL), my time at the indoor pool, his at Watch School and so forth for the week ahead. We update it as the week evolves. Sometimes appointments change, sometimes things get added or removed – but it’s all up there, a shared mini schedule.

Even so, the daemon that is procrastination regularly has its way with us: the lure of email, cat videos (!), yet another Netflix series, ‘googling up’ some or other piece of information – and disappearing down a wormhole of links. Thinking about this, I conclude that when I don’t do a thing I’ve committed to do (whether the commitment is to myself or to others) it’s simply because I don’t really WANT to do it. Figuring out WHY I don’t want to do it starts with what I’m replacing it with.

A case in point is my current (and ongoing) mosaic project. I started it 18 months ago to cover up an unsightly section wall out on the patio. It’s the bottom section of wall that we never quite got around to tidying up, about 4m long and 30cm tall. A plan and a design for a mosaic frieze gradually emerged and, with it, a distinct sense of creative accomplishment and anticipation. Step one was to get Himself in to help with filling the biggest of the ugly-wall gaps with render and smoothing it over, and to lay a row of colourful tiles along the top of the little wall. In due course I was presented with a cheerful tile pattern and mostly flat surface to work on. Success! Whiteboard updated accordingly, positive feelings all round. Yay. (Take that, Procrastination!)

In my (debatable) wisdom, I’d decided to work directly onto the wall. So the next was to transfer the design onto the surface. Some delays here, which literally included the dog eating the plan (!), but the design finally went up and work began. It was fun. Slowly but surely two geckos emerged on the wall and the piece started to really take shape. The five central dragonflies were planned on paper, and the ceramic tile pieces cut, ready to go up. Happiness factor increased.

Then, after several weeks of regular activity – once the dragonflies were up and the background (so much background!) was started, I gradually stalled out. Instead of spending an hour or so out there each evening, listening to an audio book, cutting tile pieces to shape and fixing them to wall around the critters I’d already completed, I started to binge-watch a TV series, I read a couple of books and spent more time surging the internet. I baked and made freezer meals. I went to WASO concerts and had lunches out with friends. I gardened – a lot!

After several months of this, my internal hall-monitor started asking very pointed questions about the mosaic project. Initially I blamed the weather (too hot, too cold), the wildlife (flies, mozzies, dogs!), the uneven surface (to which the tiles really don’t stick very well). But a long hard look at the what-when-why-and-how of it all has made me realise that I’ve simply been finding the physicality of the project too much. My body and mind have conspired to rebel against the idea of crouching down or sitting on the (cold, hard) ground to work on it. In addition, what I haven’t wanted to acknowledge is that, somewhere along the line, tedium has replaced the initial enthusiasm. I quite simply fell out of love with the idea of it all.

So where to from here? The project is about half done – and can’t be UNdone; nor can I simply bundle it into the back of a cupboard like a half-finished jumper… Clearly I need a plan. And a deadline with clear milestones to ensure I stay on track. I’m reluctant to say Gantt Chart, but that’s about the size of it if I’m to visualise achievable steps and navigate myself back to creativity!

Over the course of writing this, a Master Plan has emerged (without resorting to flow charts!) It’s not on the whiteboard yet, but it will be. Bottom line is that I’ve found something to goad myself into getting back into it: it hinges on FiL’s 90th birthday celebrations in mid-July, some of which will be here at #10. So now there’s a plan: Day 1 (5 June) – review progress to date, decide on completion date. Get cracking! Days 2 to 32 – shape and place no fewer than 10 pieces every day. Day 33 (8 July) – Final pieces cut and placed. Grout the entire frieze and clean up. Done!

I think I’ve worked myself up to believing I’ve got my mojo back: I’ve written a blog post – the first in over six months – AND cut and placed 10 mosaic pieces! Good outcome for all that soul-searching!

(Note to the reader: Give it go – the process does require a certain amount of soul searching and, with that, acknowledging some home truths, but it’s worth it – really.)

A knitting cabaret? As knitters, how could we possibly resist!? Last weekend some of our craft group trotted off to see Stitch in Time – a knitting cabaret, in which Canadian performer Melanie Gall explores all things knit (and crochet).

Excitement! Drama! Romance! And… knitting? A scintillating cabaret, featuring the lost knitting songs of WWI and WWII from Canada, Britain, America and France. Bring your knitting (or crochet) and stitch along to these funny, poignant, toe-tapping, needle-clicking tunes. Come out and have a ball! Stitch in Time presents over a dozen historic songs, including More Power to Your Knitting, Nell!, The Knitting Itch and Knocking at the Knitting Club.

It was a hoot! From her sensible heels, to her spangled dress and adorable knitting hat (!), Melanie rocked the room with rollicking tunes  and entertaining tales on the history of knitting. Most of us had brought along a knitting (or crochet) project and, between bouts of laughter, the needles flashed in and out of yarns of glorious colours and projects as varied as could be imagined.

My own knitting (and crochet) journey has been a rather bumpy one at times. From my first attempts in primary school – an epic fail that left me quite convinced that knitting was something other people did – to the community craft group I now help to facilitate, it’s been quite a ride.

My mum had knitted for us on and off our whole lives and, by the time I was making my first foray into the terrifying land of knit, she had acquired a knitting machine. This speeded up her production significantly and reinforced my notion that hand knitting was a waste of time. At about that time, my ever-busy mum taught herself to crochet. Unbeknownst to me, she bought yarn in four shades of green – from pale moss, though to the deep forest green of pine needles – and set about about making me the most amazing poncho.

This was in an era when ponchos were all the rage and many a mum, gran or aunt was conscripted into making one (or more). As often as not, the homemade creations were made from granny squares pieced together – very trendy! But not my mine. I’ve no idea whether Mum had a pattern or just made it up as she went along, but she crocheted the poncho in the round in alternating rows of trebles, popcorn stitch and clusters of trebles. The neckband was double crochet in the palest of the greens, with the tassels to match. It was perfect! The right length, perfect tassels and fabulous colours that showed how well Mum knew me. It also convinced me that crochet was yet another dark art that was beyond my abilities to conquer!

When I got to high school the following year, I found (to my horror) that students were expected to ‘volunteer’ to knit and/or crochet! At various times we were tasked with creating squares that would later be assembled into blankets and donated to a retirement home, and outfits for little cupie-dolls. The dolls were also for a good cause and many beautiful outfits were created – just not by me!

Not my work!

My output was slow and the quality highly variable. I did eventually conquer knitting a simple 6″ corner-to-corner square, but remained convinced that handcrafts weren’t  the best use of my time – or limited skills! What I didn’t realise it at the time was that these community service projects were aimed at teaching us the value of volunteering and to develop a sense of social responsibility. In my case what it really seemed to be doing was reinforcing the notion that knitting and crochet weren’t my thing!

A good many years passed before I decided to give knitting another try. Unlike me, my BFF has been a pro-knitter from an early age and I’ve always been unfailingly impressed by her fabulous creations. From time to time she’d offer to show me how, but I always protested that I was a hopeless case… until Dearest Daughter was on her way.

Then BFF (and DD’s godmother-to-be) suggested that I might like to try knitting something for the baby. She said that if I aimed at making just one small thing I might find it wasn’t so bad. I was dubious, but she convinced me that it was achievable. So yarn and needles were purchased and, although the project took ages and there was a fair bit of unpicking involved, by the time DD was born I had created a rather cute sky blue angel top for her. She did grow into it eventually… and it was passed down to BoyChilde in due course, so it was well worth the effort.

1983: BoyChilde & angel top.

It was also the foundation on which all the rest of my knitting adventures were based. With ongoing encouragement from BFF I learned to be more forgiving of my knitting mistakes and to not take it all so seriously. Gradually – and without me realising it –  knitting turned into more than a practical skill, it was fun! More than that, I felt ridiculously proud of my creations and of the that I’d become somewhat competent at something I’d always thought out of reach.

As the kids grew, so did the size and variety of jumpers. I experimented with Fair Isle and cables and intarsia – using multiple colours to add pictures to the jumpers. Hats, gloves, tea cosies, socks, toys, scarves and wraps all emerged from my needles at various times over the past 40 years – and I’ve enjoyed every knitting moment of the process.. even the undoing and re-knitting parts!

Crochet hit my radar only relatively recently, when arthritis started to impact my knitting enjoyment. The first step was to relearn how to make granny squares, with occasional guidance YouTube and from BFF – still my creative guru. As part of the learning process I went on to teach others how to crochet squares, dishcloths, Xmas ornaments and more.

One of my first granny square charity blankets.

In keeping with our early introduction to knitting as a community project, BBF and I started a regular community craft group a number of years ago; the group still meet up each month to chat and knit or crochet – sometimes on our own projects and sometimes making items for charity. And occasionally we go to things like the knitting cabaret, just for fun – but always armed with some sort of small project to work on!

This knitting (and crochet) cabaret of mine is far from over – although it still surprises me that I enjoy it so much (thanks, BFF!). My 12-year-old self wouldn’t recognize this version of me, but I think she’d be amused by the Loani Prior tea cosy I made this week – particularly the polo neck 🙂

Pot Sock Frock and Petticoat tea cosy.

Our household tries to be mindful about single use packaging and to reuse and recycle wherever possible. In the run up to Christmas festivities, however, this gets to be increasingly difficult. The sheer volume of packaging on gifts and food items undermines the best of intentions. And then there’s the gift wrap…

I recently discovered that in Australia alone, more than 150,000km of gift wrap is used over the festive season. Yup, 150,000 kilometres. I found that to be a mind boggling stat – and one that’s impossible to unknow now that it’s hit my radar… as is the info on just how much of that wrapping is not recyclable.

This includes: foil, embossed, glittery, laminated or plastic wrappings, tinsel, tissue paper, cellophane, ribbons and bows. Then there’s very thin wrapping paper, smaller pieces of regular, recyclable paper and shredded paper; these are also off the list as their fibres are generally too short to be made into recycled products. Yikes.

With all this in mind, Daughter Dearest and I embarked on a mission to discover ways to eliminate those wrappings that can’t be recycled. We’ve made our own wrapping papers before, using butcher’s paper or brown paper and decorating it in various ways, but this year we’re on a mission to test out other options.

Phase one was to attend a session on sustainable gift wrappings. There we learned how to make gifts bags out of newspaper or other repurposed paper, with the help of just a little glue. The bags can be pretty much any size out of whatever paper you have to hand. I had fun putting some out of date maps to good use, making surprisingly sturdy (and attractive) bags. There are heaps of online resources for this, so track them down if you’re interested 🙂

We were also were introduced to the basics of the not-too-mysterious art of Furoshiki (Japanese fabric wrapping). This is a brilliant way to wrap gifts sustainably, using fabric (recycled, repurposed or new) instead of paper.

So phase two of operation alternative-wrappings was to hunt through my fabric stash, brave a Spotlight sale and visit a couple of Opshops. I now have a box full of pretties and plan to add a wrapping instructions with each furoshiki-wrapped gift so that my people can re-use the wraps that way if they’d like to. I’ll also include a note suggesting that, if the wrapping isn’t wanted, it can simply be ‘recycled’ back to me to me 🙂

I can’t wait to get started on the wrapping! Here’s a how-to in case you’d like to try it too.

We’re once again in the throes of a re-training regime for both our dogs. This is mostly because one of them recently developed a liking for adventuring when off lead at the park. No biggie in and of itself, except that she sometimes chooses not to come back. Apparently it’s much more fun to turn the whole exercise into a game. Much sigh.

Fortunately we know some great people at the local Dobermann Club. They all know MissMolly (she has something of a reputation as a super bouncy Dobe) and one of them kindly agreed to help out with some one-on-one. This new training regime started a few weeks ago and we’ve had some great results with MissM (aka the runawaydog) so far. It’s involved going back to basics with recalls, impulse inhibition and so forth.

Cassie’s been having some fun with training as well. But since most of it’s really aimed at the runawaydog, she needs to be kept occupied whilst the high intensity focused training sessions take place.

Enter the snuffle mat. This is essentially a rubber door mat that has had a whole lot of fleece fabric strips tied to it to create a densely packed, soft and fluffy adventure mat. The idea is that it acts like a puzzle for the dog, allowing it to sniff out and hunt around for little treats in a fun way. This provides mental stimulation, slows down their eating, encourages natural foraging instincts and works to decrease their stress levels.

It was a really simple rainy day craft project to undertake and very rewarding, although it used a good deal more fabric than I expected. It also involved a lot of knot tying! My reward was to see Cassie take to it with great gusto during training time this week. She hunted and foraged, snuffled and searched for her morning kibble in amongst the fleece-forrest, tail going like crazy. Very cute. And afterwards? A delightfully calm pup – which was a real bonus as she’s usually hyper if separated from her buddy for any reason.

Snuffle mat - Cassie

If you think you’d like to make one yourself, the instructions are on my craft page. Enjoy!

ps. For heaps of other good ideas to keep your dogs occupied, you might like to have a look at this canine enrichment site.

As part of my on-going commitment to not sending ‘stuff’ to landfill unless absolutely necessary, I recently got moderately creative. This was largely inspired by the over abundance (!) of decidedly past their best t-shirts lurking about in the back of my wardrobe.  To be honest, I’m really not at all sure how some of them got there. I suspect that there may have been a bit of a t-shirt breeding program going on in the dark recesses of wardrobe-land…

Anyhow, sorting through the epic pile of accumulated shirts, I ended up with four piles:

  1. Well-loved and even more well-worn shirts that I hadn’t been able to part with, a prime example being my first year uni t-shirt from 1979 – paint stains and all
  2. Those that seemed to have been kept ‘just in case’ – after all, you never know when you might need a less-than-perfect shirt for grubby projects such as painting, grouting mosaics, gardening, etc.
  3. The mystery shirts from a parallel universe (or other unknown source/s)
  4. and – the smallest pile by far – the ones I still want to wear.

A quick re-sort of piles one, two and three created a fifth pile: those suitable to donate to a goodwill/thrift shop.

Once pile number five was disposed of, and I’d combined what remained of pile one (can’t bear to part with them) with pile four (will actually wear them), I was still left with a very large pile of shirts to recycle or repurpose in some way.

Hunting around on the magical internets-of-ideas (aka Pinterest) I discovered instructions to turn unwanted t-shirts into t-shirt yarn. This could then be knitted or crocheted into useful and/or decorative household items, such as bathmats or baskets. A most cunning plan!

So I embarked on phase one: create the yarn. A fair bit of trial and error ensued, until I came across set of simple  instructions that I could work from, even though most of my shirts had side seams and not all of them were 100% cotton (which does work best).

By this stage I’d promised to run a series of community workshops on how create very cute t-shirt yarn baskets. This meant that my learning curve suddenly had to take a speedy uphill climb so that I could stay a step or two ahead of the game!

More trial and error ensued, with me using the biggest crochet hook I’d ever seen to create baskets of various shapes and sizes. In the process I learned that:

  • the softer the t-shirt fabric, the kinder it is to your hands
  • a slightly looser tension is required when using a big hook and fabric yarn
  • one t-shirt provides not quite enough yarn to make a small basket.

By the end of the workshops, everyone had conquered the process and completed at least one basket. As to what they’ll be used for… suggestions ranged from storing toys, bathroom essentials or other household items, through to planters (around houseplants) or turning them into Easter baskets full of chocolate eggs.

At the end of the day, whatever the baskets are used for, they’re definitely more useful than a pile of daggy old t-shirts going to landfill.