I should be editing this week’s Lime & Violet episode, but it’s late, and I’m still kind of distracted by all the goings-on today. So I’m posting instead. I do that sometimes. :)

I made stitch markers. Four sets, twelve markers, sets of coordinated three. They were in the etsy shop, but are loooong gone, having been snapped up almost instantly by a shopper.

I like doing little things like this in the inbetween-hours. When I’m thinking too hard to do anything other than just kind of -be-, but my hands need movement or they’ll go insane and rebel and move to Tahiti without me. Thus, minijournals and painted mugs (pictures tomorrow, after they bake) and…apparently…stitch markers.

Tomorrow, I’ll make more, most likely. Along with the editing, and the writing, and the knitting, and the bookbinding and chattering with Tara when she comes over with the Holy Grail of Yarn Dyers, the Wholesale catalogues…. *happyshudder*.

It’s good to stay busy.

I decided last night that I’m taking The Day Off(tm). No working, no answering email, no fretting about everything going on. Just relaxing with the husband, and making things *I* want to make instead of stuff for the shop.

Usually, that means I knit. And all my knitting can pretty much be summed up with the Two Big S’s — socks and sweaters. (With a liberal dose of knitted toys.) I’m not sure why those two things have got me so entranced lately (for the last year, at least…), but it’s been the way it’s been.

Socks are the easiest to explain. They’re small and portable and there’s an endless variety to choose from. Sweaters are a new thing, and I think they just fill a need somewhere in me to have a big, huge, dauntingly large project to work on in the inbetween minutes. So there are two of those on the needles, too — Wicked and Ariann — and I’m really ready to hunker down this weekend to work on them a little. Get them another notch closer to completion.

All of my completion in the last day or two has been with the journal kits and now these, too:

Love Note Kits, over at the etsy shop of dooooom. While I was putting these together, I had a couple of great ideas for other seasonal limited-edition kits. Not sure if I’ll have the time to do them or not, though — I’ve got them on my hipster PDA cards in the Someday/Maybe section, so the ideas are waiting for me when I get there.

Funny how that seems to work for me, too. It seems I’m the most inspired and motivated when I’m in action. Sitting here thinking nets me a lot of worrying (“will it sell?” or “will people like it?” or “what am I trying to say with this?” mostly…), but if I get up out of the chair and just START, I often find that the ideas start flowing like water and that Idealanche I talked about a few days ago starts right up.

So Monday, it’s back to the Action Game, and this weekend? I’m throwing in the Northern Exposure Season Five DVDs and knitting another sock.

It’s just the way of things.

This is what nearly two dozen little packages of sketchy goodness look like en masse:

Oh, but seriously.

And now that they’re up on the etsy site of mayhem and chaos, and almost gone, I’m going to have to look at making more. Once I’m done with the current project (pictures tomorrow) that’s got me covered from head to toe in glitter. I feel just a weensy bit like a discoball gone horribly, horribly wrong.

I’m not so good at doing things assembly-line style. It sounds really pretentious to say that I’m more of an Artist than a Crafter, but that’s kind of how I feel sometimes. Like I’m happiest when I’m in The Zone, actually making something, instead of doing the same bits of a project over and over again. I’d never cut it as a factory worker; I’d lose my flippin’ mind in about 3.1 milliseconds.

I’m not sure why this is, either. It’s not that I don’t enjoy making books, because I do. All books. I love looking at the little pages when I’m done and saying, “I MADE THAT!” and getting all squidgy about it. But 24 of the same in a row was just about enough today to have me on the edge of contemplating putting my head in an oven.

All these odd little psychoses that come out after a long, sixteen-and-a-half hour day, I swear…

It’s late, and I should probably be in bed. But I was cutting out more of these:

They’re sketch-a-day journal kits, with an ATC-sized spiral-bound journal and three cards explaining the project, tips for sketch journaling, and prompts for when you don’t know what to draw. They’re really kind of fun little things — the art journal section here on moderngypsy.com will have my own little sketch-a-day section as soon as it’s done and up.

But because it’s late, I’m thinking about this whole creativity thing. How it seems to abandon me completely sometimes, and other times it smacks me out of the blue and I get four hundred thousand bazillion ideas, ALL AT ONCE. Like an avalanche rather than a steady trickle.

I’m not really complaining. Usually the Idealanche(tm) leaves enough workable ideas in its wake that I’m good to go for a few months. But those last few days before another ‘lanche is triggered are like torture. There’s SOMETHING brewing, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. In the old days, I’d have hopped in my car and driven to the coast to try to hear my thoughts more clearly, but I’m too far from it now to use that little trick. (For 56 more days, at least.)

Usually, it’s something small that starts it — a little idea that rolls down the mountain of the subconscious first, blazing the trail for the rest of them. Small and workable, like doing kits for holidays or something, and it ends up with a creative flurry that leaves me with a thousand index cards of ideas and a few that don’t even suck too badly.

One of these days, I’ll learn to dynamite my weak spots, like they do up in the Cascades. Controlling the tension and thus, avoiding the avalanche that can close down all the roads. Blow ‘er up early, so to speak.

Until then, I just write more cards, and make what I can, reaching out to grab the boulders as they roll on by.

It’s a good life, if just a weensy bit chaotic.

There’s a really great group shaping up over at the Laboratory 555 group at livejournal.com.

If you haven’t heard about it, it’s going to be like a year-long virtual ArtFest, where we’re all using up our art supplies and learning a bunch of new techniques in the company of other artists and creators.  It’s being run by Mandy of Junque, the rubber stamp company that used to be one of the only ones with an edge.  She’s a trailblazer, that one.  And now she’s sharing her year-long journey with the rest of us, and we’re ALREADY getting into some fun conversations.

There’s a Flickr group of some of the current subscribers’ work, where we’ll be posting our experiments and class-”work”, and I’m literally champing at the bit to get started.  (No ponyboy hat references.  I just keep fondling my supplies now.)

This is old, for anyone coming from the other blog, but the past few days have been dye-a-thons around this house. On Friday, I finished this bunch of fun:

And now there are ten MORE skeins waiting to be wound up and photographed. And hopefully, by the end of the day, there will be another ten or so. Then I’m out of sock yarn blanks, and will need to hurry up with the spinning and carding of batts (big sheets of raw-ish fibers put through a drum carder machine to align all their hairs in the same direction for spinning) so that I can get those out of here, too.
I’m really working hard to get as much of this stuff done as possible. Get it up on the etsy site (which I really need to link in the sidebar as soon as I figure out for sure what I’m doing with all this CSS stuff), and remove it from my house. I’m so lucky in that people seem to want it all — all this crazy stuff that I keep making. It boggles my little mind sometimes.
I keep thinking that if I just focused on one thing, I could be unstoppable. When I focus, I’m like a laser — obstacles move out of the way, I barrel through the ones that don’t, and I can accomplish an insane amount of things in a day. But being posessed of a nature where doing the same thing every day would be tantamount to a slow cube-death, no matter what that same thing is? Not conducive to being laser focused every day.

Maybe what I need to be doing is refining the actions I take so that I’m still just as varied without being as scattered. Microfocus, so to speak, and then move on.

I believe the ’80’s pundits called it “multitasking”. Ahem.

Everyone has one.
A first, boring postie.
Mine is in HAIKU!

One must amuse one’s-self as one can. Expect the artsycraftsyfiberygoodness to begin soon!