I have this bad habit, a compulsion actually, to dive blindly into every new project I begin. Dive may not be the right word… belly-flop would probably be more appropriate, but I digress... I say to hell with all those carefully crafted instruction manuals and tutorials that should be oh-so-carefully followed to insure a picture perfect project. I would rather be up to my elbows in the craft-du-jour and wallowing around like a pig in slop before I figure out that I’ve missed a crucial step.
Of course my haphazard approach to art yields many, many mistakes and some very upsetting consequences to my masterpieces-in-progress, but I like to think of every project as a total learning experience. Even if I end up with my fingers glued together, paint in my hair and my voice hoarse from screaming obscenities at the top of my lungs I know somewhere there has been a valuable lesson learned.
So my first lesson for today is… Always take a "before" picture if you’re going to be posting your masterpieces to your blog…
I got this baby home from the thrift store and before my coat was even off I was rummaging around my craft cabinets for the black spray paint and prying off the ugly floral pillow top so it could be recovered. Picture if you will (since I blew it on the "before" photo) a non-descript light brown sewing basket with a hideous pastel floral top. Now, it’s a picture of Lyzard-ness. It’s black… it’s got skulls… and it’s filled with sharp, pointy objects (a.k.a. my sewing paraphernalia.)
The second lesson I have learned is necessity really is the mother of invention…
I found these awesome little seed pods scattered around a tree the other day. What every boy under the age of 15 would consider a highly amusing projectile weapon I saw as the perfect accoutrement to a funky wardrobe. But that’s not the part where I learned a lesson…
Once I got these prickly little suckers home I immediately glued them to some earring components and dunked them in a cup of silver paint. Here’s where it gets interesting… I was wandering around with two dangling seed pods dripping silver paint on every available surface as I frantically searched for a place to let them dry. I didn’t want to set them down for fear I might potentially damage their delicate little spines so I was really up *&%# creek.
Did you know that your almost-empty coffee cup can easily double as a drying rack when you pry off the lid with your teeth and suspend your dripping earrings on a skewer laid across the top? Did you also know you can do all this with only the use of your mouth because your hands are full of spiny seed pods and silver paint? …Interesting…
My last lesson of the day to impart is this: planning can only get you so far, sometimes you really do have to leap before you look…For a while now I knew I wanted to make a freaky-funky bag out of a bunch of ugly ties I got from my late grandfather, but it was always at the bottom of my list. I’m not big on sewing because it takes too much planning, but those ties… they were calling my name… They were hideous… they were hilarious… They were PERFECT for this project!
I hemmed and hawed over this for about a week. I must have rearranged the ties a few hundred times in a variety of ways. I pulled my hair and drew diagrams. I cursed as-of-yet-unheard-words over a calculator and a notepad of random doodles and numbers. I made myself cross-eyed trying to graph out a logical pattern…
In the end I threw all my plans out the proverbial window and went by feel. The seams may not be ruler-straight and my lining may not match up perfectly, but I ADORE the crazy cacophony of this bag.
I guess the moral of this story is that art is just so much more exciting when you take the big leap and let the consequences be damned.-Lyzard
