[-practically mperfect, alterations-]

by Nancy S.M. Waldman

I missed a day (or was it two?) of posts. Some days I just don’t have *it*, you know? I’m busy shovelling out my workspace as it has gotten overwhelmed in the last two months.

When I get inspired, I start pulling materials out of the closets and can’t even think about putting any of it back because I might need it! Since my work room was such a mess, I started working in the tv room and several other rooms of the house. Whoa. Creative energy has a way of spreading, sometimes taking over not only our minds but whole rooms. *grins*

Anyway, it’s time to get things under control again. So that’s what I’ve been doing… as well as working on several small projects - all over the house!

Emma’s robot

Originally uploaded by Lockwasher.

Today’s image is charming, isn’t it? Lockwasher does these great sculptures out of found objects and metal do-dads. Each one has such personality and the craftmanship seems meticulous. I’m very impressed.

I chose this one because it’s made from a fancy tin. And, well, yeah, maybe because this one has a heart. Click on the image to see more of Lockwasher’s bots and rockets. They’re simply wonderful (and inspiring).

Must go work on my space.
Happy Sunday, all and thanks, Lockwasher!

Here are more wonderful robots that lockwasher has created.
See all our Practically Mperfect articles
Here’s a wonderful article on the process of creativity and how clutter enters into it: Mind Space
See all our Alterations articles
See our New Again, an Alterations Challenge
Here’s an article on our human need to GATHER things
(with links to the fun results of our Collectors Survey)

First published on March 5, 2006 in the original Practically Creative blog;
Re-published as written as an informal Practically Mperfect article

[-metaphorism, inspiration-]

metAphorism is a word I coined to mean a simple, everyday thing, concept or event that points us in the direction of a deeper lesson. metaphor - figure of speech giving an implicit comparison: this is that. aphorism - concise statement of a truth or opinion.

The metAphorism:
The Costume Box
The Lesson:
unplanned, unsorted accumulations are important sources of creative productivity

by Nancy S.M. Waldman

When I was a little girl, we had a big cardboard box in the closet that held anything that could be thought of as “costume.” Never sorted through, never planned, it looked only like an unholy mess. Feathers and ribbons. Fabric to drape and pin. Hand-me-downs and hand-offs from relatives that could never be used in real life. A rabbit-fur muff. A fox stole. A “gypsy” skirt made from horizontal rows of brightly contrasting fabric. There was an evening bag that would bring hundreds on E-bay today. Clip-on earrings without mates. Belts. Beads. Broken things. Unlikely bits of felt and plastic and leather and cotton and wire and pipe cleaners.

The specifics are less prominent in my mind all these years later than the enticing assortment and variety of things.

It was used, of course, at Halloween to devise costumes which were never store-bought. While we sometimes had help from our creative parents, we often came up with our own creations right out of the Costume Box. The other major use was for the garage musicals that my sister, Suze and I put on regularly for fame and profit. Suze was the creative genius behind “Dance through the Centuries” and many others. One was carried out entirely on roller skates (must have been where Sir Andrew Lloyd Weber got the idea). The Costume Box provided the raw materials for transforming us into stage-ready performers.

When I had children, it was second-nature for me to have a box that I threw things into to form their own Costume Box. One summer we rented a condo on the beach with another family. There were five boys in all and I took the Costume Box along, hoping it would provide some entertainment if it rained the whole week. One evening the adults were sitting outside with other people from the condos and our boys came down dressed as characters from Star Wars. Even though there were no store-bought costumes in the box, we watched in amazement as they trooped down in identifiable personages. “There’s Darth Vader!” a child exclaimed. “Oh look! He’s a Stormtrooper!” said an adult. There they were: BobaFet, R2D2, Chewbacca.

It’s truly stunning what our imaginations can do with almost nothing.

None of us became professional performers or costume designers, but the creations that adorned us out of the Costume Boxes had a lasting effect nonetheless. When you have had the experience of making something new out of old cast-offs you remember it forever. It’s not only fun, it’s creative confidence-building in a box.

So when you think about creativity, remember the Costume Box. Don’t let those clutter-clearing shows on TV make you feel too guilty about your accumulation of stuff. Junk drawers, untidy tool sheds, archivist attics, overflowing garages, toy and costume boxes provide raw materials for creative productivity.

Originally published in the October 2005 issue of The Practically Creative Quarterly, theme: collecting

© 2005 - 2007 all rights reserved

[-photo-essay-]

Ways to Organize your Chaos Collections

Read the rest of this entry »

[-essay, process-]

The space in our minds is often more cluttered than our studio space. Here’s an article that may help unclutter yours.

by Suze Corte

Here’s the way I work.

I’m not saying it’s efficient or even evolved; it’s just what comes naturally. For me there are two kinds of goals: the practical, everyday type and the creative ones. When I set a practical goal like having the house clean by Friday, I go about it directly and stay with it until I finish. True, I may procrastinate until Thursday night but still, I can plan exactly how to go about the task, how much time it will take, and what the final result will look and feel like.

Not so with creative goals.

When I dream up something I want to accomplish creatively, I invariably begin somewhere in the middle and work towards both “ends”the start and the finish. I remember doing this with a newsletter I was asked to create. The content included children’s art and writing, so the style, I felt, needed to be free flowing, surprising, and playful. Since it was a four-page newsletter, I had plenty of space to express myself. I began working on the project by brainstorming. I jotted down ideas for a while, then switched to playing with type styles, and soon found myself sorting through drawings and stories. I hit on an idea to use an appealing child’s drawing of a bee and repeat it, buzzing through the issue to highlight different articles. I tried it, liked it, but decided to set it aside in case I thought of something even better later on!

The process went on in this manner—somewhat like a bee flitting from one flower to another—until the newsletter began to take shape and make sense conceptually and visually. I eventually got around to designing a logo that fit the style, but I found that I needed to lay out a lot of the content before I knew what the “beginning” of the newsletter looked like. The point is, the final result was not something I originally foresaw from top to bottom. I had started with some basic space and size requirements and vague conceptual notions, but no concrete vision of the end product. Quite characteristically, I didn’t head out towards this creative goal on a smooth linear route. To the contrary, I weaved, spun around curves, backed up, switched around, and regained forward movement by fits and spits. Despite the path I took—or maybe because of it—the newsletter turned out to be delightful, inspiring to readers, and visually pleasing. And I felt fulfilled creatively, as if a puzzle had been solved and a mystery revealed. It was great fun!

Sometimes, of course, creative goals are not geared towards this kind of progress to their final destination. For me these are often the ones where I not only begin the journey in the middle of the road, but also complicate my life even further by nebulously approaching as if it were a circle, with no beginning or end, something like a traffic roundabout with options shooting off in many different directions. I don’t do this to confuse or frustrate myself; I find that it just happens as a matter of course with some impending creative quests. These are the projects that tend to get set aside until some future time when other ideas emerge that will send my thinking in a more fruitful direction. And let’s face it, some projects don’t deserve to be finished and are meant to be perpetually stalled.

I often put off creative pursuits by telling myself that I am working on them when really I am just cleaning the work table. I know a lot about procrastination, having developed my skills to master status. Gathering supplies is another nice technique for avoiding actual creative work: you look busy and you are, in fact, dealing with the tools of the trade, and so it is a great trick for pretending to be in the actual process of producing something. However, there are times when even these ruses turn towards the light and become useful. Sometimes while playing like I’m cleaning my studio, a glinting object will catch my eye, and like a magpie, I start to gather goodies and fill my creative mind with interesting bits and pieces, thought and ideas, connections and relationships that work.

In the course of writing this article—which, by the way, was only a vague concept in the narrow recesses of my mind about an hour ago—I have rediscovered a great two-part truth about my way of working towards and reaching creative goals: it doesn’t matter how I get there as long as I get there AND I must give myself permission to honor whatever path I take. There is no one right way to go and there is no reason to feel like there’s suddenly a Wrong Turn sign in my way when I choose to select a meandering path to my creative goal. This has all been very therapeutic for me, and now I will go create something. Or not. Or not now-ish.

My studio table is a mess.

words and images © 2005 - 2007 Suze Corte; all rights reserved

Originally published in the July 2005 issue of The Practically Creative Quarterly; theme: space and spaces

Suze Corte is a writer, artist and pre-school teacher in Houston, Texas. In 2007, she was chosen as be the Houston Area Association of Educator’s of Young Children’s Teacher of the Year and the Texas Association of Educators of Young Children’s Teacher of the Year. Congratulations, Suze! It is a well-deserved recognition.