Radical Acts

Buckle up, I'm about to get more personal here than I think I ever have before.  I started this blog, two and a half year ago now, I believe as an act of self-expression.  At the time I was crafting heavily, spending a lot of time on message boards and just starting to get into the whole follow this blog versus that blog craze.  I guess I was probably full of a bit of "my stuff is as good or better so I need to put it out there" too.  Total honestly here.  

But I needed paper crafting as a way to sort of deal with the rest of my life and everything going on in it.  Some of you know that I have a little boy with autism.  I don't talk about it a lot here because I wanted this to be my autism free zone frankly,  it's permeates so much of my life.  I wanted a place where that wasn't front and center.  Spending time in my craft room was therapy.  And from the looks of everything I've accumulated over this time, that therapy hasn't come cheaply.

Over months of soul searching and taking a real and hard look at what this is and what it has been, I have come to place where I understand that I don't need this place to be what it was before, which was frankly, an escape.  And with that escape came the whole blogging culture, the challenges, the design teams, the blog followers, the adulating that comes along with it.  Creating to blog, not blogging what I've create is where I found myself at various points over these last two and a half years.  Not all of the time, but enough of the time to suck a bit of the joy out of this.  Hmmm, that's not so healthy, and not why I started doing this and  it's not why  or how I want to continue creating.  

So where does that leave me and my craft?  In a pretty good place actually. If there is anything I am certain of its that this is a craft, my craft, I am good at it, and I still get a tremendous amount of joy out of it.  But the focus has changed from an escape to expression nothing more, nothing less.  And who knows what else I may need it to be in the future, I am open to whatever my artist wants to use this platform for.  But for right now I know that my days in the blogging fast lane are over.  And with that statement I feel a tremendous amount of relief and peace.

My plan, currently, is to blog whenever I feel like it.  It may be a few times over the course of months, it may be eighteen times in a single month if I've been really creative and have a ton of stuff to share.  I've actually got three projects now that I want to share, I just haven't felt like photographing them yet.  Eh, not going to worry about that so much anymore.

I'm giving up the worry about the trends, about the new product, the design teams, the really goofy stuff that should never have been a part of this to begin with. I am a competitive person by nature, and I have to do a bit of self-check to make sure I don't bring that back into this.  This is not the place for that. I am going back to basics - me and paper.  And maybe vinyl.  And glass etching.  I have been really wanting to try watercolors too! Some of it will be really good, some exceptional, and some is going to be just okay if not kind of stinky (it does actually happen).  It's all mine and I own and embrace it all.  Right now, this is what is best, what I know is necessary for me.

If you're along for the ride, however it has changed, great.  If not, thanks for being around as long as you have.  I wish you the best in your crafty endeavors.  

So there it is. The big Radical Act, which really in the great scheme of things is not so big, but again, very necessary.

I want to share a quote with you from a book I have been reading and working through.  It's called The Artist's Way.  It's by Julia Cameron and it's a twelve week course in regaining your creativity.  It has been life-changing in ways that I just can't describe.  I can't recommend this book enough.  Anyway, back to the quote:  "Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how.  The moment you know how, you begin to die a little.  The artist never entirely knows.  We guess.  We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark."  ~ Agnes de Mille