Things on Thursday: Priority Mail Box

Our Thing on Thursday this week is this medium flat rate priority mail box:


This box brought me my first supplies from Mark's Finest Papers, a company that has made 2010 a landmark year in my life by asking me to be on its Design Team.

OHMYGOSH!!!!

For those reading Questioning who are not stampers, Design Teams are an important marketing tool for stamp companies. In exchange for free stuff (FREE STUFF, PEOPLE!), Design Team members make papercraft projects and publish those projects on their stamping blogs and other places on the internet.

I am so looking forward to my six months with Mark's Finest Papers, and this flat-rate box signals the beginning of that creative journey.

You can't see me bouncing in my seat, but trust me.

I am.

Creator's High

"To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong." Joseph Chilton Pearce

When he was three, Nick asked a question: "Which way is right?" His innocent question goes beyond merely directional importance and strikes at the very heart of our choices in life, doesn't it? It certainly struck me and George that way.

Which way is right? I'm not sure how it got started, but early in my life, I dreaded the possibility that I might be wrong. This developed into a full-fledged phobia as I learned to define my worth as a human by my grades. If I made a 100 on a test, I was a good person. If I made a 99, I was careless, inadequate, hopelessly stupid. This thinking lead me, at the age of 16, to feel like a complete failure in life and to have thoughts that I'd be better off dead.

How ironic that in seeking to be right I was so terrifyingly wrong.

Why do we put ourselves through these sorts of judgments? Often, we're much harder on ourselves than we are on others. I never thought my friends who made 99s or 89s or 79s or 59s were stupid or bad. I loved them and thought only good of them. But for me, lurking always in the spidery recesses of my mind, was the thought that horrible things would happen if I weren't perfectly right.

There were lots of reasons for this, I suppose, but I'm more interested in solutions. How did I learn that being wrong wasn't the end of the world? How did I make peace with imperfection and lose my fear of it?

Well, aside from a helpful psychologist and some time spent being loved and loving, I cultivated my creativity. It all started with making a baby. I made this little person who coos and giggles and squirms and startles and sucks and cries and poops. That miracle lead me to quit work and stay home full time, one of the scariest and bravest things I think I've ever done.

Being a stay-at-home mom gave me time in my home, and thus made me think about how it was decorated, what was hanging on the walls, what would make it more appealing. It gave me a chance to try flower arranging (not for me), making curtains (also not for me), and papercrafts (definitely ME!). When I discovered papercrafts, I realized that my life-long obsession with office supplies, pens, and paper had a whole creative side that I'd never considered. The genie was out of the bottle, and I haven't looked back.

Still, it took time to get over my fear of being wrong. It's rather startling how persistent I was toward a goal I didn't know I had. I just wanted to make things I liked. I copied others' work, studied magazines and books, spent hours just making stuff. At some point, it stopped being work and started being joyful play. I stopped worrying so much about getting something right and let my creativity loose.

And that's when I understood why God created the universe: because it was good.

Since my epiphany, I'm more conscious of others' brave and creative endeavors and am in awe. George's creativity with food amazes me. I'm too afraid of ruining meat and have never been adventurous in the kitchen, yet he creates original works of art each weekend. My sister's creativity with photography also amazes me. My mom turns everything she touches to art. My mother-in-law makes art with fabric in quilting and applique. My friend Liz, a graphic design artist, was my original inspiration in papercrafts, and in trying to be like her, I found myself.

How do you get your creator's high? What do you do that fills you with that wonderful joy of not fearing to be wrong? Is it fashion? Home decorating? Gardening? Writing? Whittling? Music? Motherhood?

Put another way, what brave new thing would you do if you weren't afraid to be wrong?

Fearless

Note: If you don’t know about the Word of the Year Project, check the links at the top of the sidebar.

My word for 2009 is Fearless, and so far it is working for me. I’m writing more—though not as much as I would have hoped—so I need to focus on increasing my output, especially for my book on autism. The best success of my Fearless project has been the launch of my stamping blog, an enterprise that scared the heck out of me because I truly feel my cards are okay but not exactly special enough to support a blog.

My attitude toward crafting is shockingly democratic. I believe that crafts, in contrast to fine arts, give us ordinary folks who lack artistic genius the opportunity to express ourselves creatively. What we make can be as kitschy as a crocheted toilet paper cover or as gorgeous as a perfectly turned piece of pottery. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that we feel a sense of satisfaction in the act of creating, like a kindergartner who makes an Easter bunny out of a paper plate and cotton balls. That elemental creative pleasure is all a crafter needs to make the time and effort spent entirely worthwhile.

Over the past few years, my hobby of choice—rubber stamping—has grown in popularity, and like other hobbies that become popular, it has become increasingly trendy, complicated, and professionalized. What was once a fun and accessible hobby that “anyone can do” has developed into an intimidating activity that seems to require actual talent as well as extensive knowledge of a huge variety of products.

I frequent an online stamping community called Splitcoaststampers, or SCS for short. The gallery at SCS contains hundreds of thousands of handmade cards to inspire and motivate other stampers. The stamp-related forums are friendly places where perfect strangers will take time to help you figure out how to pierce a straight line of dots or choose the best ink for clear stamps.

The trend toward more embellished cards came to my attention gradually through the Favorites of the Week thread, started every Sunday morning in SCS’s general stamping forum. Anyone can post links to their favorite cards for the week. When I first started looking at this thread several years ago, the styles of favorite cards were quite diverse, with everything from very simple to very ornate represented.

Gradually, however, as the embellished style became more popular and product choices expanded, fewer simple cards were posted. Seeing as I have precious little artistic talent, my forays into the gallery at SCS in general and into the Favorites thread in particular became increasingly intimidating. All those beautiful cards with ten layers of cardstock embossed and distressed and embellished into little works of art are beautiful, no doubt about it, and I admire the talent and time put into creating them. My personal style, however, is cleaner, simpler. If I were a graphic design artist, I’d want to design print ads for the Gap. Anything with lots of restful, empty space attracts my attention.

I had quit visiting the Favorites thread until January, when I decided to see what styles were getting posted. Trends change, after all, and I knew the pendulum would swing back to cleaner, simpler cards eventually.

The pendulum hasn’t swung back yet. I clicked on about 40 cards and every one was like the first: eight or more layers of cardstock, multiple embellishments, time-consuming techniques, embossing, outline stamp images artistically colored with Copic markers, and so on. Every single one was stunningly beautiful. By the time I reached the end of the thread, I felt like a total loser: that kid in junior high who suddenly realizes her project for the science fair looks like it was made by a five year old, while all her classmates’ projects look like graduate students made them. I felt embarrassed I’d ever posted a card at all, much less over 300 of them. I wanted to delete my whole gallery and slink into oblivion.

Those of you who know me personally know that I do not have low self-esteem. Years ago, I overcame my tendency to beat myself up for not being perfect. Yet there I sat, staring glumly at my computer, feeling totally beaten up and humiliated because my cards didn’t look like the cool kids’ cards.

This is what happens when you compare yourself to other people, and forget who you are and why you’re doing something. The results of such comparisons are never, ever good.

Then I remembered Julie Ebersole. Julie makes “clean and simple” into high art. When I’m thumbing through a stamping magazine, I can pick out her cards without looking at the credits. I want to be her when I grow up. I thought about Krystie Lee Hersch, who credits Julie as her major source of inspiration and makes gorgeous cards I adore, often with a single piece of cardstock and some ink. I thought about Nichole Heady, whose success with clean and simple designs led her to start up one of my favorite stamp companies, the enormously successful Papertrey Ink.

These women taught me a valuable lesson: celebrate who you are, and create what you love. I love clean and simple cards, and there’s nothing wrong with that, even if it’s not exactly trendy at the moment. These positive thoughts began to ease my humiliation, and it occurred to me that if I, with my, um, comfortable self-esteem, could feel intimidated and humiliated, there must be others who felt the same way…or worse. I brainstormed ways to celebrate the clean and simple style. The most obvious and easiest thing to do was to start a thread at SCS titled “Post your Clean and Simple Cards Here,” and here’s what I wrote:

“Okay, just checked out the favorites of the week thread and my ego has been battered to a pulp. Ouch! I've stayed away from that thread for months and months for just this reason. Those Totally Awesome Stampers ROCK!

”But for those of us who don't do techniques that require anything like ‘talent’ or ‘skill,’ who don't layer our cards into inch-thick confections of pure gorgeousness, who don't have all the latest nesties or copics, who don't have coloring skills above kindergarten level, and who do love to make clean and simple and, most of all, EASY cards...please post your favorites from your own gallery, the ones that make you happy as long as you don't compare them to what the Totally Awesome Stampers are making…. Rather than feel sorry for our simple, easy, and basic cards, let's celebrate them...because they really do deserve to be celebrated!”

Putting my neuroses out there for the whole world to see made me nervous, but something amazing happened. People admitted to feeling the same way I did. Many said they had always felt too intimidated to start a gallery themselves, but after seeing all the clean and simple cards linked to that thread, they felt energized and eager to share their work. Some people even sent me private messages thanking me for being so courageous in standing up for clean and simple stamping.

Courageous? Me? Huh? I hadn’t thought of it like that, and I guess from a certain point of view it was rather fearless of me to buck a trend. The truth, however, is that talented clean-and-simple stampers like Julie, Krystie, and Nichole have been bucking the trend all along, fearlessly doing what they love. They are the leaders, and I’m just a devoted follower who knows how to make a little noise.

You just never know what the consequences of your actions might be. Because several people suggested it might be a good idea, I started a regular Clean and Simple Favorites of the Week thread, which has turned out to be quite popular. Then, a wonderful stamper named Jen started the Clean and Simple Weekly Challenge on SCS. I’m on the first Design Team for it and post a card each week to inspire others in the challenge.

You have no idea how truly strange this feels to me…being an inspiration to others. Heck, I just wanted to feel better about my creative vision, and now lots of other people feel better about their vision, too. I’m giddy with joy over this beautiful example of my karma working for good in the universe. Too often, karma is biting me on the butt.

During this clean and simple love-fest, lots of people (well, more than five, but I’m easily influenced on things like this) asked me to start a stamping blog. I’m a first-born pleaser, so of course I had to do it. Simplicity by LateBlossom is the result. I still don’t feel that my cards are “blog worthy,” but you know what? It doesn’t matter whether they are or aren’t worthy. What matters is that I’m having fun posting them and at least a few people are having fun seeing them.

Best of all, the gallery at SCS now has many more clean-and-simple cards posted every day. Those cards inspire me and put a very silly grin on my face every time I visit the gallery now. Long live Clean and Simple!

So far, living my word Fearless hasn’t gotten me published, but I’ve made new stamping friends and once again feel like a kindergartner with an amazing work of paper-plate-and-cotton-ball art to show my mommy. Knowing that I helped others feel the same elemental joy of creating something beautiful for themselves motivates me to create more, stamp more, share more. If there’s a downside to this situation, I’ll be darned if I can find it.

Now it’s time for me to get to work “creating” that book about autism. I feel pretty Fearless about that.

So please do tell, how’s your word working for you?

Newsflash

Because having two blogs just isn't enough, I've started a third blog on STAMPING! So if you're interested in rubber stamping, check it out!

Simpicity by LateBlossom

The Upside of Addiction

Back in our child-free days in Boise, Idaho, George and I invited a couple of friends—let’s call them J and B—for dinner. Before she entered our lovely home which I had spent hours cleaning, B pointed to the weeds growing in the front mulch-beds and said, “You need to pull weeds.” Later, during dinner, she stared at the chandelier for a minute and said, “You need to clear out those spider webs.” J shushed her and seemed embarrassed by her honesty, but it was a revelation to me. This was the moment I realized that no one notices what you DO clean, only what you DON’T clean. You simply cannot win. Ever.

When I took the plunge into stay-at-homeness, I learned that there are lots of chores to do, and they are never done. That toilet will get dirty again—and faster than it did back in the old days when you used the facilities at work 40+ hours a week, and an unseen janitor got paid a pittance to clean up your mess and the messes of all the other, higher-paid employees who sat in cubicles all day when they weren’t in the restroom taking care of business.

As a stay-at-home parent, the janitor looks back at you in the mirror every day, and you don’t get paid even a pittance for all the toilet-scrubbing you do.

All chores grow in size and time required to do them when you stay at home: dishes (you no longer eat breakfast out of vending machines or “do lunch” at Schlotsky’s), laundry (oh, Lord above, the laundry), vacuuming (crawling babies actually eat stuff you never even noticed off your floor), taking out the trash. There’s just MORE of every chore, and no one notices unless you don’t do them.

I quickly found that if I wanted a truly clean house, I had to spend all my time cleaning. Cleaning all the time, however, turned me into a grumpy nag whom my husband, baby son, two dogs, and I despised. I concluded that to be happy with my new life, I needed to reconcile myself to dust bunnies and clutter.

This was difficult because I’m an anal-retentive, obsessive-compulsive, goal-oriented intellectual who feels that all problems have a solution if only you think about them enough, and messes are a problem to me. Short of hiring a maid, however, this problem wouldn’t yield to any amount of intellectualizing or goal setting. I distracted myself from the dust bunnies and clutter by starting a hobby.

It began innocently enough. I wanted to learn how to do calligraphy and illumination…medieval book arts. Ostensibly, this was research for a novel I’ve been “not writing” for twenty years now. (By the way, stay-at-home mothers never get to use words like “ostensibly” in real life. Aren’t blogs wonderful?) After a few months of so-called research, I had a dozen or so little illuminations and no way to display them. So I taught myself another hobby, bookbinding, to have a place to put these little works of very amateurish art.

That was when I got a tiny bit addicted. In a matter of months, I bought enough paper and supplies to make illuminated books until I die of old age. When I came across a book on making greeting cards, I thought, “Oooh, another use for all these supplies!” I started making my own cards simply to use all the pretty paper lying around my house. It seemed practical at the time.

It’s Amy’s fault that I got hooked on the serious stuff. She asked if I had tried rubber stamping and introduced me to Stampin’Up!, a diabolically clever rubber cartel that sells a coordinated product line of stamps, ink, paper, ribbon, and accessories. I was already so deeply deluded that the typographical cuteness and egregious exclamation point in the company name didn’t even bother me.

I now own an undisclosed (because it’s simply too embarrassing) number of rubber stamps, most of them very well used.

Don’t judge me. Please. It really is an illness, and I can’t help myself.

Once I realized how addictive stamping is, I vowed to ignore completely the siren’s call of my paper-pushing friend Claire, a Creative Memories consultant, to start scrapbooking. There wasn’t enough time in my life for calligraphy, illumination, bookbinding, and cardmaking as it was. I had a baby to raise, a house to keep up, a long-established reading habit, and a husband.

Then the Twin Towers fell, and I had another baby, and my husband went off to war, and preserving memories seemed like a really good idea all of a sudden, and I’m now the proud creator of hundreds of scrapbook pages.

While I haven’t turned my husband into a paper addict (he has his own, even more expensive addictions, I mean, hobbies), he has become an enabler for me. He looks at my scrapbooks and says things like “I had forgotten all about this! I’m glad you scrapped it.” This warms my heart because initially George opposed my “cutting up pictures.” When we’re old and in the nursing home, my scrapbooks will give us great comfort. More importantly, our boys appreciate looking at the scrapbooks and seeing their own lives unfold in lovingly documented detail. Nothing says “I love you” like a scrapbook.

At least, that’s what I tell myself.

Compared to nasty and illegal addictions that result in midnight raids on your house by uniformed law enforcement in riot gear, paper crafting is really pretty benign. In fact, it has done so many wonderful things for me personally that I hardly know where to start. Consider these benefits:

1) I get feedback, and it’s not about weeds and cobwebs. People tell me what they think of my creations, and mostly it is good. One nice lady wants to sell my cards in her boutique in Cincinnati. I find this very satisfying. Maybe my need for praise is a bit pathetic, but everyone deserves to have a pat on the back every now and then, don’t you think? You get it at work, in the form of evaluations or pay raises or stock options, and you get it at school, in the form of grades. You don’t get it staying at home scrubbing toilets.

2) I don’t have to do the same thing twice. My cards are all different. Ditto for the scrapbook pages. The variety spices up my life and balances out the drudgery and monotony of chores nicely.

3) Once a project is done, it does me the courtesy of staying done. I don’t ever have to do it again. I can come back to look at it, months later, and it still doesn’t need to be redone. Not like toilets or weeds at all. As former jailbird Martha says, that’s a good thing.

4) I found a medium for creative self-expression that adds color, texture, and joy to my life. The value of this is inestimable. Not to mention the absolute coolness of so many gadgets and doodads involved. I mean, have you ever SEEN a Bind-It-All? Click the link, and tell me if it isn’t the coolest gadget ever engineered.

My house now contains a whole room dedicated to my hobby, and I spend time in that room almost every day. Yes, there are giant, golden-retriever colored dust bunnies in the corners of my wood floors, dirty dishes in my sink, and toys scattered all over my house, but I’m happy, giddily happy. Isn’t that worth something?