'If you make happiness your goal, then you're not going to get to it… The goal should be an interesting life."

Dorothy Rowe

Monday 3 October 2011

Marks out of three?

At least 2. Possibly even 2.5.P1000908

  1. “Add any mail to ‘Postage of Time’  [POT].”

    Notice the posh cream one? A. has threatened to send me a lime green one. Red letter days I’ve heard of – but lime green letter days? [Before anyone writes to tell me, I know red letter days have nothing to do with the mail.]image
  2. “Make 20 brown paper tubes, and 20 plastic bag twists and tie them together with garden twine.” √ 
  3. “Hang the latter from a tree and take their photographs.” X

After naming POT, I’m tempted to go back to naming my pieces. At first I tried to think of sensible names - ‘Plastic or Paper’? – but of course things rapidly got silly - ‘Tweedledum and Tweedledee’? ‘Pinky and Perky’?

I would probably have got round to the hanging if I hadn’t:

  1. Spent 10 minutes looking for the twine [which is green, the photo lies]. Because it is green, I keep it in the green thread drawer – except it appears that I don’t, because I found it in the string box. That is more logical, if only because there is more room in the string box. Well, there was till I bought some more. I’m quite partial to string – especially with brown paper. [Not to eat, you understand.]
  2. Spent 10 minutes looking for the eraser stamps I carved on Friday. [No, I didn’t need them today, using them wasn’t on the list, I just realised I couldn’t find them while I was looking for the twine.]P1000917
  3. Spending another 10 minutes carving a new stamp and proofing it. [As you can see, it isn’t a very complex stamp.]Just when I got to the stage when I remembered that the drawback to carving out all 6 faces of an eraser is that it guarantees you end up with inky fingers, I remembered that I’d washed the previous stamps after using them and left them to dry by the sink. So now I’ve got three stamps with very similar patterns of lines on them…
  4. Getting perfectionist about not twisting the bindings on the tubes  - or rather, only twisting them back to front, not left to right. This led to frequent unbinding.
  5. Getting perfectionist about getting the right amount of twist on the plastic bags.

Is it is possible to be a perfectionist when you are working with brown paper, plastic bags and garden twine? For ‘perfectionist’, read ‘mad’.

Despite all that, I enjoyed myself. I am finding the ‘3 a day’ lists quite motivating, even though I didn’t finish. I think this is because they make me break tasks into smaller parts, in order to make them doable in a day, and there is a greater sense of achievement.

The idea came from Margaret Cooter, although I’m not using her system. I started with bits of paper, but I’ve now redesigned my college planning sheets to include space for daily lists. I am including mundane things in the lists as well - tomorrow’s includes the dreaded word ‘mending’.

Of course I reserve the right to change my mind in the morning – these things should be spontaneous.

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