Creative Inventory Part 5

What activates your creative energy? What deactivates it?

I don't think I can even list all the things that get me in the mood to create!! I am inspired always by beautiful things. Now wait, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so what can I possibly mean by that? I guess it's more complicated than simply "I am inspired by beauty".

Remember how I said I have a natural talent for seeing the possible? It goes along with that. I am inspired by blank canvasses. A raw, uncut piece of fabric. A huge open stretch of land that has nothing growing on it yet. Entire days where I have nothing that has to be done! (I can't wait for Wednesday, my day off this week!) A basket-full of balls and skeins of yarn that haven't been woven into anything yet.

Sunny days inspire my Earthiness and pull me out-of-doors into the sunshine to dig in the dirt, to design gardens of flowers and vegetables and fruits and to adore the beauty of Creation.

Stormy days bring out my 'hand-made' creativity. All things fine arts are produced on stormy days - new dresses, new crochet designs, new tales of haunted house, pirates, and best friends, new drawings and worst of all - encourage me to redecorate a room of the house. (This occasionally gets me into trouble.)

Days that are in between stormy and sunny make me want to play the piano for hours and sing. Cloudy days don't give a lot of leniency for sitting around, nor do they make me want to coax seedlings to grow taller, and so my heart begins to sing the blahs away.

BUT I begin to feel drained when the project has carried on for too long. This is my creative downfall and why I am so terrible at follow-through. I begin projects with gusto, anxious to bring the thoughts in my head into reality. Once they begin to take much longer than I originally planned - especially sewing projects if they must be ripped apart and resewn - I begin to lose my creative spark toward that project and it will become just another statistic in my pile of things unfinished. When something no longer stimulates my eye for the possible, I lose interest, and, often, move on to the next stimulus. This is something that makes me believe that I need a partner to work with - someone to hold my nose to the grindstone.

Deadlines are especially effective for me. If I promised to deliver something the next day, you can bet I will pull an all-niter to finish it!

Bathroom Break

Here we are - January 3!

I have a bit of a head cold, but nothing terribly serious. Just enough to make me slightly miserable.

Avery and Danny are coming over today to help me work on the upstairs bathroom. Our most pressing goal for the rest of the winter is to get that bathroom working again so that we can actually use it. Our house belonged to Alex's grandparents for forty years and there are some very strange quirks. For example - they really have something against using the bathroom that is part of their master suite. In the house they now reside in, they do not use their master bathroom, although, like ours, it is attached to their bedroom. They walk down the hall to a second bathroom. When they lived in our house, they walked all the way downstairs to use a tiny, cramped bathroom on the first floor rather than make a mess in the large, spacious, master bathroom directly next to their bed. The result? The master bathroom has a seriously bad case of dry rot and the fixtures don't work properly. We are not afriad of using the master bathroom, but we can't until we get it working again.

I'm not a plumber, so I can't actually replace the shower fixtures by myself. However, I can strip wallpaper, paint and scrub, so those are the goals of the day. Here are a couple "BEFORE" pictures.

I know this is hard to believe, but I actually have already done a bit of work in this bathroom. I replaced all the brass cabinet pulls with polished silver. The previous owners also had a serious affinity for brass. I think it's a generational thing because brass just screams "I did my decorating in the 80's and never looked back!!" It's definitely time to update things a bit.

If you will notice the green bathmat on the floor, and hearken back to what I just said about the silver hardware, I will give you a general overview of the room's eventual theme.

As you get to know me a bit better, you will find that I am a very elemental person. I am certainly very earthy - that is evident by my green thumb and my love of playing in the dirt. I drew the idea for this bathroom from an experience I had walking through the park one very early morning, when everything was dewey and silvered, and the sun was just beginning to rise, and all the foliage was brand new and pale. (It was in April.) And so, later today or perhaps tomorrow, when you see the finished product, I hope you will agree that the inspiration rendered an appropriate result.

Ta-ta for now! There is a lot of work to be done today.