I wanted to say hello before we embark on our monthly themes and welcome any new readers to the blog. For three years now I have made a calendar and each month write a little blurb about whatever it is we are looking into at that moment. This year I have chosen to take us through the highs and lows of personal projects and hopefully guide you to following through on something you have always wanted to do. This was a little introduction that I wrote on the Facebook page that goes with this year's calendar under the name Pearls of Random...for crafty creatives - open to anyone who owns a calendar.
"I remember the exact moment that I came up with the idea for this year’s calendar.
About this time last year I was having a chat and a coffee with a friend at our local café The Fish Bowl where I had hung my pictures for the 2018 calendar. A couple of friends of my buddy were at the café and came over to say hello. Through chit chat it transpired that I was the person on the walls. Both friends immediately spoke of their own creative dreams with such passion – one lady had always wanted to write her families history from detailed diaries she had found and the other lady was a lover of watercolour painting.
I was so excited to hear about their projects and told them that it was completely possible for them to start their creative dreams. We had such a big chat about it and the friends were ramped up and raring to go, but when I asked them what they thought they might do to get started their air seemed to escape them – their enthusiasm waned. What just happened? I could hear the doubts come flooding out as quickly as the passion had flowed – they looked around the pictures on the walls and spoke with such a foreign description about my stuff. I realized they were looking at the pictures on the wall and thinking that somehow my creative project was different to theirs. That somewhere I had a confidence, a strategy, a great plan, a secret that they did not have.
I wanted to exclaim – NOOOO this is just me and my wonky self – this is just the stuff I do – I don’t have a clue what I am doing, where I am going or how to do this either. I just started, made stuff, made some more stuff, step by step. I throw pictures away, yell at paper, moan to my husband, doubt myself (a lot!!)…I nearly passed out when my pictures were first hung on the walls. I don’t have money, or public validation. No one is telling me that this is what I should be doing in any way. If I stopped doing this today – no one would notice – I don’t say this in a poor me kind of way – I just mean that you can start or you cannot, but it is completely up to you.
You don’t need permission, professional credentials, a huge space, or a work contract…you just need to take that first step. That little step that is taking you closer to your creative project you have inside. Taking the time to think about the journey of a project I have chosen 12 themes to help you along. You may see yourself, you may not, and you will probably have a few more stages you would like to add."
I will check in again next week to talk more fully about January's "Following my own yellow brick road", but in the meantime if you would like to join the private discussion group do pls head on over to the Facebook Page as well. My hope for the page is that we can be an invisible support and helping hand you can take along your way, especially when we start to step out of our comfort zone. I see us keeping each other accountable for the personal, quiet goals we set ourselves, the little ones, which may or may not lead to the bigger ones. Whatever we achieve at the end is not the prize, it is what we achieve in taking a step, and then another towards that inner dream we all have that makes us secretly smile.
I look forward to getting to know you better, learn about your projects, cheer at your successes and nod knowingly at the things that are making you wail. Until next week. Cx