…mischief managed…

If there’s one thing I love more than a new project, it’s a new project with the Minister for Shenanigans coming along for the ride. We’ve been doing the remote friendship thing, and long distance craft dates, since before covid made zoom cool. Connection + accountability + creativity = my favourite kind of projects. Over the last fourteen years, we’ve dreamed up some amazing, inspiring, fun, motivating projects. This week, we have pulled off what is quite possibly the coolest project yet. Cooler even than the Carrose San Diego photobook I made a few years back.

Back in April 2019, I had a day trip for a homeschool excursion. This particular day, the venue was 3 hours away, and leaving home at 5.30am meant the children were either sleeping, reading, or generally cursing their fool of a mother who thought this was a good idea. Do you know what happens when I am left unsupervised and unoccupied for THREE HOURS? All the ideas, that’s what. This particular day, I had been thinking about blogging and how the community has changed over the years, which lead to thinking about different forms of media I was looking for and couldn’t find which lead to…

In those three hours, I managed to not only come up with the idea to start a podcast, but started brainstorming episode topics. For the next couple of days, we both kicked the concept around semi-seriously, but not committing to it. 2019 was pretty spectacularly crappy, in a personal, pre-pandemic-crappiness, kind of way. it was a fun concept for sure, and the conversations pretending this could be a thing we could do were just the distraction I needed from real life. That same real life kept me from actually pursuing it with any level of seriousness, or, to be honest, interest. House selling, family deaths, family weddings, family illness, prepping to move, finishing our cabin, and wrapping up the year with bushfires. 2020 wasn’t here to play either, and between moving, floods, and plagues, we mentioned the idea a bit, but it never went anywhere beyond me playing with some vlog style chats on my instagram stories.

And then. Then, at the end of August, in the middle of lockdown, I found our original list of episodes, and in a lovely little example of how my mojo and inspiration is so so very time dependant, I dived straight in. I looked into how to record a two person podcast remotely. We kicked around some names, but nothing caught. Spring hit and with it a burst of energy, and in between cleaning All The Things, I kept thinking it over. The next day, I wrote a blog post referring to Car as “The Minister for Shenanigans” for the first time, a reference to a fave show we watched “together” earlier in the year. Six hours after giggling away to myself with the moniker, IT HIT ME. The Ministry for Crafty Shenanigans. I even have a hashtag on insta for our joint projects – #carweneedahashtagforourshenanigans. The Minister agreed it was absolute genius.

We now had an outline of a ten episode first season, and a name. If there is one thing we love, it’s dropping into the whirlpool of inspired new project energy and bouncing off each other until things are so awesome and take on a life of its own. That’s exactly what happened here. Technically, it was still just an idea. We had no firm plans to actually DO this. I was also knee deep in birthday season, with the first birthday of the four (that all happen within a five week span) only days away. We kept crafting. We kept chatting. I kept blogging. I got the birthday done.

At this point, we are four days past rediscovering our original season outline. I got a flash of inspiration and started outlining an episode to see if we could actually make it a thing, and well… I kinda loved it? While Car read it over, I accidentally fell over a domain name purchase. And an instagram account. And had a brilliant idea for a logo. We still weren’t fully committed. “We can always record a couple of eps and then decide” is a thing I actually said. Except, the more we chatted, the more excited we got. The episode outline got finished. A couple of friends found our instagram. The more we chatted, the more ideas we got for future episodes, and the more we started to think we could actually make this a thing.

Last week, we hit high gear. After two and a half years of talking and thinking, and a month of half-planning, we got caught up in our own momentum. We recorded and episode. We got the website set up. We submitted it to Apple Podcasts. We got approved by Apple Podcasts. We sent it out to beta listeners. In between panicking about what we had done to ourselves, we also had so so many “OH MY GOSH WE COULD…” conversations, inspired in so many ways to better connect and encourage the community we hope to build.

Today, at 9am, we took a great big breath, and half excited, half nervous, we officially sent it out into the world. Welcome to The Ministry Of Crafty Shenanigans podcast.

We are aiming for it to feel like sitting around the craft table, chatting with friends. We envisage our listeners sitting, project in hand, or maybe a cuppa, joining us at our metaphorical table for 10 or 15 minutes each week, chatting all thing crafty and creative. Almost like a bite-sized snippet of our quilt camp conversations. Our description says “a podcast about creativity, community, collaboration, and connection”, and that’s at the core of our planning. Whether we are talking about finding inspiration, or managing our works in progress, or how we have built such a solid long-distance friendship, we hope you can find something in there to encourage you in your own creativity and wider connections.

New episodes drop every Friday at 9am AEST, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or to stream direct on our website. Season one is ten episodes long, and we have so many fun conversations planned. We hope you love our latest collaboration as much as we do!