on random projects & passing the baton {blogtober day 6}

“Do you know what I miss?” 

I messaged my offsider one day, while I was in the depths of my blog archive. On the hunt for something specific, though I can’t now remember what (project details? A link for a post? Who knows), I’d found myself clicking though the “related post” links and was down a rabbit hole of ghosts of projects past, and of my past self.

“I miss the random projects where we would get an idea or see something and then just…jump straight in and do it.”

A decade ago, my blog was a wild, untamed frontier. My readers would open their Feedly of a morning with zero idea of what to expect of that day’s post. Would it be a quilt I started and finished inside of 24 hours? A flash fiction? A horse lead rope in the mail? A random challenge to actually try one of the million ideas i’d collected on Pinterest? Deciding to learn how to bind books? There was a day where I shared a graphic on Facebook, and an off hand comment from a friend had me at the craft shop within the hour, with a fist full of floss. The starting was the easy bit. The finishing? That took eight years and lockdown in a tiny house thanks to a global pandemic.

It feels like it’s been forever since I’ve felt that rush that comes with an OHMYGOSHnewprojectMUSTSTARTNOW find. Maybe Advent 2023? Even that wasn’t quite the same, more a push to capture that magic. For my birthday last year I asked for cash to buy some supplies for a new hobby, vacillating between watercolour paint making, and bobbin lacing. Once, I would have long since ordered them and be halfway through a project that was already abandoned. Now? I looked. I loaded carts. I looked some more. I pinned some stuff on Pinterest…and then I just walked away.

In the end I bought the watercolour supplies, and to date I have made exactly one batch, resulting in 2.75 half pans. It was fun, but it isn’t quite the captivating, all consuming “must make them now” new hobby it would have been a decade ago. I need to clear some other projects first to have space to let the pans dry…really, it’s just blaming my small space for what is really a solid effort at self-sabotage. Maybe I’ll make some this weekend.

And I’m not quite sure what’s shifted. Maybe it’s just that I’m older now. Maybe it’s that my kids are older, and I don’t have the glorious silence of nap time to race through chores and squeeze in a project as well…maybe it’s the lack of deadlines. I work really well with deadlines, and now I have none. My kids are old enough I don’t need to be watching them every second of the day, and once schoolwork and my chores are done, I can make time for making…but there’s no especial limit to my time. I’m racing dinner, not a crying baby. And I do think that lack of constraint makes a difference to my motivation. Maybe it’s that we no longer have a craft shop in my little country town, which means a whim has been and gone in the time it takes AusPost to get me a Spotlight parcel. Maybe it’s that I’ve tried so much of so many things? Maybe it’s that I’ve learned to think about what I buy and add to the collection; will I ACTUALLY use it or am I caught up in FOMO and be destashing it down the track. Or maybe it’s the decline of blogging and online community – it’s less fun heading down a rabbit hole with no-one to share it with, or even someone standing at the edge of the hole, insisting they won’t follow but will at least holler down to make sure you’re ok.

I was pondering all this, when my second son – no longer a toddler who’s naps mark the outlines of my stolen moments in the craft room, but 6ft2 and fond of patting me on the head as he says “hello down there tiny mama” – came rolling into the house.

“Would you like to come see my bike track?”

And off we went, to the ridge that runs through our back forest. There, over the space of a week, he’d carved out a track between the trees, and created himself a downhill bike track. Just like those rabbit holes I once fell down, he’d watched a couple of videos, gotten inspired, and immediately got to work. His commitment to his project had him out there for hours, sculpting the path to become a line both safe and fun. It was like seeing a little relic of that energy I once had, taking root in the next generation.

Of a Friday night, now we have teenagers, bedtimes are more a vague idea of something that might have happened once, and my daughter, closing in on her fifteenth birthday, will often wander out around 9pm, as I’m finishing my cup of tea and debating one more episode or should I head to bed, with a request for a tool or some fabric or a random “do you have?”. As the rest of the house winds down, her room remains the one island of light late into the wee hours, cutting and stitching and painting and creating. She’ll upcycle an old pair of trousers into a cute bag, or make a stuffed key ring, or sneak in at 11pm to give me a heart attack and ask if she can use the oven to bake some polymer clay and maybe a batch of brownies (obviously not at the same time). 

As much as I miss the days where that almost-manic, hyper fixation-like energy drove the majority of my creating and blog writing, I also love this era, where I get to see the fruits of that labour; it’s a reminder that creativity as a mother is never selfish, and instead, as I found myself in my making, I also instilled a sense of joy-in-creating in my children. One of my favourite books when I had when the children were tiny, was The Creative Family; one of the key takeaways to raising creative kids, was to let the kids see you being creative. I will confess it wasn’t necessarily an active lesson I was trying to instil, but by normalising inspiration bursts and making for the fun of making, these wee small (or not so small) folk of mine have taken up the mantle and run with it.

I think, overall, I can take it as a win, to pass the creative energy torch to the next generation. One day, I hope they too can look back on their deep dives as The Good Old Days.