30 Days of Creativity – Week 1

One of my June goals was to participate in 30 Days of Creativity for the second year in a row. Here’s my report for Week 1!

This was a great week! I did a lot of fun little things.

June 1 – I started off easy with a project I’ve been working on for months — Emma’s cross stitch Christmas stocking. I got started back in November and December, and then in languished for a while until I picked it up again in April. I’ve made slow but steady progress since then. I leave it out next to the couch where I can see it, and that’s enough of a reminder to keep at it. Cross stitch is a pretty mindless activity, so it’s easy to add some stitches while hanging out with Jose and watching TV. As you can see from the photo, it’s got a snowman theme. I estimate I’m ~20% complete right now.

June 2 – My friend Melissa has some cool magnetic photo sleeves in her cubicle, and a few weeks ago after finally using my Silhouette cutting machine for the first time, I realized I could make some neat “frames” on my own. I ordered some adhesive magnet paper (sticky on one side, magnet on the other) and my idea worked perfectly! I stuck scrapbook paper to the adhesive side, designed a frame shape in Illustrator, and then figured out how to (clunkily) import that into the Silhouette software. After one false start because I didn’t install the cutting blade correctly, it worked like a charm. I’m so in love with these!

June 3 – I laid out and ordered my first-ever photo book! I can’t believe I’ve never done one of these until now. I went with Blurb and am excited to see how it turns out.

June 4 – In some of my blog surfing, I came across an idea for a computer desktop “organizer.” I am really bad about keeping my desktop cluttered with files, and it makes it rather difficult for me to ever quickly find reference material or other documents I might need. I took 20 minutes and whipped up my own version of a desktop organizer, and I am not even a bit embarrassed to admit how ridiculously happy this makes me. I’ve got 3 categories that are appropriate for my two primary roles — Emergency Operations and Russian Vehicles — and one box for Other. The hardest part was figuring out how to size things just right, but that just involved finding the monitor resolution, dividing by the number of icons that can fit from left to right and top to bottom, and drawing appropriately sized boxes. (The sizing is also designed such that when I switch from docking station to laptop and the display resolution changes, my icons won’t scatter randomly.)

June 5 – More cross stitch.

June 6 – I bought two yards of home decor fabric at Ikea over a year ago to make some throw pillows but never got around to it. Throw pillows are SUPER easy to make, so yesterday I prepped the fabric and I plan to sew them up today.

Until next week!