Eggstremly Enjoyable...

My fingers now have several layers of paint that will be difficult to explain tomorrow morning at church.

Friday after church, Erin and I went over to her high school to help paint two young men in their unitards for the upcoming CATS musical.

This morning, we sat down as a family to dye our Easter eggs.  For Erin’s friend, Holly, who had slept over the night before, this was a first.  She had never dyed eggs before so we introduced her to just how many colours a family of artists need to prepare for this eggstravaganza.

We showed her how to use a white crayon to do wax resist patterns and she proved that creativity lives within us all as she made her very first Easter egg ever.

Bethany thought this one of hers was worth showing off...

and Erin liked how this egg of hers turned out.

I always take the longest to do my eggs because I keep trying to get as many colours and as much detail as possible on each egg.  For me, it isn’t about how fast I get them done but how much fun I have as I play with the possibilities.  This one was really neat with several layers of wax crayons over the different colours.

My favourite egg cracked when I dropped it from just a few inches above the table as it slipped from my hands... a reminder of how fragile egg painting can be, even when working with hard-boiled eggs. in the end, it is worth all the work!

Tonight,  I helped my best friend spray paint pieces of styrofoam to turn into a fence on the CATS set and added yet another layer of paint to my fingers and no doubt sacrificed a few brain cells to the fumes...but it was enjoyable.

INHALE:  How we celebrate the special occasions in our lives gives us endless opportunities for creativity if we just look for them, give ourselves time to savour it and experience it, ultimately making it part of the celebration itself.

EXHALE:  Whatever way in which you celebrate the turning of the seasons, Easter or Passover, find a moment to make something, cook something, plant something or share something with those you love.  If you have never played with crayons on hard-boiled eggs, buy some kits when they come on sale in the next few days and sit down to play.  You may get messy, but you may also discover that the child within you is not as buried as you thought.

There’s No Such Thing As TOO MANY Choices...

Bethany’s fever is gone.  Her temperature was normal all day so I made her have a long, steamy bath to help her cough and wash her hair then stripped her bed and washed the sheets along with her jammies.  She was finally allowed out of her room and almost couldn’t decide what to do first.  I made the choice easy... finish up the school work you missed, then you can play now that you’re feeling better.

I may be Creative... but I am still a MOM!

Tonight, I needed a bit of colouring therapy, but the last time I had my poster out, I found myself bothered by the fact that the set only came with these colours.

So... I went on a hunt and found THESE...

There can’t possibly be anything bad about having 50 colours to choose from instead of just 10, can there?  Only that it makes me wonder where to begin!

So I picked out a section of the border that I’d been eyeing for a while and began to colour. I even added some shading detail because flat colour sort of blended together a bit too much.

As that section began to fill in, the colours really started to jump...

and when it was all done, the contrast of the black with the inner colours made it almost SING.

Nope, there’s definitely no such thing as having too many choices!

INHALE:  We all have countless choices to make each and ever day. Eat the apple or the cookie, get out of bed or hide, speed up for the yellow light or slow down, take the stairs or the elevator... the possibilities are almost endless.  Sometimes, the sheer amount of choice we have can seem overwhelming... until we remember that another name for it is FREEDOM!

EXHALE: If you like to draw, go buy yourself a new pencil, crayon or marker set and revel in the amount of colours to choose from.  If you like to cook, go buy a few new spices to play with.  If you like to craft, go explore the aisles and sale bins until you find pieces for your next project.  If you love music, check out a few new tunes outside your usual genre, but be sure to download them legally.  (iTunes Genius feature has let me discover new songs I might otherwise never have heard)  Find a way to add even more choices to your chosen path of Creativity. Your day will be richer for it, even if it takes you a bit longer to make up your mind where to begin!

Playing and Enjoying Mindless Creativity...

I booked off today.  After teaching for 2 days and getting a call to substitute teach for tomorrow and Friday, I decided last night that I needed a day to catch up on laundry, cooking, sketching and the piles on my desk.  A few weeks ago, we bought 10 lbs. of beets and tucked them in our cold storage area down in the basement.  Nick and I love beets, but 10 lbs. is a LOT of beets, especially since both of my girls are rather iffy about them.  There were also bits and pieces of other veggies in the fridge to use up, so once the girls got home and started in on homework, I decided to make a huge pot of veggie soup and process the beets.

My cookbooks all explained how much easier beets were to peel once they’d been cooked or steamed.  “The peels will just slide off!” they promised. Remembering earlier attempts to make borscht a few years ago where my hands were stained pink for weeks from peeling piles of beets, I was ready to try another technique.

Along the way, as I stood at my sink rubbing the peel off cooked beets and staring into a huge pot of blood red water, I started getting crazy, creative ideas, especially when Erin wandered by and said “Cool! Didn’t they used to dye things red with beets?”

Reaching up into the cupboard, I found a rather old dishcloth I’d knitted about 6 months ago.  (I knit a LOT of these on car trips!)

I decided to throw it into the pot to soak as I scrubbed the peels off the beets.

When I was almost done with the beets, I decided to peek at the cloth.  What a colour change!

Dumping all that colour down the sink was “Creepy Cool” according to the girls because it looked like blood!  Can you tell they are SO ready for Hallowe’en?

Of course, without a setting agent, the dye didn’t really stay long in the dishcloth.  I decided to toss it out with the scraps rather than put it in the wash and risk turning socks or underwear pink.

With all the beets processed into freezer bags or made into beet salad, it was time to relax for a while and enjoy someone else’s Creativity.

I used to fill in doodle posters like these all the time as a kid.  I bought one a few years ago and rediscovered it today while tidying my office.  There is something incredibly soothing about colouring in a few shapes at a time and watching the colours play with each other as the design begins to come to life.  I still have a LOT of white space to fill, but it was FUN... and that’s what this adventure has been all about... finding more ways to add fun and creativity to each day.

INHALE:  The Amish take delight in treating every task as important and worthy of doing to the best of your ability.  By playing and being a bit off the wall, the job of peeling and chopping up 10 lbs of beets became less tedious and more of an adventure.  I don’t think I will ever find a way to make chores like dusting feel Creative (though I’ve been known to doodle things in the dust when it gets really thick!) but for today, the challenge of looking for Creativity worked, then I got to take great delight in enjoying someone ELSE’s creation. All I had to do was colour in the shapes!

EXHALE:  When was the last time you bought a colouring book, doodle poster or printed out a mandala to colour?  Try to find one that makes your fingers itch to play with a new box of crayons or package of markers and keep it handy so that the next time you are talking on the phone, helping a child with homework, relaxing before bed or even watching television, you can colour in the next page or section of your project and have something Creative to show for your time instead of wondering where the hours went.

Hating Certain Colours...

Hate is a pretty strong word, but many of us have certain colours that we really don’t like as much as others.  Mine has always been orange.  Orange crayons are always the pointiest ones in my box and I avoid wearing the colour at all costs.  It makes me look like Mr. Spock with the flu!  I think I’ve destroyed most of the photos from the summer where the only swimsuit in town that was long enough for my torso was black with big orange and red flowers on it. Total Yuck!

On Saturday, however, I noticed something odd.  Every second picture I took of fall colours were the really orange trees against the deep blue sky.  I know what the artists out there are thinking... “Of course you liked that image.  Orange and blue are complimentary colours and thus more dramatic!”  Blues and greens are my favourite colours to work with, but maybe I have been avoiding their complimentaries more than I need to.

So I decided to play around this week to see if I could be creative with colours that I didn’t like!

INHALE:  We humans tend to form opinions on things very quickly.  We call them gut reactions.  Spread out a bunch of coloured markers or papers on a table and ask people to choose their favourites.  Most people will find more than one or two colours that they instinctively gravitate towards.  There are many cool places on the web to read up about colour theory, but the Colour Matters site and Wet Canvas were two of the neatest I found.  Think about your favourite colours.  Do they change with the times or have they remained constant in your life.  How to your favourites make you feel?

EXHALE:  Today’s project is about taking baby steps with the colour that you dislike the most.  Find some pens or markers or coloured pencils in several shades of the colour you think you dislike the most.  Spread them out next to your sketchbook and look at the variety.  What objects can you think of that come in those colours? Are there any that you like?  I don’t like orange, but I do like fall leaves, pumpkins and oranges.  Scribble a patch of each colour then write what it make you think of next to it or draw things that come in those colours.  Write your name in that colour.  Write the word LOVE in that colour.  Doodle one of your favourite patterns in that colour, but basically fill the whole page with shades of the colour you think you dislike.

I expected to dislike the process more than I did.  It was actually kind of fun.  Maybe now my orange crayons won’t be the last ones with points.

Time to Find a Box...

I  decided that today was a good excuse to go box hunting.  Not all of my Creativity explorations are going to fit in a sketchbook.  There are some that will need a safe place to be stored until this year long adventure is up.  In one of those cool moments of Serendipity that seem to be happening a lot lately,  Erin’s Grade 9 English teacher assigned them a project for next Wednesday where they have to create a “Box About Me”.  Erin will need to box up at least a dozen items that represent something about herself, her likes and her personality.

Michael’s was having a sale on photo boxes, which are a great size for stuff like this.  I’d cleaned out all of our empty shoe boxes after our expedition to Maine to buy sneakers this summer, so there were no plain boxes anywhere in our house.

So we both went box hunting, and we both had to adjust our expectations.

It was one of those days when most of the boxes on sale were just a little bit... well... ugly!

I’d been dreaming of a plain white photo box that I could decorate, decoupage and doodle on.  Instead, there were wild, loud patterns that didn’t do anything for either of us.  There were colour combinations that made me want to cringe and that got me thinking about why I react negatively to certain colours.  I almost challenged myself to take the colour I hated the most to see if I could work through that or turn it into something I liked... and then I found this box at the very bottom of the bin.

Remember those doodle posters that were around in the late 70s and early 80s?  I know I am dating myself, but they are making a comeback.  You get a huge poster with lots of black and then white spaces you can colour in. LOTS of white spaces and tiny little markers.  I loved them, but I don’t think I ever got more than halfway through a poster before it got crushed by the mess in my closet.

This pattern reminded me of those posters, so of course I grabbed it.  Erin found a marbled one in her favourite colour (red) and so the hunters returned home with their boxes.

I have dozens of markers.  I have entire marker sets filled with luscious colours that make me want to drool... but when I started to colour in my photo box shapes, I discovered a little problem...the colour was all rubbing off onto ME!

The only thing that would colour through the odd finish of the box were sharpie markers.  I only had 5 colours on hand, so I started a little bit but then decided I need to go find a sharpie marker set with a wider variety of colours.

This is going to be so much fun to work on!

INHALE:  We all need safe places to tuck our treasures.  Most of us have never lost that childhood love of picking up treasures to keep.  I could SO identify with Laura Ingalls when her pocket ripped out of her dress because she’d gathered too many pebbles!  Having a safe place to keep treasures only becomes a problem when the treasures overflow everywhere.  I am sure NONE of you have EVER had that happen with yarn, fabric, beads or anything else... right? We all have hiding spots for things, but now it’s time to make a treasure chest!

EXHALE:  Time to make a treasure chest... or at least start.  Find an empty box, basket, container or anything that speaks to you creatively.  Over the next few weeks, decorate it with paint, fabric, buttons, ribbons, paper scraps or anything else that suits your fancy.  I think I have some 3D fabric paint in a drawer somewhere that I may dig out to use on the black lid.  You don’t have to rush this experiment.  Just start out slow and see what happens.  The most important thing is to create a place to store your treasures and experiments that you will be making on this journey.