Episode 109: Tiny Creative Joys

As I begin fiddle lessons (!), I see so many connections between my desire to learn folk music and my fascination with handcrafts.

I had seven minutes of relative quiet for recording, and I tried to make the most of it. Featuring: me, playing the violin, very badly. (And some crochet for challenging times.)

Wherein I learn to play Happy Birthday on the ukulele for a tuba duet and rekindle my commitment to dismantle the patriarchy. Really, there are no show notes other than that. You... are gonna want to hear this one.

We're gonna be in this for a long while, dear listeners. We'll be experiencing waves of grief over a long time. So it's time to focus on tiny joys, and on how our creativity can help us create some of those joys for ourselves. Show Notes That Discomfort You're Feeling Is Grief The 100 Day Project Discussion thread about our 100 Day Projects My first wee granny square I want to make next week's show like a call-in show and I need your help! Record a 1- to 2-minute clip including your name and location, what you've been making, and include a question if you have one! Email your voice memo to me at [email protected]. If you're not able to record a voice memo but you want to participate, simply email me and I may read out what you wrote. Find our weekly Zoom chat schedule and info on our video chat room over on our community site. It's free to join, and it's a super place to hang out with other creative folks.

Time is so weird right now. It's movings so slowly, and so distantly, so fluidly. There are no good words for it, really, but I think we can all agree we're living in a Twilight Zone. In "normal" life, I talk with folks a lot about finding and making time for creativity and creative projects in our daily lives. But when time is all screwed up, and when we may feel inclined to think we have way more of it on our hands than we actually do, does the challenge of fitting in creative projects go away? It sure doesn't. Have a listen for some more on this, and for some ideas for fitting creativity into your quarantine time. (Hint: I'll be doing the 100 Day Project. Maybe you, too?)

We're nine days into self-quarantine because the last person we saw before going into self-isolation last Monday called a few days later to tell us he'd been exposed. In many ways, this isn't any different an experience than what we'd been expecting, except we can't go shopping for groceries and the like. Which, at this point, actually seems like a massive difference. My kingdom for a change of scenery beyond what we get walking the dog. I'm keeping the podcast going outside of my initial plan to release an eight-episode first season. I don't yet have a predictable schedule to work with for recording and editing, and my brain is half mush these days. So at the very least, what I'll send into your ears is what we have today: some musings on quarantine and updates on how I and our community are working to keep creative folks connected and making stuff, and maybe a bit of birdsong I recorded in the woods by my house a few days ago. It's a sound that brings peace to me, and maybe to you, too. Find our weekly Zoom chat schedule and info on our video chat room over on our community site. It's free to join, and it's a super place to hang out with other creative folks.

My friend Erin has been keeping me sane these last few days that have felt like centuries. She's a new friend. We've only known each other for a few months. But meeting her felt like we were always meant to be friends, and we started texting each other daily pretty much from the start. So in these days when I'm thinking about all the folks whose friendships I've taken for granted and haven't spoken with in ages, I'm also taking solace in the habit Erin and I made from the start of just checking in on each other every day. When I had to miss posting a new episode of the pod last week, for reasons that aren't even worth going into now, seven days and three hundred years later, I knew that my next episode had to break form. I needed to ask my new friend, who's a legit, bonafide psychiatrist, to come on the show and talk about how creativity is a tool that will serve us well in this overwhelming, mind-boggling time. Dr. Erin Griffiths is a holistic psychiatrist whose practice is entirely online. Our conversation made me feel better. A whole lot better. I hope it'll help you feel better, too. Find a video of our unedited conversation over in the Podcast forum; look for Episode 106. And hit reply to let me know what you want from this podcast in the coming weeks. My listening habits are already changing, and I suspect yours are or will soon, too. Let me know where you want Mighty Creative to fit in, if there are topics you want me to cover, if you prefer heavy stuff or light stuff or what. Finally, this podcast and our online community are made possible by Supporting Members. A major perk these folks have enjoyed for over a year is regularly scheduled video chats with me by Zoom. We all decided this week that these chats should be something all community members can take advantage of, so as of next week, all members of our forums can find times each week to hang out face-to-face online with other folks who love to make stuff. I hope you'll join us.

An exploration of how our creative hobbies and interests can help to keep us grounded during times of uncertainty. Show Notes Each episode this season begins with a short clip of a maker or artist talking about a recent project they were obsessed with. I recorded all of these in April of 2019 at Camp Thundercraft, a retreat for creative businesspeople held each spring and hosted by the folks behind Urban Craft Uprising. I'm very excited to be going back to teach two classes at the 2020 retreat coming up. This week, we hear from and laugh with ceramicist Alex Simon. Um, the pickle pipes. The simplest of altered books with folded pages. Making T-shirts. April Rinne's article, Coronavirus: Time for a Flux Mindset. Let's talk about it. Subscribe to Mighty Creative on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, Soundcloud or search for it in whatever podcast app you love. And if you're enjoying it, please rate it so more people can find it and get more in touch with their creativity. Support the podcast by becoming a Supporting Member, and enjoy super perks, too.

I tried so many creative challenges and failed at every single one. In this week's podcast, hear about what I changed in my approach that finally led me not only to succeed at finishing a challenge, but that enabled me to establish a daily creative practice that didn't stress me out but made – and continues to make – me so happy. Show Notes Each episode this season begins with a short clip of a maker or artist talking about a recent project they were obsessed with. I recorded all of these in April of 2019 at Camp Thundercraft, a retreat for creative businesspeople held each spring and hosted by the folks behind Urban Craft Uprising. I'm very excited to be going back to teach two classes at the 2020 retreat coming up. This week, we hear from macrame artist Katie George. This is the La Croix project she mentions. 😍 right? In the pod I list four things you can do to set yourself up to succeed at forming or maintaining a healthy creative practice and habit. Plus a bonus you can (I mean, should if I'm gonna get all prescriptive about it) apply to the beginning stages of doing or making anything new. Here's a direct link to the group Alice formed that's just for folks working on a daily project or creative habit. Joining our online community is free! If you'd like more help identifying what you need and want from a creative habit so you can design one that's easy and natural to keep, the Year of Making ebook will help. And be sure to subscribe to my newsletter so you hear about workshops as soon as I announce them. Support the podcast by becoming a Supporting Member, and enjoy super perks, too. Subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, Soundcloud or search for it in whatever podcast app you love. And if you're enjoying it, please rate it so more people can find it and get more in touch with their creativity.

I first learned about the concept of distributed cognition when I was an undergrad studying linguistics, but I didn't know what it was called until I studied it again in grad school. For an absolutely impenetrable "explanation," read this. For our non-academic purposes, let's consider distributed cognition a way to extend our individual ability to keep stuff in mind. We might ask our spouse to help us remember to take our vitamins each morning – this is a way of extending our own memory to be aided by the memory of another person. In today's podcast, I wax on about lists. Making lists is, to me, the ultimate (and delightfully simple) distribution of my cognition. Without making lists, I am a constant victim of my routine failure to remember to do all kinds of things, from the trivial to the very important. Putting these things down into a list means I can rely on the list instead of on my flaky memory – I take each item out of my brain and put it onto paper (or into an app, or whatever). When it comes to our creative projects and fantasies, getting stuff out of our heads can be just as useful as it is for us to get anything else out of our heads. When we use the tools we have to distribute all the myriad things that are constantly swimming around in our minds, we help ourselves to think more clearly, and to fit more things into our days – because we stop losing things to our fallible memories. Have a listen, then hit reply and tell me about the creative lists you keep! Show Notes Each episode this season begins with a short clip of a maker or artist talking about a recent project they were obsessed with. I recorded all of these in April of 2019 at Camp Thundercraft, a retreat for creative businesspeople held each spring and hosted by the folks behind Urban Craft Uprising. I'm very excited to be going back to teach two classes at the 2020 retreat coming up. This week, we hear from artist, designer, and crafts instructor Robert Mahar, whom I did not fangirl upon meeting, I swear to you. I had the pleasure of taking an embroidery workshop from Robert at camp last spring, and it was fabulous. I still pull out the massive project every now and then when I need a quiet thing to do. My list-making system of choice is a bullet journal; I carry mine with me wherever I go. I do not make fancy spreads in it. In fact, I do not make any spreads in it whatsoever. (I have in the past, but I never keep up with them, so I've just stopped wasting my time with them). In addition to my daily to-do lists, I take notes from meetings and workshops in there, jot down project ideas, and put in anything else I want to protect from the bottomless abyss of my unreliable memory. I use a Leuchtturm1917 dot-grid notebook for my journal. And a Pilot V Razor Point Pen, which feels amazing against the grain of the paper. I stick one of these onto the back cover of the notebook so my pen is always handy. Also, my husband and I share a grocery-list app (also a Google calendar, and I don't know how other people who live together can manage without one of those), and I use Todoist as an online list-maker (usually for things in the future I want to be reminded about). I mentioned my unrealistically long Ravelry queue. I do want to apply such an approach to other kinds of projects I want to make, too. In the podcast I said I'd do this in my bullet journal. But maybe it'd be more useful to keep all the lists on a Trello board... Support the podcast by becoming a Supporting Member, and enjoy super perks, too. Subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, Soundcloud or search for it in whatever podcast app you love. And if you're enjoying it, please rate it so more people can find it and get more in touch with their creativity.