Unfinished Projects

Honestly, I don’t know how other bloggers do it.  I know a few people who post on their blog every single day, but I don’t know how.  I can’t keep up.  I started off this year doing so well.  I was even a few weeks ahead of myself at one point, but here we are in September, and I can’t even manage to get out one post a week.  I have this problem with everything I do.  I start out with a great routine and the best of intentions, and then somewhere along the way, something chaotic happens that sends me into a tailspin.  My routine gets scrambled like yesterday’s eggs, and there is no putting this Humpty Dumpty back together again.

Take for instance, my 365 project.  I kept up with my daily art journal project faithfully through mid-May, but a weekend retreat with the girls side-tracked me and I skipped one day, foolishly thinking I would catch back up the next day.  Did I do it? No, but I am happy to report that I did start working on it again, eventually, and even though I am behind, I still get every bit as much joy from the process as I ever did.

So why did I start working on my project again?  Because even if it is behind, I will eventually finish it, and what a great sense of accomplishment I will have when it is finally done!  I just can’t give up on something I’ve started.  There is something in me that demands that I finish it, otherwise I’ll be riddled with guilt over the time and money I’ve wasted.  And that’s exactly what an unfinished project is – a waste of time and money. 

So go on, get out there and dig up those old projects you started but never finished.  Let’s make September the “Unfinished Projects Month” and see how many projects we can get done.  To make it a little more challenging, and maybe a little more enticing, I will offer a prize to the person who completes the most projects!  Here are the rules:

• Complete as many projects as you can between now and September 30.  Contest ends 12:00 AM CDT, October 1, 2013.
• Items can be any arts or crafts project, but must be something started or purchased but never finished.  Examples of projects might be scrapbook page kits, crocheted afghans, mini albums, quilts, paintings, etc.
• Items must be distinctly different projects; multiples of the same item will be counted as one project.  For example, if you crocheted 3 scarves from the same pattern, they count as one project.  However, if you crochet 3 scarves from 3 different kits, they count as 3 separate projects.
• Take a picture or pictures of your projects and upload them to our Flickr Project Gallery at http://www.flickr.com/groups/cn365/ before 12:00 AM CDT, October 1, 2013.
• Post on the Crafty Neighbor Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/craftyneighbor and tell us how many unfinished projects you finished.
• Check this blog on Tuesday, October 8 for an announcement of the winner (I need time to check out all those projects!).
• Between now and then, I will dig out some cool prize that I know you want and I’ll post it here.  So stay tuned, and start working on those projects!  Good luck!

The prompt for this journal entry was "Once in a lifetime".  I couldn't resist stripping down the famous Talking Heads song to a few significant lines.  In case you wondered, this is the page that I previewed on July 23 in my "Getting Stuck" article.  I layered on some gesso before using my stencils and Dylusions ink spray.

Save It Quick Or You'll Be Sick!

Have you ever had one of those days?  You know the kind I’m talking about … one of those days when you’ve spent hours working on a project and suddenly your computer crashes and you lose all your work?  Apparently, a bit of regularly scheduled maintenance resulted in one of those days for Blogger, causing data corruption, intermittent outages, disappearing posts, and a host of other errors.  I think everything is up and running now, but I’m sure the chaos was frustrating for everyone involved.

It reminds me of the time many, many years ago when my audio engineer husband stayed up working all night on a soundtrack for a high school musical.  He’d been working for more than 8 hours straight on one piece of music when the computer suddenly froze and he lost every bit of work he’d done.  After that, he was often known to say, “Save it quick, or you’ll be sick.”  Apparently, my daughter never learned that lesson, because years later, she stayed up all night working on a very important report for school.  She was so relieved to finish it up, but instead of saving it first, she went straight to print.  Unfortunately, she accidentally hit the power button on her computer instead. 

I can’t count the number of times I have worked for hours on a blog and hit “Post” only to have the computer freeze, crash, or tell me I was no longer logged in.  My daughter reminds me every week to type it up in my word processor first and then copy and paste it into Blogger.  More recently, my son’s cell phone died and he lost all the phone numbers he had stored in it.  When I asked him if he had backed them up in his address book on his computer, of course his reply was “no”. 

Fortunately, for my son, all of the numbers he had stored in his phone were pretty recent ones from people he sees pretty much every day, so he was back in business within a couple of days.  Websites and blogs are not always so easy to find.  Have you ever stumbled upon a great website but failed to bookmark it and then was never able to find it again.?  I certainly hope that at least a few of the people who’ve stumbled across my little craft blog like it enough to want to come back.  If you’re one of them, I hope you’ll take my husband’s advice -- don’t let some random mishap spoil all our crafty fun!  Keep track of this scrappy little blog by clicking the “Follow” link on the left.  I’ve moved it up to the top of the sidebar for your convenience. 

Come to think of it, life works pretty much in the same way.  Birthdays, Christmases and vacations go by in the blink of an eye and then they’re gone forever.  That’s one of the reasons why we scrapbook – to preserve the memories that are important to us before we forget them.  So save it quick, or you’ll be sick, and don’t forget to journal!