Projects

End of August update. I made it through a lot of these things!

I always have more projects going on or in my mind than I can reasonably finish. I used to feel awful about that and hate myself for not following through on all my ideas. I thought of myself as someone who never finished anything. Luckily, at some point, I realized that the finished thing is not always the point. In fact, most of the time the finished thing is just a by-product of the really interesting part of work, which is the getting from idea to object and all which that entails.

Another idea that helps me cope with dead projects is that in some way, I haven't got 10 projects, or 20, or whatever. Really I only have one project, which is to make things, and all of these other subtasks are just part of that big project, which has no end and can't be finished. If I get half way through a project and then lose interest, that project can be considered finished. Whatever I've learned in getting that far is part of the bigger task.

Losing interest in a project is a good sign that it's not an interesting thing to be doing and deserves to be ditched.

Sometimes a project will stay on my imaginary to-do list for years before I do anything about it. For example, this year I learned how to make a kaleidoscope, something I had been thinking about for a long, long time. I just took a pinhole camera workshop. I've been thinking about pinhole photography and even researching it for at least two or three years.

Here is my current list of projects. It'll be interesting in six months to see which, if any, have been done.

* Convert my Brownie into a pinhole camera done
* Build a stereoscopic pinhole camera that can use 120 film
* Make + send out kaleidoscope-making kits done
* Learn how to knit toe-up socks done (+ firestarters)
* Fix and funkify my noise-cancelling headphones
* Illustrate Stooger (friend's children's book)
* Make a lego movie with Vigo
* Build a robot
* Set up a website for Vigo to help him keep in touch with his friends
* Help improve the Rolling Family website done
* Improve this blog (own domain, make it look better, structure it better to share with Justine and maybe other people)
* Finish the two sweaters I've started knitting
* Finish sewing together the shirts I printed and cut two years ago done

I know there are other projects out there I'm forgetting, which is a good sign that they aren't going to happen in the next six months. I'm teaching a screenprinting workshop at the end of April at Willoughby & Baltic. That's a project in itself.

It would be nice to have an art vacation. Maybe a month in a studio space with somebody bringing you food a couple times a day. Someplace with a view. Someplace where you cook dinner at night over an open fire on the beach.