Santa’s Workshop

It’s been all about Santa’s Workshop here, working out new designs, tweaking, re-doing, making messes and mistakes and going back in to redesign!  Designing is a never-ending process that takes place behind the scenes in all studios where after sometimes weeks or months of work have little or nothing to show for it.  Often the whole concept gets scrapped. Sometimes we are persistent and are lucky enough to find where we went wrong and what we were after.  These are the ones that pass muster and make it to a final product that’s worthy of showing.

It’s really quite astonishing how hard we artists work sometimes, especially when we get little or no external rewards for what we do.  Some give up when at first we don’t succeed.  They walk away and say “I’m not good at that.” or I have no talent.”  They think art just comes easily to those who are talented.  Others like me are driven to keep on keepin’ on until we figure it out – what went wrong and how to solve the problems that arise.

Artists are really problem solvers and are inclined to want to solve the problem.  I guess more importantly, we think we CAN solve the problem rather than think that we just aren’t talented.  We know that everything good takes hard work and we have faith in ourselves that we might have it in us to succeed.  We might not, in all cases for sure, but we know that we can set aside the failed efforts and proceed with the next experiment.

In this case, at first I thought it was my sewing skills that was causing problems for me.  Add to that this is some very small work for to do with arthritis. But it turned out, the real main problem was my sewing machine which really needs to get tuned up but has to wait.  I realized that there were some serious nicks in the needle plate again, so I used some very fine sandpaper to do my best at minimizing the effects of the thread getting derailed by the nicks.  Mind you, these nicks are minuscule but if you know what to look for they become very obvious.

More are in process now, refining and adjusting and evolving.  I’m enjoying the change up from working large to really small.  I love the design process even though it can be frustrating because it’s always challenging.  And because when it turns out with a product I’m happy with, it doesn’t get much better.  Of course, I didn’t say, “It doesn’t get ANY better.”  A sale or two would be better.  But I’m also happy when I gift something that comes from my heart and my hands that I’m proud of.  This is the meaning of Christmas for me.