Appeasing the Creative Beast Within- Another Last-Minute Craft

My daughter's last day of school is tomorrow, and we thought we ought to give her teacher a gift.  Of course we didn't talk about it until yesterday.  Instead of just having my daughter just make her a nice card, or pull out one of those "thank you" cards I keep for emergencies, we decided to make her a Kafflower brooch from a pattern we had bought at the craft store a few months ago.  We were going to make Mother's Day gifts from it, but never got around to it....*sigh*

my daughter's Kafflower brooch

Anyways, last night I cut out the fabric pieces and tonight I assisted my daughter in putting it together.  She did all the sewing of the petals herself!  I sewed the center puffball together and she helped hot-glue everything into place.  It turned out really nice.  I'm proud of her and she is proud of her gift.

Incidentally, if you crafty folks out there want a quick project you can take on the road with you or accomplish a couple in a weekend, the Kafflower seemed to be pretty easy and turned out cute!  I think it would be a great one for crafty kids (my 7-year-old daughter loved it).

I got lucky with this project.  It turned out to be pretty easy to get done.  The hardest part was finding a pin bar to use with it (I forgot to run to the craft store for this crucial item, but I managed to appropriate an abandoned one I found in my jewelry box).

Quite often, I begin a last-minute project like this with good intentions and end up staying up all hours of the night to finish something that wasn't required in the first place.

Here are some examples of my zeal totally overruling reason and discretion to appease the creative beast within:

• various Halloween costumes
• scrapbook for our foreign exchange student
• shadow box for retiring coworker
• homemade potholders for wedding gifts
• crafts sold at Holiday Bazaar

Just thinking of those projects actually makes me proud...  They were all begun with ridiculously short lead-time, but somehow I managed to pull them off.  What kind of madness is this?  It's not exactly an adrenaline rush, but similar.  I think I just seize any opportunity to express creativity because I don't exactly have a creative day job.  It's like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or Superman and Clark Kent.  Mild-mannered data monkey by day, amateur craftsman by night!  Okay, I'm not kidding anyone here.  "Mild-mannered" does not describe me... but that's a topic for another post.

And where does this ambition come from? Some of that was mentioned in a previous post.  Over the last few years, I have been discovering and embracing this creative side of myself.  I've been testing it out, and many times, even liking the result.  Sometimes, it's to "break a rule," or at least to defy conventionality.  Many times it is for purely aesthetic reasons- just to create something beautiful.

I suppose there are worse things in the world than starting too many projects at the last minute: apathy,  laziness, knowingly underwriting toxic mortgages, and talking in the movie theater (there's a special level in Hell for those folks) to name a few.