I’m Feeling Creative Right Now

And Haven’t Decided What to Do

See, the thing is that I have been a maker of things ever since I was a kid. I remember one of the first things I made was a guitar. I found a square block and a thin piece of wood. I hammered them together, added rubber bands, and played my own guitar. I’ve never learned how to actually play the guitar and I have two of them. The latest problem involves my frozen shoulders (recovering) and a rather large midsection. I just can’t hold the guitar properly.

What I have a hankering for right now is to create something. I don’t want to use somebody else’s pattern, but I will certainly use their idea.

I crochet, I sometimes knit, and I sew like a wiz. Put those together, and I might have something.

Well, I asked myself, what do I need? I need a new robe, and I need a new nightgown. Granny squares or rectangles made from crochet are easy. There is no shaping. No curves, although I could do curves. Slightly problematic since I will need two of whatever gets curved. I could write down what I do with the first piece, like an underarm piece. Being a Virgo, I would really like the other piece to match, but now that I think about it, who cares?

Having lived in the same place for the last 30 years, I have not had the opportunity to downsize. In fact, we are stuffed to the gills. I could find a sheet somewhere and have that part be the lower part of a nightgown or robe, come to think of it, and the top part be something I crocheted. If it itched, I could line it with more of the sheet.

What about a patchwork robe? I’ve got loads of material. I could applique stuff to the robe. Whatever I made, sold on the open market, would be an $800 boudoir set. And all I would involve is my time. Would I sell it? Of course not. I make stuff for myself and my husband, like fingerless gloves that really come in handy when I am writing on the computer in the wintertime. If I had a name as a designer, I might consider selling the stuff I make. I just get joy from making things.

Or, instead of such an ambitious project, I could make something small. We recently got new neighbors in the next house over. The little girl is four years old, and she loves her animals and dollies. I still don’t know her first name. Her mother says she changes it every day, though when I met her, she was Yuri and had kept that name the longest for three days. I bet she’d like a toy or toys. To make eyes that need to be child safe, I could embroider them and not use the plastic eyes available online.

I was also a member some years ago of a Facebook group called Feel Better Friends. They have a standard doll pattern for all the dolls donated to sick kids with cancer. There is a wig for the doll, too for all the kids who have lost their hair during treatment. The idea is to use the basic pattern, and then, from a photo of the child, you match everything you can; skin color, hair, eyeglasses, oxygen tubes, and interests. At the time, I was still working and didn’t have time to make a doll, but I seem to remember somewhere reading that after the doll was made, you put it into your freezer for a number of days to make sure it didn’t have germs on it. Anyway, you have to audition by making a doll to get to the point of making a specific doll for a specific kid.

The other thing I need are a couple of new doilies for our parakeet. He generally needs new ones every couple of years. They are only 2 inches in diameter from crochet cotton, so very dainty work. They hang in his cage, and he wrestles and argues with them. They end up looking like fuzzy tiny dish rags. Sometimes I go out into the living room, and he is squawking up a storm, swinging back and forth on one of them. Right now, they look like little fuzz balls he has roughed them up so much. So, out of anything I could do, I could make him a new one this afternoon. And, no, he has never gotten stuck on it.

So, that’s what I did this afternoon.