My experience is going to good use

About a month ago, I made the decision to return to a medieval recreation group I used to be very active in. I had thought to take it slowly, but it would appear old habits die hard.

When I was at the height of my activity the last time I was part of this group, one of the things that took up a lot of my time was the arts and sciences. I loved it because it gave me an excuse to have a dozen craft projects going on at the same time. It also gave me an excuse to learn more crafts that was more substantial than just learning them because they were there.

In fact, it is how I came to learn about wire jewelry!

Now, I’m in a different kingdom that is rather different from the kingdoms I used to play in, and in my kingdom is an alliance of parks hoping to become their own kingdom. They are working on developing resources to help guide the growth of this alliance. Among these is a guide for the arts and sciences.

We routinely have arts and sciecnes competitions, and the alliance is looking to foster better participation in these tournaments and to have guidelines to help judges assign scores. Back in my last kingdom, I actually developed guides for those wishing to participate in these tournaments, those wishing to judge in these tournaments, and those wishing to host arts and sciences events. I made the mistake of mentioning this to the head of the alliance last weekend, and am now being roped into helping the committee develop this guide.

Looks like my past is catching up with me, perhaps for the better.

Turning dust to stardust

My mother is in a sorority, and they have themes every year to guide the activities and programs for each chapter. A few years ago, the theme was “Turn Dust to Stardust”.

Mom, being the creative and earth-friendly soul that she is, made her chapter’s programs cover art with recycled materials. Bottle caps became part of trivets. Altoid tins were decorated. Frames were covered with paper made from dryer lint.

Mom likes to do things like this. She saves up interesting things that could easily be recycled and turns them into something interesting. She also likes to shop at thrift stores, where she either repairs the item and wears it as is, or she’ll find something that she can take the components from to make something else.

The latter was her intention one day when she came home from a garage sale with a very tacky necklace of matte gold beads and flecked green and white glass beads. I had been designing jewelry for a couple of years at that point, and with green being my favorite color, Mom thought I could do something with the necklace.

After it sat in my box of jewelry stuff for over a year, the necklace finally decided what it wanted to become. Two weekends ago, I sat down and cut the strand apart, restringing the gold beads onto the remaining string. Then I kept the green beads in the order they had originally been on the necklace, added in some silver E beads, and linked them together using segments of wire. It actually took two weekends because so many of the beads needed to have larger holes made so they could be loaded onto the wire I was using.

The end result is a chunky, earthy necklace that’s already receiving compliments!

It’s been said that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. What trash can you turn into a treasure?

Creating an online pattern book

This week, I’m working on an old project that I really thought would be farther along by now. I guess that accidental two-month break really didn’t help it much. I am working on my JotSpot (it will become publicly available later this week). If you are unfamiliar with JotSpot, it’s a hosted wiki currently in beta testing.

My personal project, in its entire scope, is to create a personal encyclopedia. Too many people have complained that talking to me is a challenge because my experiences are numerous and varied, so someone asked me to make a dictionary he could reference while talking to me. Originally, as I started to build the wiki pages, I started to build them strictly with the external audience in mind. As i thought about it, it occurred to me that this wiki could be a great personal reference for myself if I designed it correctly. As a result, the wiki is now growing into an online aggregation of all of my research notebooks, inspiration binders, and other online places where I have dumped things I wanted to reference later on.

The first part of the wiki that will become public will relate to my artistic interests. I’m taking lesson plans and turning them into something the average person could read and do without having me sit there and teach them. I’m putting some of my project sheets up. It’s quite an interesting task to build these resources, making sure that they are clear and needing to build a glossary just to accompany the instructions.

The next part will be to brave the wilds of Creative Commons to put a license on things to help the information be used and shared in the way I want it to be.