Getting Started — Crafty Catastrophe

Welcome to Crafty Plans, the official blog of Crafty Catastrophe. I’m Rachel and this is where we make our plans that will definitely occasionally lead to Crafty Mastery… or Catastrophe… or perhaps Something-Okay-but-Not-Exactly-What-We-Had-in-Mind. Definitely one of those three.

Across the Ages - a simple bridge doodle

The purpose of this site is to attempt various artistic endeavors (painting, printing, writing, photography, collage, pottery, sculpting, etc.) and record failures as well as successes. The creative process is messy and creations can look pretty bad when they are coming together. I want to capture the process and work on making projects accessible to as many folks as possible. I find the best place to start is figuring out ways to care less about the final product and instead focus on the experience. Sharing experiences is one of the most gratifying things we can do. There’s a lot of stressful personal, national and world events right now, and without ways to successfully communicate and build community, it feels like everything will get worse. Art is all about communication, experience, ideas, and community - it feels vitally important right now.

Page from a Renoir letter from Christie’s

So, I knew I wanted this site to be about making art. At first it was going to involve making a podcast about the projects in a single book - but as I thought about it, I knew I didn’t want to be limited by one source. I recall thinking about the first time I saw rough sketches by Renoir and thinking they were really bad. I realized that frequently we are shown the masterpiece - and not the rough path taken to get there. For anyone without boatloads of innate ability or unfounded confidence, it makes us think we don’t have what it takes - or worse yet, (if we have a bit o’ the perfectionist in us) it makes us scared to try. I want this site to be about celebrating art and the experience creating it. I want it to be about the Try.

When I started thinking about creating a potential website and podcast, I was also working on projects with my Mom (see the About page) and that experience was influencing my thoughts on what was important and meaningful. As Mom fought health issues, art became a way for us to connect and communicate. Art is a bridge for ideas when communication is hard. Working with Mom made me want to create projects that are accessible to folks of all abilities. When she started struggling, she stopped wanting to do art, because she was afraid of messing up. Together we came up with ideas to try that were outlandish, like following a Bob Ross video and trying to paint along (try it, it seems slow until you try to follow along - he even lists the colors too fast – we were laughing within 5 minutes). We created art together, we used Play-Doh, stickers - we tried everything and anything to remove the element of fear and soon, the fear was gone.

All these thoughts, ideas and experiences were bouncing around in my noggin’ and I kept thinking of wanting to make art a bigger part of my life, and to share it. I kept thinking about making a website and podcast – but with so much going on it was hard to achieve the focus necessary to bring this project together, from the overall concept, to the name of the site. I would sketch and doodle, write down ideas and talk with friends, but I didn’t make much concrete forward progress. The ideas kept changing and churning.

I’ve been working on the idea for this site for about two years now - with interrupts from life and work. The concept has taken awhile to come together – just like a painting – it slowly has come into focus. For the last six months or so, I’ve been stuck in the Ugh-Scrap-It phase. Nothing is where I want it to be - it’s bad, awkward, boring, the wrong tone - all the self-editorializing that helps me procrastinate and stops things from moving forward. “Procrastinators Unite… tomorrow” and all that. Still, I have made progress - slowly but surely. The concept solidified, the purpose solidified, and I’m now moving into the To-Heck-With-It-Just-Launch phase. Which is probably for the best… maybe? The thing that helped me get here was a piece of advice, I think it was in the Little Women movie: some of us create better for others than we do for ourselves.

This made me realize the site needed a dedication and I knew just the right person to dedicate it to - my Mom. When I decided to dedicate this site to Mom, it was the focus I needed. I want to create something that will honor her, something I know she would love.

With Mom in mind, the Publish-It-Plan started to form, it was very rough at first. I wanted pictures for the site, a place for blogging and podcasting. I needed to figure out podcasting and who I can podcast with now that we live in COVID-19 world. I started by solidifying my goals and my non-goals. Non-Goals do not mean things I will never do, just things I won’t do right now. By writing them down, it lets me know the ideas will not be forgotten, and that helps me put them out of my mind, so I can move forward on my first steps.

Goals

Build the Site
- Create the first pages: Crafty Plans, Records Room, About and Contact Us
- Create content for each page
- Edit the content
- Publish the site, warts and all - hopefully it will improve and grow!
Put up a first project post - keep it simple
- Pick an Idea
- Figure out the format - what information to include - what to leave out
- Create the first post
- Edit
- Publish

Not Goals

Publish the first project with the launch of the site
Just get things started!
Podcasting
This was really hard to move to a non-goal, because the whole idea is to get this up as a podcast, so it felt like a big loss - but by putting it here - I could focus on getting the site up and defining what a Crafty Catastrophe project will look like. Also I keep thinking - well, maybe we’ll get it up anyway…
Video
This is a craft podcast, so some video will be needed, however, for now this is in the don’t think about it column.
Trying something new for the first project
The point of the site is to try new things, but because everything is new, it is a little easier to start with a project that is familiar.

This basic listing of Goals and Non-Goals helped me to develop a more concrete to do list – which I am working through to make the site live.

And so here we are. If you are reading this, then either you live in my house, or the first goal is complete!

Here’s to getting a new project off the ground!

See you soon,
Rachel

Aug 14 Getting Started....

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