from my Instagram page: A Photogenic Lifestyle
related: How to Pose for Instagram (and make your life photogenic)
Bluesky
BEBINA BUNNY free download here
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Unfinished craft projects
Crafting is good for us. It can be broken down into three main stages:
- Visualization
- Process
- Actualization
When you decide to make something, this something must first be visualized. And visualization begins in the imagination. Imagination stimulates our brain. It not only provides solutions and options but good company as well.
Probably the most important aspect of crafting is the process and not the product. For one, by focusing our attention, crafting is active meditation. Repetitive actions, such as those of knitting, can be hypnotic thus relax us. And this relaxation provides a number of benefits such as lower heart rate and blood pressure. By redirecting our focus, crafting can distract us from both physical and emotional problems.
When we create, our brain releases dopamine, a hormone that gives you a sense of well-being. Depression is often triggered by a reduction in the production of dopamine so we can say crafting is good for our mental health.
Crafting is a cognitive activity that stimulates brain cell communication thus fights mental decline. It also improves hand-eye coordination, spatial awareness, and motor dexterity.
Crafting provides us with ”A Room of One’s Own” in that it, when fully immersed in the process, we just flow in a world that’s truly ours. Even Einstein and Gandhi indulged in crafting to clear their minds.
When we finally complete a project, we are rewarded not just with a physical object but also with a sense of satisfaction and our self-efficacy is reinforced.
Sometimes the initial enthusiasm for a project dissipates. And this happens for a variety of reasons. We lose interest, get distracted, or simply realize we don’t like our project. So how do we declutter our sacred spaces of unfinished projects? We can try selling them on Ebay, throw them away (but that’s not at all ecological!), transform them into conceptual art, or restyle them. But we can also pass them on to others.
Have you ever played Pass The Drawing (or Exquisite Corpse) where everyone is given a piece of paper and pencil and told to draw. Then after a minute, a timer goes off and the drawings get passed to the person sitting next to them. After five minutes, the passing stops. The resulting drawings are a mix of styles that can be entertaining or even poetic.
So why not try Pass the Project?
My friend, Anthy, is a genius designer. She has so many ideas that she can’t actualize or complete them all. That’s how I wound up with an unfinished purse made from crocheted twine. It took me awhile to decide how to finish it but once I did, the results delighted me. Not only because I liked the aesthetics, but even though geographically we were far apart, Anthy and I shared an experience.
For all your unfinished craft projects, why not try Pass the Project?
While putting together this post, my blog buddy, Jo of Cranky Ceramics, told me that these unfinished projects are often called UFOs, unfinished objects!!!!
Related: Pruning a lifestyle (pruning our desires) + Decluttering Los Ojos (throwing away unfinished projects) + Decluttering Decluttering Decluttering + IN PRAISE OF HANDS: Knit yourself well + Craftivism: Activism Using Craft -30-
Craftivism: Activism Using Craft
After an oil spill off an Australian coast, the Phillip Island Nature Park asked knitters to make sweaters for penguins. Not only did the sweaters help to keep them warm, they also prevented the penguins from ingesting the poisonous oil. A knitting pattern was made available on line and knitters around the world participated including Alfie Date at the time 109 years old.
There are a number of charity groups that use plastic bags to make sleeping mats for the homeless. The bags that would normally wind up in a landfill are turned into plarn (yarn made from plastic bags) and crocheted into mats. The mats are then distributed to those not lucky enough to have a bed of their own.
A number of women use their sewing skills to make dresses from pillowcases to be sent to places such as Haiti and Africa so that little girls, victims of poverty and more, can at least have something decent and pretty to wear.
There’s an alternative form of ”graffiti” known as Yarn Bombing. Yarn is crocheted or knitted into large pieces that are subsequently installed in public spaces with the hope of giving a sense of joyfulness to cold and sterile urban areas.
So what do penguin sweaters, sleeping mats, pillow case dresses and Yarn Bombing have in common? They are all examples of “craftivism”.
Craftivism is a form of activism using craft. And by activism I mean actively trying to create a positive change.
The term “craftivism” was invented by Betsy Greer in 2003. She defines craftivism as «a way of looking at life where voicing opinions through creativity makes your voice stronger, your compassion deeper & your quest for justice more infinite».
Since the crafts involved have traditionally been known as “domestic arts”, craftivism is often identified with feminist movements. More than anything, craftivism implies an awareness that the world is not perfect and anything you can do to make it a better place will not only improve the world but will improve your feelings towards yourself as well. Expressing solidarity is the awareness that we are in this world together and thus interrelated.
The person who benefits most from craft is the maker. First of all, as mentioned on this blog in the past, working with your hands is a form of meditation. It forces you to focus your attention on one thing instead of letting your mind get caught up in the labyrinth of thought. Furthermore, hands make the world tangible by permitting us to interact with our surroundings. And by interacting, we prevent self-alienation.
Working with our hands also leads to the formation of neural pathways that can only be created via repetition. We know best what we do regularly. And this knowledge leads to experience.
Experience can’t be cloned. In the words of Heidegger, you best understand what a hammer is by using it.
Happy Birthday Billie Holiday!
Born on April 7, 1915, her name was Eleanora Fagan until she changed it to Billie Holiday. Abandoned by her father and forced by her mother to become a prostitute at the age of 14, Billie had a difficult childhood. At an early age, she began singing in Harlem and by the late 1930s was an established recording artist. However, by the 1950s, Billie’s life was full of drug abuse, drinking, abusive relationships and racism. While in the hospital due to substance abuse, the police arrived and arrested her for drugs. Billie, only 44 years old, died a few days later.
Battered, bruised, chronically broken-hearted, Billie distilled despair with her voice. Frank Sinatra said no one had influenced his singing as much as Billie had. And maybe the person most influenced by Billie’s singing was Billie herself. Because singing is good for our health affecting us both emotionally and physically. It fights anxiety and animates blood flow. And distracts us from our sorrows. Billie’s life was difficult but would have been even more so had it not been for her voice.
So don’t stop singing!
Posted in Drawings & Paintings, Health & Healing, People, Sound & Music
Tagged Billie Holiday, Music, Singing, Sound Therapy
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Alone
Anne Frank started her famous diary because she was lonely and needed a friend. Loneliness was a major theme and she wrote: “You can be lonely even when you are loved by many people, since you are still not anybody’s one and only.” Because there’s the belief, shared by many, that we are complete only when we are with another.
One is a lonely number. And static. One is immobile because, alone, there’s no interaction. And without interaction, there’s no life. Interrelating is, therefore, necessary for our survival.
So how can a diary help prevent loneliness? Obviously, a diary cannot substitute interrelating with the rest of the world. But it can help us create a healthier relationship with ourselves thus facilitate creating healthier relationships with others.
For the moment I have no answers, just questions like: Where’s the boundary between solitude and isolation? When does being alone become being lonely? How do we balance the time we spend with ourselves with the time we spend with others?
But I best be careful about all this self interrogation because, as the writer Miriam Toews put it: “Perhaps depression is caused by asking oneself too many unanswerable questions.”
The Narrative Within 