November: a catch up and a new approach

 Hello there. It's been a while, and things have changed since I last blogged.

Most excitingly, Daiso opened its first shop in Canberra in June. I went to the opening (of course) and am now thoroughly enjoying 'just popping in' to pick up one or 2 items as needed, or just to see what's new.

It's pretty small as Daisos go and doesn't stock a number of things I buy regularly, so I guess I'll still continue my pilgrimages to the Wellington store when I'm in New Zealand.

Speaking of which, I was in Wellington in August. While I was there we made use of the residents' workshop to make progress on my projects for The Land of Spare Oom:

I also went on a quest to start my collection of Pratchett Discworld books: I read (and thoroughly enjoyed) 2 of them in the late 80s, and for some reason decided I'd put off reading the rest of them until I was 'stuck in a retirement village'. Earlier this year I remembered that comment, and decided that although not 'stuck', I was spending significant time there each year and so perhaps it was time to start reading the rest of the series.

Which gave us the perfect excuse to start the quest with a round of visits to our favourite second-hand book shops (and other ones we spotted on our way to other places), which resulted in me stumbling across the mother lode

and means my book collection now spans 2 different countries... 😶

And then I returned to Canberra, and a temporary promotion to work on a project for several months, which is sapping my brainspace, as all new jobs tend to do. But it's something we've been wanting to do for years and I'm super excited to be able to work on it (and my voracious offset account is pleased with the extra feeding it's getting).

I celebrated my first boosted paycheck by finally allowing myself to buy some of the Rement Snoopy's art studio and book cafe sets I've been lusting after for a while, and which I found at an acceptable price (and with combined postage), which, when they arrived I admired, then set aside as they had the opposite effect to what I'd hoped. reminding me of how many other minis I had bought with the intent of spurring me back into making, but rather just made me feel overwhelmed and guilty.

Minis did bring me joy when I attended the Canberra premier of Adam Elliot's latest stop-motion film, Memoir of a snail, (which is partly set in Canberra!) with Q&A with him afterwards: and a special guest appearance from the star of the show herself:

Alas they were in a hurry to get to the next venue and event, so I didn't get the chance to meet either of them in 'person'.

But back to the Snoopy pieces. For some months I've been pondering the fact that I've been trying to get myself back into miniatures on a regular basis since I moved here, if not before, with little ongoing success. And that I'm feeling more and more trepidation as I declare a new challenge to try and fix the issue ('May be miniatures!' 'Daily dolls' house December!') A book I was recommended by a colleague as part of my preparation for my temporary promotion contained a phrase that jumped out at me:

'...when the sole energy that motivates us is simply to make life wonderful for others and ourselves, then even hard work has an element of play in it. Correspondingly, an otherwise joyful activity performed out of obligation, duty, fear, guilt or shame will lose its joy and eventually engender resistance.'

And I realised that perhaps my approach to 'forcing myself back into the studio' in the hopes that I'd pick up the mini habit was almost exactly of the opposite of what I needed to succeed.

The realisation coincided with my annual move of my laptop from the dining area, where it lives over winter, back to the studio for the spring, summer and autumn months. And a couple of days later while I was checking my emails I noticed the new Snoopy pieces sitting waiting for my attention. I pulled the pieces that needed to be put together out and onto the desk, thinking "I'll just pop these together after I'm done here so at least I'll feel like I've achieved something".

Which clicked with something that I was reminded of recently by a mentor: The wheel of life. And I decided to try a new approach: every day I'd aim to spend an hour making micro-improvements in 4 areas of my life I wanted to improve: exercise, pain points, clearing the reading piles and creativity.

15 minutes a day doing something creative sounded extremely doable. So, over the past week or so I gave it a crack, and have dubbed it 'quarter hour creativity'.

On Tuesday, I cleared off my work board and made up some Jeffrey and Janice books I'd scaled down to both 1/12 and Lundby scale for a Lundby Facebook group I belong to:

then gently chastised myself for wanting to say "Is that all?"

On Wednesday I cleared some more space then pulled out the frying pan for the mini club project for next year's show and asked myself 'What's one thing that you can do to make progress on this?", then cut out a template to start designing the interior, before getting sidetracked taking a photo of the unsure look the template was giving the frying pan:

On Thursday I battled a case of the 'I shoulds' and focused on the 'I'd like to' instead, and started gluing together a JWT Dollhouses sideboard kit I bought 10 years ago (!) that I had tucked away in my 'I was to make this' pile along with some laser-cut gift tags I picked up years ago that I wanted to try and use for sliding doors on it:

The 'shoulds' returned on Friday, but I shoved them aside (after gluing some more of the sideboard together) and instead I made the Snoopy's book cafe bag, not caring a jot that the wet glue was still showing when I took the photo:

Yesterday I got a bit carried away (and that's OK, too!). First up, I finished the initial design of the club frying pan kitchen:

Then decided to confront my fear of using something, in case it went wrong/ I ended up deciding I wanted to use it for something else, and made a random vintage can of Edmonds baking powder with a can from here, secure in the knowledge that I still had an extra one, and they were cheap toy ones I've had banging round for years:

But that's not all! I glued some more of the sideboard together, then cut down 2 of the gift tags ("I have multiples of each, so can try again if I wreck these ones") and did a dry fit, which suggested that it might just work:

and to celebrate, cracked open the spray paint and sprayed one of the $3.50 white plastic Daiso hospital beds with a rusty spray paint, which was most pleasing:

Finally, this morning I spraypainted a couple of Miniverse ramen bowls I picked up cheaply off Facebook that thought might make interesting light shades:

(in retrospect, perhaps I should have plugged the gaps on the rim before I painted them...)

So, almost a week into the new experiment, I feel like I may have found the solution.

And speaking of finding, I was delighted to stumble across this yesterday while looking for something else: