When I was in middle school, my Mom started working at a little craft store in our small town called Craft Tree. The store itself was tucked into a small strip-mall, just down from Blockbuster. My Mom would come home from work smelling of eucalyptus, and to this day that scent immediately takes me back to those days and my many visits to Craft Tree.
One of my favourite things about my Mom working there was that I knew about all of the children’s craft classes that were being offered and got to attend a good number of them. Some of the classes were for one afternoon, or an evening, and you got to take your project home at the end. Some larger projects spanned more than one week, though, so we would just come back on the same day at the same time. We made mod-podged plastic cats, paper sculpture Spice Girls, cute pop can bunnies, etc., including a plastic canvas tic-tac-toe game. That last one must have gotten tedious because I admittedly never finished it.
I had stitched the edges and mouth of the little X’s and O’s, glued on their googly eyes and the lines on the tic-tac-toe board. The white background was partially filled in, but that’s as far as I got. Then I tucked it away in its zip-lock bag to finish at home. It has remained in that zip-lock bag, with the ball of white yarn and a partially stitched board, for quite a long time. I stopped to think of just how many moves that unfinished tic-tac-toe game has seen and I couldn’t even count them all. Let’s just say it is a well-traveled project, traversing state lines and crossing country borders.
~Working on my unfinished craft project pool side.~
I wasn’t sure which procrastination art or craft project I would finish when I added that challenge to my Forty Before Forty list. It was just to light a fire under me to get something creative that I have had in the works finished. This little square of plastic canvas called to me the loudest, so it got tucked away in my bag of hobbies that I brought along on our summer vacation. Unfortunately, I packed the wrong needle. The eye was nice for threading yarn, but the head was too large for the squares and I had a lot of difficulty pulling it through. My fingers really hurt from the effort. I was perhaps a bit too eager to get it finished that I looked past the problems and kept going. When some of the plastic started to break, I resigned myself to not finishing it on the trip.
~A little wonky but almost done.~
When I got home I found a new needle tucked away with another plastic canvas project and it worked far better. The stitches aren’t perfect, the cracked part looks a little wonky and I think the tension from using the wrong needle caused some bowing, but I finished filling in the background! I might try gluing it to something to stabilize it (and hide the horrible mess on the backside), but it’s functional. It’s pretty cute too!
I watched a lot of Dora the Explorer with my daughter when she was little, so Dora’s little “We Did It!” song often goes through my head whenever we finish something big. So…
“We did it!
We did it!
We did it!
Yay!
Lo hicimos!
We did it!“
I don’t want to leave behind a whole mess for my kids to go through someday, so part of my list was to help me get into the habit of finishing things. It felt good to finish a project I started so long ago. Hopefully, I can keep the ball rolling and not just leave the rest of my unfinished projects to collect dust for another decade or two. The next art project I want to tackle is my diamond painting, and some artwork for the gallery wall, both items on my Forty Before Forty list. You’ll hear about it here if I am successful!
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