I work for a nonprofit and co-own a business with my husband. When it comes to either type of organization, there are always far more ideas than we can put into practice. It’s also easy to be sidetracked … taken down a path that isn’t particularly good for your organization. How do you pick the most appropriate path? How do you decide what to do among hundreds of competing good ideas? Here’s a tool I…
I follow Austin Kleon‘s email newsletter, through which he shares various internet pieces related to creativity. In the latest edition of the newsletter, there was a link to an article I found to be especially thoughtful. It contains excellent advice I wish I’d had when I was in high school or college. The article is called “Putting Work in Its Place” by Kate Kiefer Lee. In it she discusses how we don’t necessarily have…
Here’s my latest creation, a handmade blank journal with a Coptic stitch binding. After taking a class from artist Heidi Jeub to learn how to make these a couple years ago, I made a whole bunch in order to cement the process in my mind. And then I didn’t make any. Until this one. I remembered the procedures for making the signatures and the cover, but that Coptic binding was a tricky one. I managed…
It’s that time of year again … time to buy a new calendar/day book for the upcoming year. I’ve been keeping a day book for years and years now, probably since the 1990s, when my sister-in-law bought me my first one. At the time, I was journaling long-hand in notebooks, trying to follow the suggestion in “The Artist’s Way” about writing three pages per day. The long-hand requirement drove me crazy because I didn’t always…
Historic preservation is an ever-changing field. Twenty-some years ago, people in the field concerned themselves with trying to save as many “old” buildings as they could, “old” meaning primarily Victorian-era, with the goal being to bring these buildings (or, at the very least, their facades) back to how they were originally conceived. In many cases, that meant stripping off any modern skins that had been applied during the 1940s to 1970s, removing insensitive architectural features…