For someone who has an extraordinarily low tolerance for structure, I’m really missing my normal routine. It may not actually be the routine I’m missing, but the space? I miss my home. My jogs in the woods. Greg and Cleo. The quiet time I need to keep busy and sane.

I haven’t had much time to myself in more than two weeks and I’m starting to go a little Dr Jekyl on my usual, though admittedly quirky, Mr Hyde. On top of that, though I’ve kept the Twitter at my side, I’m feeling out of touch with all of you. So help me keep my sanity, hey? Drop me a note in the comments and tell me about something creative that’s got your brain buzzing, or tell me a story.

Ok, here’s that catch-up. Dear, bulleted list, it’s been so long.

• My father’s surgery was a great success. The wonders of modern medicine! The feats surgeons can perform laparoscopically! Anyway, he’s a little lighter in the internal-organ department, and there’s no sign of cancer. My parents got to meet the principle investigator on some studies that are funded in large part by the Lustgarten Foundation, which is pretty cool. We’re all feeling very thankful for those studies, and for the opportunity my dad’s had to receive early screenings for pancreatic cancer. He may deny that while he sits in his uncomfortable crankypants recovering from surgery, but in a few days I imagine he’ll be climbing ladders to sing it from rooftops. Tevye, watch out.
• Speaking of the Lustgarten Foundation, the Pancreatic Craftacular is going strong! Twenty crafty business are donating proceeds, and I’ve heard from some who have been very touched by the notes they’ve been receiving from customers who have been touched by pancreatic cancer. I’m touched, too, by the stories and by our community in general. In my imagination, I’ve been hugging you every day is week. Also, keep your eye on this here blog for a nifty blog event coming up.
• I love Montreal. Love love love. Being there at this particular point in my life highlighted for me the growing discontents I’ve been brewing about Vancouver. After a very long honeymoon period in my lovely city, I’ve come around to agree with what pretty much every non-native I’ve ever met has said about the place: The people are friendly, but they’re really hard to get to know. I want to grab Vancouver by the shoulders and tell it to lighten up. To chill out. To laugh, dammit, and do it a little louder. Vancouver may have that west-coast, outdoorsy vibe that presents the illusion of people being chill. But really, there’s an undercurrent of intensity that isn’t actually very welcoming. It’s intimidating. And I think that’s dumb. Montreal has a vitality (dare I say it has that je ne sais quoi) that’s contagious. Maybe I’ll try to be more French when I get home. I’m sure it’ll break through that British stoicism if I start kissing everyone I greet. I’ll end this rambling now, but be prepared for more musings about it as I ponder and explore.
  
• The wedding in Montreal was about the happiest, danciest, loviest wedding I’ve ever been to. I danced in four-inch heels till well after midnight, and ten days later the balls of my feet are only now beginning to feel normal again. Good times. Want glam? Ok.
  
• I want to punch Tom Robbins and his stupid, self-indulgent clever sentences in the face. I spent two weeks trying to read Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, and eventually had to take a deep breath and give up. I want to know what happens to those lovable characters, but not enough to slog through those damn words. This is a book better off tweeted, one cutesy clever sentence at a time.
• My brother and I went to Baltimore Comic-Con last weekend (this was before we started hurling insults at each other, which is what happens three days into every visit). It was RAD. I met Joel from Hijinks Ensue, fell in love with David Mack (his work, his work, which has nothing to do with him being totally sweet and also adorable), and otherwise had a blast in a room filled with costumed people young and old.
  

  

  

Okey dokey. I wrote half of this on my laptop and half on my iPad and who knows how disjointed and poorly laid put it is.

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This post was originally published on the now-retired Make & Meaning blog on May 21st, 2010.

I can’t think of any crafty projects I’ve taken on in the last few years that I didn’t document online in some way. I realized the other day that I have a pretty solid toolkit for immortalizing* my work on the intarweb, so I thought I’d share it. I’d love to know what’s in your digital toolkit, too – let’s have a share-fest in the comments!

• First thing first: I take photos. I’ve recently misplaced (oh, the PAIN) my Nikon d40 digital SLR. My back-up is my handy, wee Canon Powershot. I never use the flash. Ever. If that means I have to wait many hours or a couple of days before I can get an acceptable photo in natural light, I wait.
• I manage all my photos in iPhoto, and rarely edit them beyond using the basic editing tools iPhoto comes with. Most often, I crop and I adjust the white balance. Adjusting the white balance is something skilled photographers do before they start shooting, but the rest of us can fake it pretty well after the fact. It’s an important step that makes whites look crisp and bright, and that results in colours being fairly true.
  • If I’m working on creating graphics beyond photos, I use a program called Acorn, for the Mac. It’s quick and streamlined and simple to use.
• Flickr. In my opinion, Flickr makes the world go ’round. I host all my crafty photos there. I add them to crafty groups I like (I love surfing around all the crafty groups on Flickr for inspiration), and I use their embed code to insert photos into my blog. I license most of my photos with Creative Commons (the exceptions are the ones that have people in them; I’ll only license those under CC if the people give consent). This allows anyone to use the photos without asking me permission, within certain parameters.
• Ravelry. I keep track of all my knitting and crochet projects on there. Can’t be beat.
• WordPress. I’ve used WordPress for years and it keeps getting better – more powerful, more feature-rich (with the right kinds of features), and more straightforward to use. My blog is the hub of my online network, so after I upload the photos to Flickr I write a blog post about them. (I don’t blog about every project; ones I find less word-worthy I just leave on Flickr and Ravelry.) Sometimes I upload photos directly to WordPress, but usually I just stick with embedding them from Flickr. I use a bunch of very useful WordPress plugins, and I hope you’ll share which ones you like, too.
  • About Me 3000 makes it simple to put an about me section in your sidebar, complete with Gravatar.
  • Apture lets you insert contextual rich media right in your post, so a video you want to link to will pop up when a reader clicks the link, making it super easy for them to watch the video but not lose track of reading your post.
  • The del.icio.us plugin displays the most recent links I’ve bookmarked on Delicious, right in my sidebar.
  • Disqus is a fabulous commenting system. Using it on WordPress (you can also use it with blogs on other systems), it replaces the default commenting system. In my experience, it facilitates way more discussion on my blogs.
  • Feedburner Feed Replacement easily replaces the default blog feed with the one you track on Feedburner. (Feedburner is a Google service that collects stats about the number of people who subscribe to your feed, etc.)
  • Flattr is a new beta program I’m really excited about. When you set up an account, you add a bit of money to your fund. When you encounter content you like and the website uses Flattr, you can click the Flattr button and a proportion of your fund will be allocated to that site at the end of the month. Not many people use it yet since it’s so new, but I hope it catches on. I’d love to be able to turn my appreciation into actual money (however small an amount) for the creators whose work I most enjoy. As a blogger, I’d love to receive some of that monetary appreciation. Duh.
  • Tweet Blender lets me show my own recent tweets, along with tweets to me, in my sidebar. Easy peasy.
  • WP Greet Box shows a different message to readers depending on where they came from. You can configure the different greetings to encourage visitors to take some particular action, like subscribing to your feed, sharing your link via a tweet, etc.
  • WP to Twitter automatically posts to Twitter when you publish a blog post. You can configure what info goes into the tweet, and you can also write a custom tweet for each post. It’s very flexible, and when I remember to actually use it, I think it’s way better than having to rely on Twitterfeed.
  • WPtouch iPhone Theme formats your site for viewing on an iPhone or any other touch-screen smartphone. It’s amazing.
• Twitter. Not only do I announce my new blog posts on Twitter, I chat with lots of crafty people on there, and I tweet about projects I’m working on if I think it’ll be entertaining or if I have a question I think people can help me with.
• Tumblr. I love Tumblr. I use it for any old thing, but I’ll be using it more for crafty stuff once I remember to really start doing that.
• YouTube. I recently started doing more than just watching videos on YouTube when I started documenting the Mighty Ugly project. I really wish I’d had ideas for video projects a long time ago! I feel like a dinosaur just getting into YouTube now, but who cares?

Ok. That’s a way longer list than I’d thought it would be when I started writing! What digital tools do you use in your crafty life?

* Let’s not kid ourselves. One day if the electromagnetic pulse destroys our network, we’ll want some hard copies, now won’t we?

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This post was originally published on the now-retired Make & Meaning blog on May 7th, 2010. So, I’m not at a conference right now. Actually, I’m visiting my parents in advance of my dad’s surgery.

I’m at the Northern Voice personal blogging conference today and tomorrow, and tomorrow I’m going to sit on a panel about how blogging and online communities affect the practice of crafting, with Felicia Lo and Mandy Moore.

And you know? I realized this is the first time in a while I’ll be speaking about the fun and pleasure of blogging and online stuff, and not the business of it. And I further realized how excited I am about that. I mean, the whole reason I try so hard to make my living online is because I find it so much fun.

Since our talk tomorrow is a panel, I can’t be sure exactly what we’ll end up talking about. But I hope we talk about craft-alongs. The informal kind. The kind that get started because online pals discover they’re all into doing the same thing at the same time. It’s a pretty wicked thing, dontcha think?

Like the Groundhog-Along we did in February, after a bunch of us discovered we’re all stupid in love with the Bill Murray movie. And so the obvious thing to do would be for us all to crochet a groundhog at the same time.

Or a few years ago when those stunning ripple blankets started making the rounds, and so dozens and dozens of people made blankets. I use my blanket every day. (It looks like that -along is still going. Yay!)

Anyway, I just figured I’d write a little bit today about the personal side of blogging. The side that’s all about having fun and making friends, and in our crafty case, making stuff together. What’s the part you find the most fun?

Unfortunately, all comments were lost when Make & Meaning was taken down. Don’t hesitate to repeat yourself here, or to join in on the new conversation!

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This post was originally published on the now-retired Make & Meaning blog on April 13th, 2010.

Many weeks ago I promised to write about opportunities. I specifically promised Alice, who also writes for Make and Meaning. I’d written a post on my blog in response to Diane’s M&M post about Free, and I called it That Woo Woo Money Thing. I wanted to provide a little explanation of what we fans of Free mean when we say that when you use Free in your business model, the money just seems to work out.

In my post I said this:

There’s one thing you have to do to get the money: seize (the right) opportunities when they come around. You don’t need to have an air-tight business model if you don’t want one. Free involves deliberately winging it. With a good emphasis on the deliberate AND on being comfortable winging it.

Then Alice asked about opportunities, and I said I’d write about seizing them and about things you might do to help conjure them.

"Ladies of the air" by kyz on Flickr (CC-A licensed)

So. “Opportunity” can mean very different things to different people and there are two things you should do to set yourself up to encounter one.

1. Know what you want to achieve – your end goal. Do you want to make a certain amount of money from selling your crafts? Do you want to be interviewed in your local paper? Do you want to write for a popular blog?
2. Keep that thing in mind every day and let it influence your decisions.

That all might seem vague, but I’ll venture a guess that for many people, knowing what you want and keeping it in mind will prove to be tremendously valuable. It’s simpler than making lists, it provides no barriers to you achieving your goals, it requires no systems or books or rules.

Also, I think some folks might not realize they haven’t actually clearly defined their goal. You may have a goal of supporting your family by selling your crafts, but that’s actually pretty vague. Do you know how much money you’d have to make each month to achieve that? Figure it out. That dollar amount is your actual goal. If you want to write for a popular blog, do you have a list of which blogs those might be? Do you consider a blog popular based on your own love for it, based on the amount of traffic it gets, based on the other blogs it keeps company with? Knowing more specifics about what your goal is will make it oodles more achievable.

Now, for keeping your goal in mind and letting it influence your decisions. If, when you wake up each morning, you remind yourself of your goal, it’ll sit there in the back of your mind all day. Not nagging you (if it nags you, smack it), but colouring your day. If your goal is to sell your crafts, that goal will sit at the back of your mind and churn quietly away on new product ideas. And whenever you have conversations or read blogs or scan the news or get alerts to events going on around town, your back-of-mind goal will be looking out for opportunities.

It might find opportunities to tell people what you’re up to (yay, word of mouth). It might find opportunities to forge new business relationships. It might find media opportunities or job postings. It might find inspiration in something seemingly unrelated but totally exciting.

I’ll give you an example.

Last week I started a new project. My goal for this project is big. I’d like it to be a source of income and I’d like that income to come from being hired to facilitate workshops. I’d also like it to be free online – I’d like everybody to be able to participate in this great-big online arts-and-crafts project whether they attend a workshop or not. I’d like to challenge people to think about crafts, art, beauty, creativity, aesthetics, and ugliness in a new way. And finally, I’d like every single person in the world to give it a shot. (Heck, if you can’t aim high, what’s the point?)

I launched the website for Mighty Ugly last Tuesday.

Before I launched it, I tweeted that I was about to do just that. A local reporter I met a few weeks ago (we then began to follow each other on Twitter – don’t knock Twitter as a great bearer of potential opportunities) asked if my idea was something she might do a story on. Now, I might have been tempted to tell her, “Mmm, not yet. Let’s see if the concept sticks.” Or, “Let’s wait to see if many people participate.” Instead I replied, “You tell me!” and I sent her the link.

Three days later, I got an email from her saying she’d be over in an hour with a cameraman. I could have said, “Wait! I won’t have time to clean my house!” Or “Wait! This is so new! What if it’s too early?!” But I knew it wasn’t too early, and I knew I could fake a clean house and still have time to adequately accessorize. My goal, after all, is for everyone in the world to explore some ugly. Starting with the local news was exactly the right start.

So. Sometimes all you need to do to conjure opportunities is to firmly shake the hand of a reporter when she introduces herself, and to stay in touch in a friendly way.

Then all you have to do to seize an opportunity is to say, “Yes! Of course you can come by in an hour” even if you’ve just gotten out of the shower, you haven’t eaten breakfast, your house is a mess and your favourite cardigan is in a pile of dirty laundry.

Not all opportunities are the right ones. To tell the difference, trust your gut!

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This post was originally published on the now-retired Make & Meaning blog on April 23rd, 2010.

Sometimes I get possessed. Not all demony, or anything. I just lose control of my hands. They take control of me and make stuff. And when they have their way I actually finish my projects, and right quick! See, I’m often excited to start new crafts projects, but then I abandon them after a while. But not when my hands pilot the rest of me. When they’re in charge, craft gets done.

They’ve taken the helm just this week, so I thought this quiet Friday I’d revisit my autopilot adventures and ask you to share yours. Ever craft on autopilot? Let’s populate the comments section with links and anecdotes.

The odd photo above is a baby blanket I’m making. My hands made me start it because we’re in the last stages of our application to be approved to adopt a baby, and apparently they’ve decided it’s high time to get crackin’ on handmade baby things. I’ve only knitted a couple of inches by now, but I’m sure it’ll get done. And soon.

Patterns, from top to bottom:

• A hybrid of this baby blanket and this baby blanket
• No pattern, just beads on a wire
• Around the Rosy baby blanket
• This wee cardi pattern
• Basic Fingerless Mitts
• Jayne Cobb Hat

Your turn!

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A few weeks ago I bought a chair from my neighbour for $1 at a yard sale. I’d been waiting a year to find the right chair to complete my vision for a corner of our living room, and though I’d had something else in mind, the price tag on this chair couldn’t be beat.

Greg would only agree to the chair if he could varnish the wood and paint the legs yellow to match the table we made last month. Though I loved the scratched green paint and worn wood, I was game for the compromise. Et voilà!

I brought Sally the sock monkey out for the occasion.

The painting is by Ashley G, AKA Kitty Genius. I bought it a couple of years ago because it reminds me of a little boy who was in the after-school program I ran in Delaware. It makes me smile. The little boy was six, and though his parents wanted him to go to the quiet room to do his homework (what kind of first grader has quiet-room-needing homework?), he would refuse, saying, “That woom just makes me nuhvous.” He was so adorably neurotic.

The clock is from Faire Houre. When I first saw it it took my breath away, it’s so like the wallpaper my grandparents had in their kitchen (though their wallpaper was orange, brown and green).

The wire form is named Marie Antoinette, on account of her having impeccable fashion sense and no head.

I’m so happy to pretty much have my living room exactly as I’ve wanted it for so many months!

Here's a weird angle taking in the table Greg wanted to match the chair to.

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Last week I spent quite a lot of time wondering what on earth I was thinking telling my mother-in-law we should screen print 75 bags for hotel guests coming to my brother-in-law’s wedding. It wasn’t so much the 75 bags as it was designing the image. I can do words. Yes, words I can do. But bags for wedding guests need more than words. And draw well I do not. I do not draw well!

Early on I decided I’d try my best to draw my brother- and new sister-in-law as peas in a pod. Because they complement each other so beautifully. They’re a fabulous and wonderful couple. But they aren’t cheesy and neither am I and so I was very concerned about falling into some wedding cliché or another. Because ohmyword people, the wedding industry is so awfully full of clichés. And as we all know, whether we want to or not, clichés are utterly meaningless. And I wanted this small contribution to the occasion to be meaningful. Handmade with love. You know the drill.

So I sat with my iPad for hours. Same as last time, I started in Adobe Ideas* [iTunes link]. I sketched and undid and sketched and undid until finally I couldn’t do it anymore. So I emailed myself two final options (file transfer from the iPad is still a little rudimentary – you can get files onto it via something like Dropbox, but only a select few apps allow you to move files via wifi or sync, so email is pretty much the way to go).

Then I fired up a nifty little app called TypeDrawing [iTunes link] that lets you enter text, pick a font and size, and have that text appear wherever you draw with your finger. I wanted to have the bride and groom’s names on a curve, and I didn’t want to take the time to remember how to do that in some or another graphics program I have on my computer. So I drew curves until I ended up with one that looked fairly even, and I emailed it to myself.

Then I went back to Adobe Ideas and wrote out the city where the wedding is. In my own handwriting, to offset the script of the names. Then, say it with me now, I emailed it to myself.

On my computer, I pulled the three images into Acorn, my favourite simple graphics program (I had to convert the Ideas image from a PDF for Acorn to use it. My one major complaint about Ideas is that it only saves images as PDF. Silly Adobe, not always very good at playing nice with others). I arranged and arranged until I thought things looked good, then decided it would all look better if I put a circle border around it, and oh it would probably look best if I made that circle a solid colour so the design would come out in the negative. And of course we’d have to use green, because dude, I’m still not convinced my pea pod looks much like a pea pod and I want to give people all they help I can in figuring that one out.

The screen took on a green stain in one place, even after cleaning. It doesn't seem to affect printing, but do you know if this is normal?

I’m very pleased with my last-minute idea to do the design in the negative, because it meant that in preparing the screen I could just paint on the design in the resist, instead of painting around the design. With those skinny letters, this was made of WIN.

It ended up only taking us a couple of hours to print the bags, and we had a lot of fun doing it. Messy hands, mild panics and all.

I hope people enjoy them, and above all I can’t wait to wish Alana and Eric a very happy life together.

Ok, fine. For you lovers of cliché I took one with wine glasses to be all weddingy for you.

Lessons learned:

• However clever I thought it was, and not to mention convenient, I’m not actually entirely pleased with the big sections of green paint. Though it covered well, many of the prints have visible texture, like the screen left its mark. I’m not appalled by it, and I’m confident there’s not much we could have done to prevent it, but I’ll certainly keep this in mind in the future.
• I’m fully, 100%, completely in love with screen printing.
• It was superduper fun to do this project with my mother-in-law. Though I had a sore arm the next day from all the pressured squeegeeing.
• I’m fully, 100%, completely in love with my iPad. I’m now convinced I’ll be using it a lot for creative work, not just as a travel companion so I can keep up with work when I’m not at home, and for reading books. If I had to draw screen ideas on paper, I’d never get them done what with the erasing and the cursing and the throwing up of my arms in the air. The iPad not only provides me the illusion of having about 10% more drawing ability than I actually have, the ease of undo keeps me calm and sane.

—

* Something super cool about being a relatively early adopter is that the people who make the products one adopts early are still able to pay attention to how those products are being used. Imagine my surprise last week when I received an email from someone on the Adobe Ideas team praising my use of the app to design my first screen, and asking for my feedback. We’ve since had a proper exchange. And let me tell you how much enthusiasm that’s created in me – and I started out enthusiastic. It’s nice to be praised, but it’s even nicer to be listened to. Thanks, Adobe.

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This post was originally published on the now-retired Make & Meaning blog on March 27th, 2010.

For years, I’ve made friends online. You probably make friends online, too. In the beginning, there were jokes (and sometimes sincere concern) about axe murderers and crazy stalkers and old men pretending to be young women. It’s amazing how much changes in just a few years. Sure, there’s still (sometimes hysterical) concern about child predators online, but that’s not what I’m talking about here.

I’m talking about adults befriending adults they’ve never met in person before.

We blog or comment or belong to forums or online groups because we enjoy what we gain by doing so. We feel understood or valued for our ideas or we enjoy the virtual company of others or the solitary inspiration. Ten years ago, or even five, many people would wonder aloud to us – without even trying to hide their scorn – whether we had a life.

Not so anymore.

Last year I went to Portland, OR, for a long weekend, and it wasn’t until the day I got on the train that I realized I’d never met anyone I was going to see (except I’d briefly been introduced to one person years earlier). I’d never even met Diane, who was kind enough to invite me stay at her place.

Know how Diane and I became friends? Not through crafts, specifically. I mean, we’d read each others blogs and known what the other was up to, but we became friends because we discovered we’re both Joss Whedon fans. It was sci-fi and television that got us chatting more, and it was the friendship that grew from our chats that led to me sleeping on her couch last year. We met because of crafts, chatted because of sci-fi fan-girl hilarity, and then some other thing took over.

See, there’s chemistry in online interactions (or there isn’t) just like there’s chemistry in in-person friendships (or there isn’t). There’s just no difference at all in that respect.

I think we’ve all felt it, haven’t we?

Sometimes someone leaves a comment or posts on a forum or sends you an email out of the blue, and rather than just taking note of it and responding, it grips you. You think, “This is someone I want to chat with more.” It’s the same thing that happens at a dinner party sometimes. There’s that person at the other end of the table you think is just so interesting, you want to talk with them more. Maybe you’ll ask them to grab a coffee sometime.

Back when I was editing CrochetMe.com when it was an online magazine, I got an email from a perfect stranger offering to help with tech editing. I was desperate for help, but I’d passed on other offers because they just didn’t seem right. And I needed to work with someone right. I let the offer sit in my inbox for a long time because I was nervous about bringing someone into my crazy world, let alone someone I’d never met, but in the end I trusted my gut. There was just something about that email that made me think its writer was right. And she was. Julie and I ended up working together for years on all sorts of projects, and we’ve hung out in person a few times and had a great time.

This sort of chemistry must be at play in online dating, right? In the beginning, online dating was derided just like any other sort of online friend-making, except with more axe-murderer or crazy-stalker comments. But now we’ve all been to weddings of people who met online, or we met our own partner online.

I don’t have much more of a point. I just wanted to bring up online chemistry. Obviously, it can’t involve pheromones or anything, like in-person chemistry can. But I think it’s real. And I think it has a similar effect on our friend-making as in-person chemistry. Every so often, we find someone or a group of people that we share more than a passion for craft with. We share that intangible chemistry that could potentially grow into great friendship. Real friendship, whether we’re lucky enough to get to meet in person or not.

It’s magic, that chemistry, isn’t it?

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A few months ago on a slow work day I bought a bunch of screen printing supplies off Craigslist. I’d never actually screen printed anything, but I was seized by the crafts monster that lives in my occipital lobe, constantly searching for good crafty bargains.

In June at the Summit of Awesome I took Christy Petterson‘s screen printing workshop. Serendipity. That woman changed my life, I swear.

On Saturday I had a chat with my mother-in-law, who’s in the throes of final plans for Greg’s brother’s wedding later this month. She needs to put gift bags together for guests from out of town, and we were bouncing ideas around. I said, “You know, we could just get a bunch of really inexpensive bags and screen print them. That way you’re not spending hundreds of dollars on bags people will just throw away, and we’ll add a little personalized, handmade fun into the mix.” She was over the moon.

(Remember a few years ago when I decided to bake pies, when I’d never baked a pie before? But I decided to do it for U.S. Thanksgiving, when we were planning to feed thirty people? So I made five pies, because what the hell? Yeah, I have a problem.)

I knew I needed to test it all out before diving in, though. Christy had shown us a technique where you paint the screen in the negative with the resist, so there’s no need to burn the screen by photo emulsion. I needed to get a feel for the resist, and I needed to test out what I could do with a paintbrush. Because I don’t paint. Haven’t done it since grade school.

So first I started sketching. This is the first thing about my new iPad that blows my mind. With my finger, I sketched out the design I wanted to screen print. I emailed the image to myself, printed it out, and traced it onto the screen. Since I’m now in sweet sweet love with screen printing, I have no doubt the iPad will be an essential part of my process.

And so this is where I reached right down into the deepest part of my geek soul.

For weeks I’ve spent some considerable energy desiring a bumper sticker that says “What would Capt. Picard do?” We don’t actually put stickers on our bumper, but I’m a little in love with Capt. Picard. So smart and fair. So thoughtful and respectful. As far as heuristics we could all live by to make the world better, considering what Picard would do wouldn’t be a bad way to go.

The blue is the screen painting stuff. As you might be able to surmise here, the resist isn't actually thick enough around the words to be effective. After making a horrid print, I decided to just outline the words in the resist and fill in the rest with a paintbrush, too.

I couldn’t just use the bumper sticker phrase, though. Because there’s that one episode in Season 3 of The Next Generation, when a race of proto-Vulcans discovers they’re being observed by Federation anthropologists, and to make a long story short they think Capt. Picard is a deity. So there’s lots of talk of The Picard. “We must please The Picard, for he will bring us rains and resurrect my dead wife” sort of thing.

So when I’m riffing off a Christian heuristic to make my geeky one, I figure I’d better go all the way.

Lessons learned:

• The iPad is amazing for applications like this. I used the free Adobe Ideas app, which is like a super stripped-down drawing program. It smooths out lines, which makes everything look wonderful. Like for most things, the iPad a stupid expensive tool, but I bought it not even thinking of using it for projects like this, so go me.
• It’s more effective to paint the negative space onto the screen in the resist than it is to use the seemingly handy screen painting stuff Speedball makes that allows you to paint the positive of the design, then just wash the resist over it. I had a very hard time getting the right thickness of resist on there, so I ended up just painting the negative. This alone should save me hours when it’s time to prepare the gift-bags screen. It took me two days to get the screen right for this test.
• Bags are hard to print on, on account of the folds and the handles. I didn’t take a photo of how it came out, but Greg had the clever idea to put a piece of cardboard inside the bag to help it flatten out. Works like a charm.
• The print pictured here is on paper Greg made a few years ago. Because of the texture, I had to throw my weight into squeegeeing the paint, and I had to do three passes to get enough on there.
• My plan to just do this one test run, then wash off the screen and reuse it for the wedding: thwarted. I love this screen too much. I spent a lot of time making it, and surely the Picard would say it’s worth $20 for a new screen so I can keep the very first one I ever made. Having the digital file wouldn’t make it impossible to duplicate the design another time, but why would I want to? As it is, I have it in mind to make some gifts for my nerdiest friends…

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This post was originally published on the now-retired Make & Meaning blog on March 13th, 2010.

On Twitter a few days ago, Kirsty Hall (who’s written some great guests posts here on Make and Meaning) shared a link to a blog post by a woman named Patty K who recently wore pajamas to a conference. And it wasn’t a conference of sleepwear designers.

Go read it. It’s funny and friendly and comforting and inspiring.

And it made me think.

When I was younger, I would sometimes become paralyzed by self-consciousness. I didn’t wear the right clothes, my hair was a disaster, and of course most adolescents think this combination leads to inevitable alienation and ridicule. (I experienced only a tiny bit of either, though I didn’t notice my luck at the time.)

As a young adult I began to recognize my occasional paralysis as a problem I should do something about, and I set about trying to get over it. I’m not entirely sure how I did it, but my bouts of self-consciousness now barely register as a sit-down, let alone a paralysis.

I did develop one concrete thing to do, though: I learned to develop a shtick. By recognizing my anxiety in advance and by accepting that I can’t just make it go away, I set myself up not to become stymied by it.

Like, say I’m going somewhere where I won’t know anyone or I’m generally intimidated by the social scene. I’ll figure out some sort of shtick, and it will force me to behave how I’d want to behave if I weren’t so tied up by my own broken psychology. And it almost always works.

Once I went to a Crochet Guild of America conference where I only knew a few people. I was there to promote CrochetMe.com, so being a timid wallflower wasn’t going to cut it. The shtick I brought with me was a strategy: 1) smile at people (that’s not really a shtick, it’s just good sense but it’s sometimes hard to do) and 2) wear black. I like wearing black. And I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a CGOA event, but black ain’t exactly the uniform of choice. It’s not so much that I wanted to stand out, but I certainly didn’t want to feel like I had to conform. I wasn’t feeling rebellious, I was just feeling like I need to be me, you know? Anyway, I knew that if I didn’t force myself to be myself, which would involve standing out a little, a wee wallflower I’d become and I’d have wasted my chance to promote my website.

This is Humphrey. I took him with me to meet dozens and dozens of people on a book tour. One of our stops was in New York City, where we visited Rockefeller Center.

By putting only a couple of black outfits in my suitcase, I forced myself not to have any choice but to dress like me. And the smiling worked, too. After I agreed to walk in the fashion show when I was invited to participate, I ended up being approached by a magazine editor who, in response to my wardrobe, was all, “Who are you?” And then I wrote a column for her for a year. I was never shy at a crochet event again. WIN.

I’m far more comfortable with my personal style now, even though only a few years have passed. So I don’t often use a costume as my shtick like Patty K did. I do, however, love to bring an ugly doll with me when I travel (sometimes I bring a cute one, but that’s not as much fun). It’s an instant conversation piece, and it’s fun to take photos of the little dudes. I still have a hard time striking up a conversation when I’m with people I don’t know, so I rely on my shtick to start conversations for me. Ugly dolls are very good for this.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but crafting in public, though we usually don’t do it as a deliberate shtick, is a great conversation starter, too. I never mind it when strangers start chatting with me (unless I’m on an airplane, which is why I usually bury myself in a book until the people around me fall asleep, and then I take out my knitting).

Over the years I’ve grown to rely less and less on having a shtick strategy, mostly because I’ve come to spend most of my time in gatherings of my tribe and you people aren’t scary at all. But whenever I’m intimidated, I know just the thing to chill myself out. I may not wear pajamas to a conference, but if you see me toting a hideous doll around, come say hi. I’m really going to appreciate it.

So, what’s your shtick?

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