{"id":1142,"date":"2009-03-16T11:54:07","date_gmt":"2009-03-16T15:54:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/?p=1142"},"modified":"2018-03-12T06:55:42","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T10:55:42","slug":"creativity-cant-be-forced","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/creativity-cant-be-forced\/","title":{"rendered":"creativity can’t be forced"},"content":{"rendered":"

I thought I’d try writing a different kind of post today: an insight into my design process, and what happens when things don’t work out as planned.<\/p>\n

\"crocheted<\/p>\n

Remember this picture? This is the orang utan I started crocheting<\/a> at last spring’s Creativ Festival. My goal was to make a life-sized, realistic baby orang. After the show, I finished both arms and then moved onto the head, and that’s where things started to go wrong… <\/p>\n

My first attempt looked like a silly smiling cartoon monkey. My second attempt was much more realistic, but hideously ugly. The more I tried to fix them, the less confidence I had that I would ever be able to complete my orang. Maybe it’s because it was so important to me – I love all the animals that inspire my designs, but the orang utan is one of my all-time favourites. When I conceived this project, I wanted to make something really special just for me – not a simple replicable design, but a real one-of-a-kind art piece. <\/p>\n

There didn’t seem to be any point in making the body or legs for my orang project when it didn’t seem like there would ever be a head to go with it, so the pieces have sat in a zip-lock bag in my ‘in progress’ drawer for months, untouched. I often thought about the project, but couldn’t see any way forward.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, I went back to basics. I sat down with a sketch book and a dozen reference photos of baby orangs, and spent an hour drawing, redrawing, refining. Looking for the ‘essence of orang utan’ that I had failed to capture to date, instead of thinking of it as a crochet problem. I think I have it: my final sketch crystallized what I needed to do, and then it was almost an afterthought to crochet and sculpt the head. (I won’t share any pics yet… I want it to have a big reveal, after all the work that has gone into this!)<\/p>\n

At the Creativ Festival<\/a> this spring (April 24-26, in Mississauga Ontario), I’ll be giving a talk about my work, called Who’s Who in the Crochet Zoo<\/em>. Now I’m confident that I will be able to bring my orang utan along – nicely circular when you consider where the project was ‘born’, exactly one year earlier. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I thought I’d try writing a different kind of post today: an insight into my design process, and what happens when things don’t work out as planned. Remember this picture? This is the orang utan I started crocheting at last spring’s Creativ Festival. My goal was to make a life-sized, realistic baby orang. After the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crochet"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1142\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}