I had to look that up.
Occupying oneself.
Surely I’m not the only one who will type something out that I don’t hesitate to say only to second guess that I’ve been saying it correctly all along.
Turns out I was.
I dodged that bit of embarrassment I suppose.
I recently joked that I have felt as busy this past week as I did when I was in the office. So it’s a bit of a stretch, but I’ve certainly felt busier than I have in quite some time. As things open up, I’m able to mark things off the “to do” list that have been patiently hanging out, waiting their turn. The errands are small, but they take up time and each thing I do now wears me out as if my old self were doing 5 different things.
I suppose my body grew accustomed to the cave dwelling lifestyle I was living in April, May and the first half of June.
Mostly I’ve been busy wearing my maker’s hat and stocking up finished goods for my Etsy shop launch. You all already know that I filled WoolyHands up with yarn in May but IdyllHands (my Etsy shop) sat empty, neglected, still announcing that I was moving to Portland and the shop may look empty. Hilarious.
Truly.
Hilarious. We moved out here in 2013.
See, hilarious.
I considered opening it back up. Stocking it with jewelry I had made previously and starting to put together new pieces. However, the inspiration wasn’t coming and if it wasn’t in in my heart, it certainly wasn’t flowing through my fingers into finished products. I was in a jewelry slump for the most part.
Or I was I.
Years ago, I bought a metal stamping set on Amazon. It was a basic alphabet…no special font… no special graphics… but they worked. I dabbled in stamping hammered out pennies when I first bought it but honestly, hammering pennies was the biggest PITA I’ve ever experienced in crafting and I’ve tackled some PITA projects in my time (washing wool, carding wool, dying wool, spinning poodle hair, setting up tents in torrential downpours at craft shows… see?).
So the set sat unused for the most part.
Until last month. I pulled out my jewelry supplies looking for something (what, I cannot tell you, because it wasn’t important and I can’t remember – that’s what happens as you approach 40 years of age). While fiddling with the different pieces of metal I’ve collected for the past 14 years, I found a few pieces perfect for metal stamping. So I stamped out my favorite set of lyrics from my favorite Dave Matthews Band Song.
don’t burn the day.
Now sure, it ends with “away” in the song, but I like the simplicity of just the 4 words. I’m only adding this disclaimer in case another fan of that song is reading and thinks “HEY… where’s ‘away'”? It’s not super important to this story or the post.
So anyways, I stamped it, I posted a picture of it in Instagram and people liked it. More so than they have liked a lot of my other posts. So I stamped other lyrics onto other things and people liked those too. So then I started to incorporate those into my jewelry designs, pulling from my old style of putting things together in ways that don’t really make sense but look great anyways and people LOVED those.
And then I opened a new Etsy shop.
You can visit it here… I know you want to.
And now I’ll be forever busy.
See you next year!
Kidding…maybe.
IdyllHands 