I made a thing
It felt a bit like going back to kindergarten: I made a thing today. A thing that’ll brighten up my home office. This is how it went: first, I spent a lot of time going through old nature and bird magazines, looking for the perfect pictures. I took out my scissors and got cutting. I hope I’ve made my old teachers proud (ignore the ragged edges please!). The photos I selected spent weeks, make that months, in a plastic folder, waiting for assembly day. Once I felt I had collected enough clippings, I arranged them on the old poster I wanted to replace and took a picture for reference:
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A poster frame with cut out pictures of birds and other animals arranged on topThis felt like the smart thing to do: prepare, think of a composition beforehand, make sure it all fits in the space. It’s only when I got on with glueing everything in its proper place, that the doubts started to pop up.
Anyway, at this point there was no turning back. Don’t mind the curling edges and unevenly glued on photos; I’m not a professional, this is for fun!—I kept telling myself. At this point, the first layer was fixed and I had to take a second resting break:
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The same as the previous picture, but with less photos in a slightly different arrangement
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Cut out pictures on a table with scissors, a glue stick and bits of paperNote that my earlier cleverness of sticking to the plan already began to break down at this point. My partner M. looked over my shoulder and pointed out that I should’ve moved that one a bit more to the top. Thank you M., very helpful of you.
Roughly halfway, I started to realize that with the changes I had made to the “design”, I was running out of pictures. Thankfully, I had kept a whole stack of magazines in reserve. But first, another lie down: the upside of these long covid breaks is that I get a lot of opportunity for meditation. The downside is that I end up spending that time second guessing my glueing capabilities.
The timer went off and I started browsing the magazines again. I found a beautiful picture of a hedgehog that would do nicely. Onwards and upwards! With the final bee in place, it was time to flip it all over and put the frame back together. This is how it turned out:
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The final result: a white poster covered in cut out photos of owls and other birds, bees, squirrels, wild pigs and an otter, along with some flowersHonestly, I’m pretty happy with the final result. It’s something I’ll see everyday, that is bound to put a smile on my face. I’m not a creative of any kind, but I love to create things. Seeing all these birds (you can tell I’m fond of owls) and bees makes me happy; today has been a good day.
