Some of us need deadlines

I am one of them.

In school, I was a last-minute, hammer-out-the-term-paper, cram-everything-into-my-head, stay-up-all-night-prepping-oral-presentations. The residual of these bad habits has now transferred itself onto my work. Less so with production and creation, since I am making a conscious effort to pace my production of my wares; I will admit this is often a challenge, but doing bigger shows has forced me to follow my schedule. Thank goodness for that.

With any kind of written text or "assignment" though, I am still a true procrastinator. A professional procrastinator. It's almost like I'm subconsciously rebelling against a deadline, and yet, I know I have to cave and conform if I want to be considered again. The community newspaper I work on, consistently receives my very late submissions. At this moment, I am thinking about a course description that I am supposed to be writing for a new workshop I'll be giving next winter; deadline is this Friday and they will get it on Friday afternoon before I rush out to taiko practice. Sigh... I suppose I wouldn't still be functioning this way if it didn't work for me in some way. And no matter how prepared I am, I always stay up almost the entire night before a craft show; I've done around 25 shows now, and I don't know if this will ever change.

A couple months ago, I enthusiastically volunteered to be a part of this really cool project on Etsy. Jenn, a printmaker who has an Etsy shop called Azure Grackle, put out a call to printmakers for prints representing all the elements on a periodic table. Now I'm not a printmaker, per se, but since I do some carving, I thought this would be a neat project to work on. And even though there was a deadline, it was not so looming (Jenn is much more forgiving than a university prof or a newspaper editor!), and I managed to get these done, but JUST IN TIME! The first here is Argon (18), printed on washi (my favourite green!), and with a bit of collage.

This second one, I am particularly pleased about because it came about kind of by accident due to desperation! It was bound to turn out ok since spinach, cashews and almonds make me happy.

You can see the evolving project here: http://home.comcast.net/~clarksbarn/periodic/elements.html

Can't wait to see the entire thing when it's completed!

Did a bit of sorting and cleaning in my studio/office yesterday (was procrastinating on that too!), so I will tear myself away from the computer now and to get to work! I'll just show you the earrings I listed yesterday:

And the koi pendant I listed this morning. I'm going to have to make one for myself for the summer, I love this little guy !