Creating Space,

I’m on day three of a four-day weekend (we take Easter very seriously in New Zealand, you see—no commercials on TV on Good Friday and you can’t buy alcohol in the stores on Easter Sunday) and I don’t know what it says about me that all last week I was looking forward not to an exciting weekend trip or a lavish weekend party but instead: not getting out of my pajamas all day Friday. I kept planning all the things I wasn’t going to do, all the ways I was going to be unproductive (“Winter coat unbought? Check! Laundry still in the basket? Check! Library books unreturned? Check!”). It was glorious.

Yesterday though, I got myself up and on the bus to the Hutt and to the lovely and excellent Craft 2.0, a fantastic handmade event thingy that featured many of my most-browsed Feltvendors, which is a little like if you went to a craft show in the States and you recognized everyone you drooled over at Etsy. I was all “Oh you’re Shaky Isles! I very much enjoy thinking about purchasing your tea towels!

I bought myself a cute little embroidered pin for my jacket, a print of a peacock for my room, and a couple of back issues of my new favorite magazine, World Sweet World (as well as meeting the lovely couple who publishes it). I got to look at all sorts of pretty things and to hang out with a very very crafty friend, who, by casually mentioning all the awesome stuff she herself makes just for fun, whipped me into a lather of fantasizing about the shirts I could embroider and the cushions I could stuff and the jewelry I could make.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot: making. I don’t know if it’s because my job is ninety percent logic models and advisory meetings and vision statements (the other ten percent is cups of tea) but I am having a real hankering, lately, to work with my hands, to fiddle around and rearrange and to color and scribble and cut and paste. I bought some cheap ridiculous watercolors at the Warehouse a month or so ago and I’ve been having the best time just…making marks on paper with them. First I picked up a paint-by-numbers of some majestic lions lolling on the windswept savannah and that was great because now we have something over the upstairs bathroom sink. Then I painted some directional signs for my birthday dessert fiesta and since then I’ve been just wanting to make signs all the time, for everything: for my room, the bathroom, the kitchen cupboards, everything. I am thinking of getting a new paint-by-numbers of penguins as well, for over the toilet.

I want to have things pretty, I guess. Or beautiful. Over the past couple of years, since the cloud room, I’ve started thinking about created space, and about how external surroundings can affect the interior, internal stuff. Like, I have this theory that a very bare loveless time in my life corresponded with a very aggressively boring bedroom I used to sleep in, and I remember what a huge charge I got out of putting up all the flower garlands and seashells in my first room in my first flat in Wellington: an anvil’s worth of symbolism, to be sure, but you know what? It worked. I really did feel at home there.

Perhaps not unrelatedly, I’ve been reading the design blogs like a damn fool recently, and now it seems all I think about are reupholstered chairs and wallpapered bookshelves and adorable ornaments and delightful decorations. It’s ridiculous because while I am often full of enthusiasm I am rarely full of follow-through, but I keep imagining all the cute projects I can do and all the nice things I can put on the wall, all the scarves I can knit. I keep thinking about how things look and how they feel. I want a lot of bright colors around, lately. I want to look at the water as much as I can and at trees and birds and flowers, wherever I go.

I know that not everything has to mean something, but I sort of think that maybe this thing…this craving for beauty, art, style, design, craft, sensation…does mean something. A little something, at least—the creation of a little space.