handmade tale

I’ve been work­ing on a hand­made gift this sea­son for my brother-in-law, who’s also a designer. Tough to cre­ate some­thing for a another cre­ator. I felt under a lot of pres­sure to represent.

What was nice about work­ing on this project was the feel­ing of being an artist again. Many com­mer­cial design­ers spend a lot of time at their desks and not at a table with glue and scis­sors. It was great to get my hands dirty and feel a real sense of accom­plish­ment once it was all done [although the clean-up was a bitch; it’s cer­tainly eas­ier to shut down your com­puter than wipe away glue and saw­dust from every sur­face in your kitchen].

I had been dread­ing cre­at­ing this gift, and the idea only came to me a few days ago, which didn’t leave me a lot of time to exe­cute. Had I given myself more time, the project would have come out that much bet­ter [although it’s still pretty nice as is]. But once I got started, the feel­ing of mak­ing some­thing by hand for a loved one was very sat­is­fy­ing, and I kept think­ing that I was much hap­pier cov­ered in glue and paper in my socks than trapped in a mall spend­ing too much money and energy. Plus I gar­nered a lot of inspi­ra­tion for future work, for both 2d and 3d projects, which was a nice side-effect.

I also hand-assembled Hypenotic’s hol­i­day client treats, which sur­rounded my desk with cut paper, raf­fia, freshly-designed labels, etc. Being so out of the loop from the hand­made busi­ness [I used to self-produce greet­ing cards], it took a lot longer than I expected, but it turned out to be great fun, and again, very ful­fill­ing. Nice to make some­thing for some­one that has some true love in it.

These harsher finan­cial times have forced us to get back to basics. Craft and handmade-goods busi­nesses are see­ing a boom this hol­i­day sea­son as peo­ple move away from mind­less spend­ing and toward true inspi­ra­tion. We go through so many days won­der­ing how we got by with­out our machines and when the inter­net goes down for what­ever rea­son, we feel help­less and use­less. Time to get over that and force our­selves to use our brains and our hands.

So get out and get dirty. Make some­thing. Any­thing. For you. For some­one else. You’ll be sur­prised at how well it pays off.

image from flickr: robin123