This summer was rather busy. Between someone backing into my car in the parking lot of a restaurant, working retail and working at several events, I also started learning how to make jewelry. OK, so maybe making jewelry was a part of my job, since I worked at a small artist-owned jewelry store, but it’s still pretty cool. Now I didn’t learn how to solder or set gemstones or anything like that, but that doesn’t matter. There are plenty of items you can make without doing either of those things.
My work mostly consisted of beading and working with silver wire. It sounds kind of easy, when written out like that, and sometimes it was, but the problem with things that seem easy is that they become frustrating when they suddenly stop being easy. No words can describe the feelings of disappointment and anger I felt when I had to double-string (put the string through twice) a bracelet that had really tiny beads. The string just didn’t want to go through again, darn it! I also needed to take the item’s final appearance into account. Do the colors go well together? Are the different beads similar in price? Would someone actually wear this? These are all important questions, and I could have sat for over an hour contemplating some of them. It would happen like this: I would see two colors that looked well enough together, but when I got further down the line, I would realize that, well, the colors really didn’t work at all. Or maybe it looked like it wouldn’t work out, but if I tilted my head a little, it looked pretty good.
Uncertainty proved to be the biggest roadblock as I lost all motivation to finish the piece. I guess the same could be said for most of the other things I set out to do. Once I’m at a place where I am unsure how to proceed, I just don’t want to do it anymore.
I guess I’m using the rationale that if I ignore it long enough, the path will become clear to me””but that’s seldom the case. When I ignore the problem, nine times out of 10 I just stop thinking about it completely, which is not at all conducive to actually getting things done. Sometimes a decision needs to be made to proceed, even if I’m not fully comfortable with that decision.
When I was making jewelry, these decisions always turned out to be for the best, at least as far as appearance was concerned. Though I am capable of sitting at something for hours without getting anything done (and indeed, that’s usually what happens due to my astounding ability to ignore things that need to get done), I love the feeling of things being finished, even more so when they’re done well.
