On This Episode of: Winging It

April 02, 2023

On This Episode of: Winging It

What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything? – Vincent Van Gogh

I think if you asked most of my friends and coworkers what my most common phrase was, it would be, "I'll figure it out." I am the textbook example of, "Jack of all trades, and master of none." I have SO MANY ideas and usually NO IDEA of how I am going to make them happen.

So this is how my dining table ends up looking something like this:

For the past couple of years, I find myself seized with the desire to paint Easter eggs. I didn't really grow up painting Easter eggs. I remember dyeing them and maybe putting stickers on them, but we weren't big eggheads at Easter.

But for some reason, Easter comes along and I start fantasizing about all of the pretty Easter egg ideas I see on Pinterest and Instagram. This usually happens way too late in the game and I can't get organized quickly enough to do them before Easter, but I decided earlier this year that FOR ONCE, I was going to get organized. I went looking for wooden eggs (because man, painting real eggs is stressful), and ordered them in good time and stored them in my cupboard.

And then I actually got myself organized and started working on them early. And I'm actually finished BEFORE Easter. Wow. That is a first.

Ok, so I only painted four, but STILL... I just wanted to set myself up for success, ok? You can see that I played around with different styles because I didn't want to get stick of doing the same thing over and over:

This is done with a white acrylic paint pen. I just used a similar style to the one I used for the paper bags I've been doodling on:

I think this one has a Mexcian feel. I used paintbrushes for the flowers and a paint pen for the leaves:

I used a gold paint pen for this. It's hard to photograph, but it's really quite striking:

And this is a study of ferns and grasses using a slate grey paint pen:

I am currently studying ferns and practicing drawing them because I agreed to embroider some canvas shoes for a friend's wedding. She gave them to me early, which gives me enough time to ~~stress out about them~~ prepare and plan them without rushing:

I've been musing about how exactly I'm going to do this. I need to 1) figure out what I'm going to put on them and then 2) figure out exactly how I'm going to put the design on the shoe. After a lot of thinking, I decided the best thing to do was to make a template of the side of the shoe so that I could put it onto a piece of paper to try out different layouts. There was no clever way of doing this. I literally just put a piece of paper onto the side of the shoe and traced the edges with my fingernail, then I cut it out to roughly the right shape. I kept putting it up to the side of the shoe to refine the shape until I got pretty close:

Then I used that as a template and traced it several times on a few pieces of paper. I will eventually photocopy it so that I have spare ones, but I'm hoping I won't need hundreds of them!

Having never embroidered shoes before, I also thought it would be prudent to try it out on another pair of shoes before I messed around with her wedding shoes. I won't lie: I loved having an excuse to buy myself a pair of shoes, but people, I did this in the name of science and in the spirit of experimentation...

It's not the exact same type of shoe, so I made a separate template: