FNDs, Crafts, and Christmas

It's almost Sunday, and I suppose that means that its almost my writing day. After a week of teaching math, a day of creativity is almost always welcome.

On Tuesday, one of my students asked me what my hobbies were when I wasn't doing math. Lots of math people have math hobbies, and while cooking, sewing, and painting do require I type of spacial or quantitative reasoning that most don't imagine, they aren't really considered math hobbies.

Early this fall, a friend and I decided to begin a new tradition: Friday Night Dinners. Each Friday, a different person hosts dinner at their house. The person hosting is in charge of cooking, and everyone collaborates on entertainment (usually games). Three weeks ago, entertainment included the option of making sock dolls, and the option of crafting for entertainment continued into the following week. It has resulted in two somewhat sleepless Friday nights for me as my creativity starved brain goes into productivity mode. Of course, it doesn't help that I've been sleeping in until 11am on most Friday mornings.

Three weeks ago I painted. Two weeks ago I worked on a strange monster sock doll. This Friday there were no crafts, and I fell asleep rather early. Yesterday, however, I once again worked with watercolors in the afternoon. Watercolors come in several wonderful forms that make painting with them much easier than other mediums as far as I'm concerned. I thought I was doomed to be a terrible painter forever until I discovered watercolor pencils and liquid watercolor paint sets.

All of this creating has me thinking about Christmas and Christmas presents. For the last several years I've tried to make Christmas presents for several reasons. The primary purpose originally was to give something that was more meaningful. At the time I was working in a framing store and got a significant discount on custom framing. I made 10 copies of an ink drawing I had done and gave those as Christmas presents. The following year when I was no longer working at the framing store, the purpose was driven by finances. While framing the pictures wasn't especially inexpensive, the following year I made a dry soup mix that I put in glass jars. This was terribly cheap, almost embarrassingly so. Despite this, I had another realization later about such Christmas gifts: they often use less resources. The soup was in glass jars which are usually reusable, but also more readily recyclable than plastic (not that they always are). And who is really going to send your art to the landfill, especially when you've gone through the effort to frame it. Even if they don't like the art, they're likely to keep the frame... or at least donate it?

This year, I have a whole host of ideas. Some ideas involve jars, some painting, some sewing; some use recycled materials almost exclusively. Usually, however, I don't tend to have very good follow through. I'm hoping that the continuation of crafting evenings will keep me motivated and moving forward.