I've Only Gone and Baked!

Tomorrow will be the one month anniversary of me starting this blog.  I started it for different reasons:

1.  I started writing a journal in 1988.  I only ever wrote in it whenever the urge took me.  Last month I wrote my last entry, I had run out of pages.  Great, I thought.  I'll settle down for a good read.  I read it from start to finish.  It was miserable.  Awful.  If  I'd paid for it, I'd have had to demand a refund with compensation for damages inflicted.  I decided to write a blog instead.  With the vague possibility of people reading it, I might write something cheerful.

2.  I knew I wanted to shake things up a bit creativity wise.  I had a sense that exploring being more creative was the way for me to go.  If I publically committed to the challenge, there was no going back.

3.  Sometimes I get ideas in the middle of the night and I don't really think them through.

Yesterday I baked.  I made the icing way too runny so I added more icing sugar, which made it too thick so I added more water.  If I'd been trimming the legs on a chair I'd have been about an inch off the floor before I stepped away from the bowl.  So I took my pint and a half of icing and spread it on my wee cakes.   It ran off the cakes and made a pink puddle.  Tasted great.

 

Over the past month things have started to change.  Or maybe I have started to change. 
Dramatic sounding but true.  I didn't really know what to expect after I said out loud that I was going to spend the next year exploring being creative.  Would I suddenly have the urge to cook a curry from scratch?  Would I want to sketch in a flurry the striking features of people I came across in the street?  Would I start stencilling?

I've done my best to listen to the quiet voice of my enthusiasm over the past month.  And the odd things it has been telling me to have a crack at.

And I am finding myself more and more surprised.

I am enjoying the baking.  I am relaxed by the knitting.  I find making jewellery really rewarding.  Painting is fun.  But writing.  I get absorbed in the writing.

When I sit down at the computer to write the next blog entry I have literally no idea what I'm going to write about.  I click on the tag that says "New Post" and then I start to type.

Words just come.  It's the oddest thing I have ever experienced.  I start to tell a story of something that has happened to me recently, and a blog post appears.  I have no idea where the ideas are bubbling up from.  I have become a creative bottle of pop when it comes to actually writing the blog posts.

I always enjoyed keeping a journal.  It was cathartic to get down on paper my private thoughts. I've never been much of a letter writer.  I've taken writing classes where I've been told to write stories.  I've written some poems for children that I used when I was teaching.  I've written lots and lots of essays, exercises and teaching plans.  But I never enjoyed writing those things the way I enjoy writing this blog.  

And I love all of it.  Writing about what I've been knitting.  Writing about what I've been thinking.  Writing about things that happened to me recently.  A while ago.  Years ago.  It's like playing with words.

I know it looks like I've squeezed ketchup and guacamole on my cupcakes but that was actually a wee product known as Writing Icing that came in black, red, green, yellow or white.  All colours I'm itching to see on top of my cakes.  I might not be that great at the cooking part of the programme.  But the getting creative with the words bit seems to be going ok.