The Inspired Dragonfly

Several months ago, for many reasons, I made a decision to leave my good, solid job in higher education to open two businesses. One, Personality Playbook, is a business where I use the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® in business consulting. The other, The Inspired Dragonfly. is a business where I make and sell art. Both of these businesses are out of my home, and in the two short weeks I’ve been working from home, I’ve already learned some very important things.

1. Dogs make awesome coworkers!

They are cute and cuddly, and they let you know when someone is at the door, by barking…. Come to think of it, they also let you know when a deer is in the yard, when the mail comes, that they know you’re on an important call, and that a leaf in a tree moved… all by barking… They also tend to sleep all day…. and they don’t actually do any work… unless you count holding the sofa down… but seriously, they’re awesome coworkers!!

2. Laundry and dishes are more likely to get done when you’re around them once in awhile.

I’ll admit that I’ve never been really great at the home upkeep stuff. I mean, cleaning would be great if it would just stick, but no. Every time you clean something, it get’s dirty again, and soon! Perhaps because of this and the fact that I used to be away from home more than 50 hours a week, dishes and laundry had a tendency to pile up. Now that I’m home, it’s no big deal to throw on a load while I am, say… writing this blog post! Living in a clean house with no laundry monster hanging out in the laundry room is something I could get used to!

3. Facebooking is unpaid when you work for yourself.

Not that anyone would ever do such an immoral and insane thing, but hypothetically, let’s say that you work for a company and happen to hop on Facebook for just a millisecond on your own personal device, of course. Technically, you just got paid to Facebook! (Shocking, I know) Well, any time I hop on Facebook now I have to remind myself that I better use it to build business, or I am (dare I say it?) wasting precious time that I could be using to pursue a paycheck!!

4. Not commuting 74 miles a day is almost worth losing a steady paycheck, by itself.

I am sure I don’t have to explain to anyone with a long commute that you begin to see it as some sort or demon or curse that takes giant gulps of your life each day that you will never get back. Sure, it can be lots of fun to sing in the car or talk on the phone while you’re driving, but how many times have you left work feeling great, only to have the road suck the life out of you and spit you out in your driveway feeling like you’ve been hit by several of the vehicles you previously shared the road with?! Yep, ditching the commute is pretty much worth the price of admission to me.

5. You actually can spend the time you always claimed was being taken on your commute on the things you promised to do with that time!

This one gets to a much bigger piece of my work from home puzzle…. I made a promise to prioritize ME! After years of saying I didn’t have time to exercise or sleep enough or take time to breathe (often blaming it on the 2 hours a day in the car), I have FINALLY taken time to focus on getting healthy and treating my body like it matters! I can’t promise you that I wake up every morning bursting with excitement to spend time with my assortment of Jillian Michaels workout videos… In fact, I often say things to her and about her that I dare not repeat in this blog, but I am actually putting in the work and placing myself at the top of my list!

I realize I am right at the beginning of this journey, and I may have just made some extremely naive statements, but I am happy to be where I am right now, and I can’t wait to see where I go from here. Thanks for reading!

 

by

When I was a kid, I would watch Bob Ross make happy little trees on PBS as often as I could. I loved the magic that happened from some colored liquid and a white canvas, and I imagined the secret and beautiful places I could dive into by creating them. For years, I played around, experimented with techniques, acquired brushes, and tried to hone my skills. I was no Bob Ross, but I wasn’t half bad either at this… hobby. While I loved art, it was never anything more in my mind than a hobby.

After the beautiful experience of taking an art class with some of the most talented artists I have personally known, I somehow put this passion down. Life got in the way, and time passed, and I didn’t have time for… hobbies. After years of not picking up a paint brush, and after some tough parts of life, I was sitting in my living room, and I begin to feel that twinge. You know, the twinge of an idea that began as something small that wove itself throughout my mind, bending, changing, and morphing into something else entirely. Perhaps it began with a single shape or color or something I saw on television, but in my mind, it took on new life and became its own entity.

Finally, something possessed me to buy a canvas and some brushes and sit on my hardwood floor and attempt to replicate the vision in my mind. The joy that experience brought me was like my soul reawakened and flourished… It was as though a long forgotten part of myself began to stretch its wings and live again. Though it’s far from my best work, that first work in many years will always be special to me.

So, art returned as my… hobby, and it was a beautiful thing! Why do I say hobby as I do? Well, so many of us are taught as children that certain fields are for work and certain fields are for fun only. Maybe some people make a living as artists, but they are either too dead to enjoy it, or they have big hair and a PBS show. It’s no way to make a steady living, so it’s relegated to the status of… hobby. Of course, there is not one thing wrong with hobbies! I have more than almost anyone I know, and they are wonderful, but is it wrong to limit their potential?

Eventually, I became a counselor.  I began making art for the office, and people… loved it! What an amazing feeling to have others enjoy the work of my passion! Soon after, I began to work with students who were trying to decide on careers, and all I wanted to do was encourage them to find a way to follow their dreams. I mean, what kind of career counselor doesn’t want her clients to find a career to be passionate about?!

Then, a funny thing happened… I had people asking if I sold artwork like what was hanging in offices at work. Despite these inquiries, I wondered if anyone would ever buy my work.  I mean, art is a… hobby… right? I am not a “real” artist. I am a counselor who blows off steam by using power tools and painting wood! This couldn’t be a job, or at least that’s what the doubting voices in my mind kept saying.  It was about that time that my own advice slapped me in the face… I can’t expect a college student to follow his passion if I am too afraid to follow my own!

So, from this, my Etsy store was born! I can’t say that I am making a full time income from artwork, but I can say that it feels really, really good (once you get past the temporary, paralyzing fear) to put myself out there and follow my passion in a way that lets the world in on it. I can’t wait to see what happens!

If you’d like to check out the work in my store, you can do so on the Store page. For pictures of my process and past art, check out the Artwork page. If you have a passion, I’d love to hear about it, and I hope you have the courage to share it with the world… or at least a slice of it.

As always, thank you for reading!

by

So, when I made the original coffee stir stick art, I dyed many more stir sticks than I needed for the project.  Had I painted the sticks, I would not have done this, but the dying method allows you to dye a lot of pieces with the same amount of work.  To me, it made sense to make extras.

I wanted to make some smaller pieces to hang in my office… or perhaps somewhere else.  I wanted these pieces to have frames, so I looked to my favorite wood frame/canvases from Michaels.  These are great because you can paint or stain them as you wish.  Then, you can either make art on the outside, or you can use the inside to give the impression of a frame.

I stained the frames, using my favorite Kona stain by Rust-oleum.  I only used one coat, which allows a bit of grain to show through.  If you want a more solid look, try using a second coat.  I always stain underneath where the wood will be glued because this keeps gaps in the wood from standing out.

 

The rest of the project went in a similar fashion to the original coffee stir stick art, except for edges.  Since the inside corners of the frame are rounded, I had to make some cuts to fit the curve.  I have been using tin snips for this, but any number of cutting elements will do the trick.

 

I still have to poly this piece and finish the other three pieces.  I will post the finished project when it is done.  One thing I will say is that it is delightful to use stir sticks for smaller projects.  It’s nice to feel a sense of accomplishment without working for 8 hours!

by

In the last few months, I have developed a deep love of turning mundane things into art, especially wooden mundane objects.  Several months ago, I made a piece of artwork out of wood shims for the waiting room at work, and ever since then I have been planning to make a project with wooden coffee stir sticks.  On the shim piece, I painted all sides of every piece of wood, but that wasn’t gonna cut it with tiny little stir sticks.  I have been wanting to try dyeing wood for years, so I thought this was the perfect chance!

The week after Easter, I bought a bunch of egg dyeing kits, on sale, with the intent of using them on this project.  I wanted to make sure that the art didn’t look like an Easter egg, so I also bought three colors of Rit fabric dye in darker colors.  Finally, I pulled out my fave wood stain, Minwax Kona.  I also bought wooden stir sticks with square ends from Amazon, and I pulled out a leftover scrap of wood from the shim project. Once I did this, it was time to get to work.

I wanted the main colors of the piece to be natural wood, stained wood, and red.  I had 2 boxes of stir sticks, so I divided one box fairly evenly between the three main colors. I divided the second box fairly evenly between the other 9 colors.

The Minwax Kona staining process was super easy.  I used a disposable container and tossed the sticks in a bit of stain to coat. With the Rit dye, I simply added about a half teaspoon of each color of powdered dye to water and poured it over the stir sticks.

For the egg dye, I dissolved 2 of each color tablet in 3 tablespoons of vinegar and let them dissolve.  It’s REALLY tough to tell what color the tablets are when they’re dry, so I dabbed them with water to ensure that I was putting 2 tablets of the same color together.  Once the tablets dissolved, I added a half cup of water and poured the dye over the stir sticks in a disposable container.  I added a little violet gel food coloring to the purple batch because the color was a bit gray without it.

Eventually, I ran out of disposable containers, and I started using gallon zipper bags.  If I had to do it over again, I would have used all bags for the sake of easy cleanup and minimal use of counter space.

I ended up leaving the sticks in the dye for about a day and a half, and the time made a lot of difference in the depth of color.  I recommend leaving the sticks in the dye for at least a day.  Once the sticks were ready to come out of the dye, I drained them and placed them on paper towels to dry, which took about a day.  I could have sped up the drying process by putting the stir sticks on a drying rack or even using a hair dryer or heat gun, but I was in no hurry.

Once the sticks dried, I divided them into groups that would eventually become the rows of the piece.  I planned to have a 1’x4′ finished product, which translated to 70 rows of 8 1/2 stir sticks.  I wanted each row to have at least 1 red, natural, and Kona stained stick, so I divvied those up first.  I then divided the other colors amongst the groups.  I did this on a big carpet, and it was like an extreme sport with the dogs walking around!

Finally, it was time to start gluing.  I initially tried using wood glue. Of course, wood glue takes while to dry, so I was having to hold the tiny and sometimes not flat sticks in place for awhile before moving on.  That wasn’t going to work with 630 sticks, so I switched to high-temp hot glue, being careful not to slop it all over the other rows.  Once I was finished covering the whole board, cutting a few pieces per row into smaller pieces to add texture and variety, I glued some extra pieces over the top of some of the seams of the lower pieces for even more texture and depth. It pretty much took me all day to glue on all of the sticks, and I am glad I didn’t decide to do a bigger piece because I might still be sitting at the table with a glue gun claw hand!

When I was FINALLY done gluing, it was time to polyurethane the piece, but it was full of those annoying hot glue strings.  To quickly fix this, I went over the piece lightly with my heat gun.  Of course, you want to be careful doing this on a hot glued piece, but it quickly took care of the strings.  Once that was done, I mixed 4 or 5 drops of a stain/poly mix into a good bit of hand-rubbed poly (about a cup), and I applied it to the whole piece.  Then it was time to let the piece dry and hang it up over the bed!

I am pretty pleased with the results, and I am happy to have the extra splash of color on the bedroom wall.  If you decide to attempt this project or something like it, I would love to hear about it!  As usual, thanks for reading and for sharing my passion for creativity. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to find something to do with the leftover, dyed stir sticks!

 

by

by

by

by