The Creative Process

Since I started making friendship bracelets my sophomore year, I have started looking at everything with a DIY eye. I see so much jewelry in stores or online that I think, “I could so make that, and it would look so much better.” Then I do.

Pinterest is a major source of projects and inspiration. When it comes to projects, I have a tendency to read how they did it, and then do it my own way, mixing their methods and my own. You can see a great example of this in this post.

When I choose a picture for inspiration, that’s all I look at. For example, I recently made a necklace inspired by one I saw on Pinterest. Below is the inspiration pic.

          I thought I would make some tassels out of my incredible stash of embroidery floss. I started to do that when I realized that my stash did not lend itself to Ombre color scheme. I then thought one long tassel would look good, too. I made one and slid it on a colored ball chain that Michael’s practically paid me to buy. Below you have the result.

The material cost of this was less than $.50. You read that right, $.50. I took less than 5 minutes to make. Should I charge a mere $3 for this necklace, I would profit around $2.50 for 5 minutes of my time. That’s like making $30 an hour. What company pays that much for no experience or degree?

          One of the projects I have to be the most proud of, though, was digital. I receive daily emails from a website called Groopdealz. They offer discounts on boutique merchandise. One day, they sent me an email selling the print below.

I had recently been playing on the website, PicMonkey, a photo editing service. I looked at the print for a minute and thought the classic, “I can do that.” I had to play around on PicMonkey for a good bit before I figured out how to do it, but I did. I soon made a tutorial on how to do it for my personal blog. Not two weeks after, I had the honor to be featured on ‘It’s Overflowing’ as one of the best links from the previous week.

 

Writing the tutorial was a painstaking process. I had to start over and take screen shots of step and in between. I then had to edit the screen shots, and blah, blah, blah. I’m not here to complain. After I made this print and tutorial, I started seeing how to make so many others from Pinterest and other places on the Internet. Below you can see some Mine and Theirs.

Mine

Theirs

Working on so many projects has made me realize that craft supplies are expensive. It wasn't long before the math stopped adding up. I had to start getting crafty about my craft supplies.

Something that has become incredibly trendy is the T-Shirt scarf. T-shirts at craft scores can go for $5, $6 or even $7. Buying even just one shirt to make just one $5 scarf, doesn’t make good business sense. If you waited until the shirts went on sale to 4 for $10, (which isn’t too bad) you’re still paying $2.50 to make a $5 scarf, in addition to whatever time it takes you to make one. I simply couldn’t bring myself to do this. Lucky for me, a local thrift stores sells t-shirts printed t-shirts for $.50, a much better deal than $2.50.

I have also found it more cost efficient to buy a beaded necklace at a thrift store for $1 or $2 instead of the regular $6 or sale $3 for a 7 in string of beads at a craft store. A couple of things that are great to find at thrift stores are plates and candles sticks.

Yet another thing that seems to be all over Pinterest are plates glued to candlesticks to make cake stands. In my world, that is a display for my wares and let me tell you, displays are ex-pen-sive. Along those same lines are chalkboard trays. A great way to knock off that look is to get an old silver platter from your local thrift store, make your own chalkboard paint, and have at it. I took my own spin on it and made chalkboard frames by painting some clearance frames from Michael’s chrome and painting the inserts with chalkboard paint. I simply love the way they came out.

It’s amazing the things you can do with a pile of stuff. Supplies and materials are all around; you just have to put on your creative glasses.