Creating Habits

I found a thought provoking post on a new blog through a comment in a thread over at the Bead Circle. Essentially, the post suggests that since studies have suggested that doing something for 28 days will create a habit, and February generally has 28 days, February would be the perfect month to cultivate a new habit in your life. It seems like a brilliant idea and one which I'm thinking that I would like to steal.

I have several habits which I'd like to develop. I need to be more diligent about posting new items to my Etsy shop. I have puppets that I've been meaning to post for weeks and just can't seem to get my ducks in a row...

I'd like to make writing a more consistent part of my life. Whether it's updating my blog, writing stories/fiction for my own enjoyment, writing tutorials for my website, or writing articles to submit for publication, I need to write more.

I need to make more time to get into the studio. I recently went through some old image files and found images of pieces that I had auctioned at JustBeads.com. There were a lot of discontinued styles and types of pieces. I know why some items were abandoned. The mermaids and winged goddesses don't travel or store well, their wings or tails tend to chip or break. On the other hand, I love the donut vessels like the one pictured above*. They're time consuming and there are a lot of steps to make them. It's difficult with Sprout in my life to get the timing right on any of the pieces that I make that use thrown and handbuilt components. I'd like to make the time to re-visit some of the forms that challenge me and make me stretch my artistic wings.

The Beads-of-Clay yahoo!group is having another bead swap. (If you didn't look at the video in my earlier post, I strongly recommend it... I REALLY want to learn how to do that!!!) At last count, there were about 35 people involved in the swap. I'm looking forward to it. I haven't really decided what I'm making but it will be fun for me to make a series of pieces that I won't be photographing, scanning, or listing anywhere.

And speaking of photographing and listing, I need to get moving on those puppets.

*I'll probably be sprinkling some of those archive images into the blog. I like having pictures with the posts and looking back at some of these 3 and 4 year old pieces, I have to admit that I kinda like them. The donut, for example, was made in 2003.