‘Doesn’t look too difficult…lets see how this goes’ was the first thought I had. Then I realized I was supposed to put the beads on the skewers and paint them. Ok, I thought…not hard, maybe time-consuming, but not hard. Oh, how wrong I was.
It took longer than I thought because the beads kept slipping off. Not a problem, I found eight beads that fit tight enough that they wouldn’t slide off. That turned out to be an excellent use of my time because when I went to paint them, the beads that weren’t firmly skewered slid around in circles and drove me half out of my mind. It was like a Three Stooges episode in here. Holding the sharp pointed end of a skewer and trying to paint eight wooden beads isn’t as relaxing as you might think. In fact, it was downright infuriating.
After I finally had enough painted to make four napkin rings, I realized I was supposed to make a decorative lanyard as well. They were drunk if they thought anyone was going to keep painting 100 beads eight at a time. No lanyard, then. No problem, I didn’t want one, anyway.
That’s when I read the next part of the directions and they said I had to string the beads 12 at a time and make a tassel. Out of twine. Nothing says easy, like using twine to try to force it through a bunch of tiny holes in a bunch of wooden beads.
I just gave up for the day. Honestly, I might need a few days to get through the next step. I’ll be back though. I’m no quitter…lol
So what did I learn? Because as funny as this whole scenario is, there is also a valuable lesson in it. When you are trying to do something new assuming it is easy, or hard for that matter, is a bad way to start off. I mean, I know that, but this brought it home. How many times had I started a project, a job, an event, etc and thought, ‘this is going to be so easy’ and then it wasn’t? Sometimes we don’t even realize we are, for lack of a better term, jinxing ourselves. We assume things will be easy, or hard, and fairly often the universe takes delight in teaching us just how wrong we were.
So tomorrow I’ll be back at it with a newfound respect for ‘simple’ crafts because as you can see from the pictures, I can make it look nice, I’m just not sure it’s really a ‘me’ thing to do because it doesn’t make me feel nice, it brings me no joy. And that was the second lesson. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. Again, I knew it, I had forgotten it though, and it took a couple of tubes of paint, a roll of twine, and some wooden beads to remind me to select how you spend your time wisely.
Duct Tape and Dreams 