Trying something new...

For the past couple of nights I have been playing around with the look of this blog. See those three columns? The new header? I have spent some time fooling with cut-and-paste HTML hacks of the Blogger template and getting back in touch with Photoshop. This is all play for me. It stretched my mind and challenged my abilities and it was fabulous. Not the result, what I did could have been done better and faster by any one of millions of people. I certainly could have asked Sandy (she is the talent behind ornamentea.com) and she would have done it in a flash. I really wanted to do it myself, though. I wanted to see IF I could do it, for one. Computer work is not my forte, not even close. Doing this hard-for-me task made me feel like a very proud little girl. Like Dad just took off the training wheels and there I go, down the street fast and upright.

All this makes me think about why we (I am roping you in to this now) make stuff. Why we craft. It has to be about a lot more than making a necklace to match your new shirt. I have enough necklaces to match anything and everything I could ever need to wear and really don't do too much matching anyway. The desire to make something new comes from somewhere else. I think it has to do with figuring out the problem, getting the solution right. What's your reason? Why do you like to make what you make?

As a business decision, it doesn't make sense to me to spend lots of time working on this kind of thing. We have great folks in our office who know how to do things like this in their sleep. I took me about an hour to make this very basic header for the blog and Sandy or Susan could have done something ten times as good in about 15 minutes. Because of this, I don't get to play with 'new' stuff as often as I would like. Did you read that? I wrote 'play.' Yep, it was play. That is why I did it. Since my hobby (making jewelry) is also my work (owning bead stores, writing about and designing jewelry) I guess I need something else that is able to be a bit more 'play' and a bit less work. I guess I need something to do that lets me take off the training wheels.

(Oh, the blog hack is not quite right. I still need to fix the spacing between the columns and I want to adjust some colors, too. And my typing the words 'HTML hacks' and 'template' make me sound WAAAAY more knowledgeable than I really am. Way more.)