My Obsession/Addiction – 365: A Daily Creativity Journal

Recently I bought the book 365: A Daily Creativity Journal by Noah Scalin. It’s a journal that provides a creative craft prompt for every day of the year. It has prompts involving everything you can imagine: Yarn, writing haikus, using leaves and twigs, and pretty much anything else to inspire you for an everyday creativity spurt.

I started on January 1st, of course, and the 1st prompt is “Start small today and make something that fits in the palm of your hand and use only the materials in your immediate environment.” Since I had just finished making a necklace based around my Dungeons & Dragons character (more on that in a moment), I had some thin metal wire sitting out and the sharpie I had used to sketch out the design. What I came up with was a tiny little stickman made from wire.

Before smashing it:

After attacking it with a hammer, muahaha!

I mentioned before about the necklace I made based around my favorite Dungeons & Dragons character. (Get ready for the nerdiness to come out) The character I play most often, and love the most, is a Drow necromancer named Astrael Umbrall. For Christmas, my mom got me an awesome D&D book entirely about the Drow race. In it, I read about how each Drow house has a symbol and each Drow wears their symbol somewhere on their clothes, whether in jewelry or just embroidered on their cloak. I found the symbol for Astrael’s house and made a necklace out of it! Here it is below:

Day 2- the prompt was “Use your favorite animal as your inspiration today.” Pigs are my favorite animals, so I sewed a small zombie pig head that was filled with scent beads and attached a ribbon. I have it hanging on my car’s rear view mirror as a cute air-freshener.

Day 3 – the prompt was “Make something with paper but do not use scissors or glue or draw on it.” So of course I thought about folding paper, origami! I searched for simple origami patterns and found this website with a mushroom making tutorial. I searched through my pile of dusty scrapbooking paper and picked some that looked psychedelic. So then I folded a psychedelic mushroom.

Day 4 – the prompt was “Take a 5-minute walk and make something from the things you find where you’ve ended up.” Since there is nowhere interesting near my house within quick walking distance, I bent the rules a bit and decided to grab a bag and collect cool things from a 5-minute walk through the woods behind my home. I found a perfectly intact mason jar within the first minute of entering the woods. After that, I collected pretty looking rocks, leaves, berries, and plants. Then arranged all those interesting things in the mason jar and snapped a photo!

Bonus picture: Sissy the pitbull helping me on my scavenging expedition.

Day 5 – the prompt was “What do you collect? Use part of that collection as your material today.” I collect a lot of things: little piggy knick knacks, decorative plates, and comic books. I couldn’t bear to alter the first two, so I started looking through my comics. When I got old enough to be interested, my mom gave me her old horror comics she had read as a kid and kept.  I love most of them, but some are just plain boring. So I picked the rattiest one from the boring pile to cut apart. I followed the directions on this website for a decorative comic book starburst. I didn’t have any glitter, so I just skipped that step.

Day 6 – the prompt was “Walk into your kitchen, and use the first fruit you see. Whether fresh, canned, pureed, or even jammed.” the first fruit I saw this morning was canned pineapple chunks. So I soaked them in food dye and made a lovely fruit rainbow!