September was an eclectic month for me creatively. Technically, all months are creatively eclectic for me because my style is a little bit of a lot of things and I dabble in an assortment of media and techniques.  But this month was particularly wide-ranging, at least in finished pieces.  I think I was under the influence of a weird combination of overwhelmed by ideas and under-motivated to start anything.

Since my favorite holiday is next month, I tried to kick my motivation into gear by making Halloween-themed earrings.  I have a few silkscreens with seasonally appropriate patterns and a general idea of how I wanted to mix and match them for earring components.  After spending the better part of an afternoon conditioning and sheeting polymer clay, applying the silk screens, waiting for paint to dry, and then cutting out and finishing earring focals, I was not feeling more motivated.  The next day, when designing and assembling earrings, I did feel a bit more inspired.  Sometimes you just need to make something before you feel like making something.  You know?

Having completed a small collection of seasonal earrings, and being in the mood to keep working with polymer clay, I made a fairy tale-inspired stash box.  The Snow White fairy tale has deep roots and branches in many directions depending on the telling.  But most stories feature a beautiful young woman with fair skin (white as snow) and dark hair (dark as coal) and a forest.  In some versions, there’s a poison apple.  Those are the symbols I incorporated into my design.  

The next project I completed this month was partially inspired by the Art Elements monthly theme challenge.  The theme this month is “blue” and that’s sort of how I ended up overwhelmed with ideas in the first place. So many directions, so many shades.  Blues have always been a preferred color of mine.  I sometimes call blue my “default color” as in, when faced with too many colors to choose from, I default to picking blue.  It’s why my wardrobe was dominated by blues for many many years until I started making a conscious effort to pick “not blue.”  And ended up with lots of purple, which is blue adjacent. 

Anyway, back to the design challenge.  Earlier in the year I began making polymer clay covered stash boxes with faerie faces and flower themes.  I had plans to make a series of flower nymphs and some naiads.  I could have gone with a blue flower faerie for the blue theme challenge, but I really wanted to start the naiads series. Water is blue, after all.  Or, well, not really. But under a blue sky, it appears blue to us. 

After completing the naiad tin, I shifted back to flower fae for the next covered tin.  This time I went with a desert theme.  Because frozen lake naturally leads to desert when your muse is all over the place with ideas.  I can’t say why this flower faerie has horns, but she does.  They’re inspired by bighorn sheep, which are common to the high desert areas.  I think I just wanted to make something with horns. 

Having played with polymer clay for most of the month’s projects, I finally settled on an idea for an embroidery project.  It was another blue-themed inspiration for that Art Elements challenge.  I searched the interwebs for “blue beetle” and eventually narrowed it down to a blue striped snout weevil.  I feel as if there should be a hyphen in there somewhere for disambiguation, but there wasn’t in anything I read.  But seriously.  Is it a blue-striped snout weevil?  Or a blue striped-snout weevil?  Because from the photos, either or both are accurate descriptions.

At this point, I’m going to share some childhood insect trauma.  It’s not what you’re probably thinking.  Yes, I’ve been stung (by bees and scorpions) and bit (by ants and spiders) and had locusts caught in my [at the time waist-length] hair.  Those are not the traumas of which I write today.  No, the trauma was caused by my 8th grade science teacher.  One class project, worth a substantial portion of our grade, was to make an insect collection.  We were given jars with wads of cotton soaked in some foul-smelling chemical to kill them, and pins for staking out their corpses.  We were 12 and 13 years old.

When I turned in my final project, my teacher said, in front of the whole class, “I’m very disappointed in you, Tammy.”  There was more, but that’s the part I remember vividly.  You see, I was usually an over-achiever at school yet my insect collection was one of the smallest in the class.  Because I only collected already dead specimens.  I couldn’t see any good reason to kill insects, even the ones that might sting or bite me, for a school project.  I didn’t know it at the time, but I was well on my way to becoming an animal rights advocate by then. You can partially blame Disney’s anthropomorphic portrayals of deer and mice and such.

I don’t remember if I said anything in response to my teacher. I already knew I wasn’t going to get a good grade on the project, which grade was based on the number of specimens collected, not on any measure of what we might have learned about insects and arachnids in nature.  The lesson I learned that day, though I couldn’t have articulated it at the time, was people in positions of authority or power, including teachers, are just people.  People who are flawed and don’t always do or say the things we think people in their positions should.  Which is no excuse for compromising our own values.

And with that, I leave with you with another view of this weevil that is blue and has a banded snout.  No insects were harmed or children traumatized in the making of this art, although some cats may have waited for treats a tad longer than they deemed appropriate. 

Thanks for visiting my blog today.  I know our society has shifted away from longer reads in favor of social media posts with 240-character statements or videos where no reading is required.  So I appreciate that you took the time to read my story.  Please leave  a comment if the spirit moves you.