Retroactive clock-out for yesterday, and a crafting day today

Yesterday:

Forgot to clock out yesterday. Did my morning pages, then had a good long walk/artist date out on the trails. I packed a bread-cheese-mayo breakfast, a bottle of water, and my sketchbook, and headed out. Made a sketch, attempting to use tricks gleaned from Drawing and How to Draw Trees:

By the time I got home I was exhausted and spent much time recovering. In the afternoon I played way too much of my online game, but I did finally get around to my novel again, and spent some productive time brainstorming. Read more of Confederates in the Attic, which is a really wonderful book about bizarre people and murky conflicts.

I had probably my most productive time of the day in the wee hours of the next morning (so I suppose it’s just as well I forgot to clock out until today). I woke up in the middle of the night fretting about my rapidly dwindling stock of FabMo fabrics, and then had a total brainwave: I forgot about all the wallpapers! I began thinking of paper crafts, and before I knew it I had three scribbled pages (big scribbles, since I didn’t turn on a light) of ideas, and a name for my Etsy shop. I set it up this morning, along with a corresponding gmail account: The Sixes and Sevens (I wanted it without the “the,” but naturally the name was already taken).

Today:

After setting up my Etsy shop, I bummed around with Erik for a while, then we went out to run errands: crafting supplies and grocery shopping. After last night’s papercrafting brainstorm I had my heart set on getting some bookbinding supplies, but Michaels didn’t have them. I did get some other things I needed: beads for omiyage pouches (I should eventually get some cord to use in those pouches too, maybe, instead of ribbons), recycled sketchbooks (50% off!), packing tape for building boxes, and index cards. In the afternoon I attached some of the new beads to my omiyage pouches, then wore myself out to a surprising degree making a set of six blank cards and envelopes. I took an idea from The Tightwad Gazette and bought 5×8″ unruled index cards at Staples instead of cardstock; these proved really too flimsy to use as notecards, but with wallpaper spray-glued to them they work quite well. I produced an envelope template too, spray-glued black paper to the verso side of other wallpapers and cut them into the envelope shapes, and placed Alan Davidson atop the stack to flatten the envelopes out before gluing them together (I’ll do this later this week). Because I was taking breaks (read: gaming) in between, I can’t tell whether this project really took the full two hours that passed while I was working at it. I hope not, because I don’t want to charge more than $18 for the set but I can’t justify my time if it really took two hours. Anyway, this was the first batch, so it would of course take the longest. And the set looks very nice.

I’m going to try to get a bit more done before bedtime. We’ll see.