My job as the Office Coordinator for the Craft Center is to be energetically involved. Whether that means organizing and supporting the workshops we offer, training student staff, or engaging with the community about our services, I am the Craft Center cheerleader, willingly, every day. It’s an easy gig in that I fully believe in what we do. Having ridden the College Rollercoaster of Success and Failure for six years I wish that something like the Craft Center had existed to fuel my creative pursuits. No grades, no expectations, just you coming in and focusing on something that is not your academic goal. Being able to turn off that part of your brain and engage your creativity and pursuit of an experience rather than the outcome is an incredible gift. I belive that what we do here every day has the potential to effect the mental health and wellness of our students, and ourselves.
I have over the years written outlines, created logos, drafted business plan after business plan, and created multiple Etsy accounts for some type of creative side business. I wanted to embroider a whole line of pillows. I wanted to create wall tapestries for the modern home. I wanted to quilt and knit blankets for bedding (skills I have zero experience in but wanted to turn into a revenue generating business). Partially because I felt like it was something I should be doing. Creating is kind of what my degrees are in. Creating should be a thing that I enjoy doing outside of my normal work day. Selling those creations seems like the sensible next step. For almost ten years, I have never been able to figure out how to do it, or what that business should look like, or something that holds my attention long enough.
The pressure to create for money is a real problem. Trying to make pieces that I care about with, really, the self-made pressure of generating an income fizzles out any desire to create really quickly. My mind immediately skips ahead to what the business could look like, where I could sell, what markets are available, how much I would need to price things at instead of focusing on getting good at one thing and creating resonable goals and expectations of what I want to see happen. For me it comes down to this: am I creating because there is a passion and drive to or am I creating because I want money. All of my previous attempts have fallen into the latter catergory.
A beautiful thing about my job at the Craft Center is that every day is a day to explore. We offer so many different mediums and tools that you could come in every day for a year and never have the same experience twice. For some people, that would drive them nuts. For me, it's a thrilling environment that challenges me, but also comforts me.
When I decided to redesign this blog and to really think about what kind of business I wanted I made a list of the things I wanted and what I was good at and the things I didn't want and the things I was bad at. I also wanted to list my short-term goals, long-term goals, and the things that I needed.
The things that I was good at included: encouraging others to be creative, planning and organizing, technical writing, and coming up with ideas.
The things I wanted included: being able to work on short-term creative projects, to write about work practices, and to advise and creative coach.
The things that I was bad at included: understanding projects from start to finish, sticking to a long-term project, and finding time to maintain projects.
The things I that I didn't want included: travel and staying with one type of focused project (example: owning a knitted blanket business where that's all I make).
My short-term goals included: lowering debt and more consistent waves of work flow/energy.
My long-term goals included: bringing creativity back into my personal work practices and to have something more reliable that I enjoy doing outside of my day job that also creates revenue.
The things I needed included: breaks, routine, social life, and space for good mental health practice.
The thing I'm quickly realizing is that I still don't know what that business could be or what it looks like. And the struggle is for someone like me, who needs routine and stability but also has a lot of passion, is that I need to just allow whatever "this is" to grow naturally and not force it.
Is there a way to create a side hustle out of this? Maybe. Is there a flourishing business model somewhere in the depths of what I want to do? Maybe. Can I make money off of this? Maybe.
Is it good practice to end a blog post with no resolution? Probably not. But, hey, we're growing naturally and that seems like a good stopping point for today.
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