A couple of months ago, I started a pretty ambitious art project: a
partial portrait in beads. I’d taken a black and white photo, blown it
up all huge, gridded out the pixels, and made a beading pattern that
would have made a vaguely 6x10 finished piece. My notably flawed math
skills notwithstanding, I figured that it would take a couple bags of
beads and maybe 10 hours to finish, and that it would make a nice gift
for a friend.
I kind of underestimated things, though. I set the pattern out in
blocks that were 10 beads high by 75 rows wide. Each block took about
two hours to set up and bead. The finished piece would have been 16
blocks high and used 120,000 beads. Factoring in the amount of nightly
free time I have to work on such things (not a lot), and adding in a
couple extra hours here and there for reworks and distractions, I
guessed I would probably have finished it sometime mid-2047.
Somehow, I managed to find the time to get the project just a little bit over halfway done and then some crap happened. Crap!
And overnight, my reason for finishing the piece changed from a
magnanimous "hey, I made a thing for you" to a spiteful "hey, I made a
thing, and now you can't have it." And right about the time that the intention switch got flipped, I fucked up the piece. Irreparably.
I learned a valuable lesson - making pretty things into petty things never works.
After the fuckup, I kept working on it because I was bound and
determined to finish, because: spite! Also, I wasn't quite ready to give
up. A week later, I threw it away, and the following day, I started on a
new one. This one, I thought, is just for me. I’m doing it because
it’s a damn good idea and a damn good design and it’s something I want
to start and finish and hang on my wall because I liked it.
Which was a great plan and all, but I fucked that one up, too. There
is a lot of counting involved, and it’s hard to keep things straight
when watching Criminal Minds and trying to also hold a
conversation with Mr. Boyfriend. I’d count something, get distracted,
answer a question, recount, make a quip, recount, get impatient, need a
glass of water, recount, ad infinitum.
When I was stitching blocks of blocks together, I noticed a spot
where two lines of beads did not match up and could not match up with
out significant re-working. I’d already done some pretty stellar
post-fixing and was feeling all kinds of crunchy about doing any more.
It was too much to think about, I’d have to undo and re-do about 1,400
beads, which was just too, too much. Last night I took a good hard look
at what I had worked on and decided that it wasn’t worth salvaging.
It’s tempting to look at all the lost time and all the changes of
intention that went into making the piece -- 100 hours, easy, and a lot
of good thoughts at the beginning -- and think that because I’d put so
much into it, it deserved to be finished. But it doesn’t. Yeah, I spent
some time, and yeah, I spent some brainpower, but all that’s really
lost, though, is just $12 worth of beads. That’s all it was ever worth.
No comments:
Post a Comment