The 100 Days Project

The 100 Days Project is over for another year.  This year I had a big stretch where I was as the uggh stage of my project; the 'have to push through' stage.  There was also the 'this is awesome!' stage; the 'I didn't know I could do that' stage; the 'what the heck do I do today?' stage; and the 'I haven't done anything for ages so now I need to do three in one day' stage.

I started the 100 days project again this year after having a very satisfying experience with last year's.  I didn't get all my days done last year, but I felt like I had really achieved something personally with my art.  My theme had been 100 days of faces and I thought I might get to the stage where I was comfortable with drawing faces and using them in my quilts.  I did get really comfortable with faces and I felt I was even reaching a point where I could narrow in on my style - I felt this was a pretty big accomplishment.

So this year I was really excited to get going on another 100.  I chose 100 days of scissors, wanting to see if I could find my voice with free hand paper cutting, with the hope that I could transfer this to my fabric cutting later.

And I have had several stretches of days where I've really thought I had cracked something.  There was a stretch when I was doing branches, I loved almost every one of them, but then I felt I couldn't keep going with them because I thought I'd exhaust myself with them on paper without ever getting them into fabric.  Was that a legitimate worry?

I spent a span of days trying to find a symbol that worked for me.  That was after seeing Dinner at Eight artists share their work that was accepted for a themed show 'Personal Iconography: Graffiti on Cloth', and wondering if I had any particular personal symbols that I could incorporate into more of my work.  Turns out I don't think I do...

So I pushed through and just kept turning up, because that is what it's all about.  Turn up, do the work, form the habits, see what happens.  Sometimes I'd cheat though, and I'd do several days in one go, which helped me work in a kind of series with whatever subject I'd picked.

But mostly I just kept trudging on.  And now we have reached the end of the process.  I'll let you in on a little secret though: I haven't done day 100.... I bought two sketchbooks in the beginning - a black one with 40 pages and a white one with 60.  I must have ripped out a page, or the manufacturers were telling fibs because at day 99 I ran out of pages!  Somehow I just can't bring myself to work on any other surface!

Overall it doesn't feel quite as satisfying as last year - the experience was positive, there are pieces of work that I like and that I want to explore more, but I guess I just don't feel like I reached the same stage as I did last year.

But that's ok, I'll be back for next year's 100 days, because the process teaches you so much, even if you don't reach the creative levels you hoped for.  And now, looking at the photographs of all the work laid out end to end, I'm proud of myself.  That's a good feeling.  I'll be back for a second helping next year.

Here's what day 99 looked like:

And here's the whole project in lots of 20 (you don't see the whole pictures, just thumbnails, and sometimes oddly cropped):