Doing A 360

We all have our pet peeves, now don’t we? Those tiny little annoyances that other people do which cause our teeth to clench or our right eye to involuntarily twitch. Maybe it’s the improper use of the three their/they’re/theres…or enduring a meal with someone who chews with an open mouth…or sitting down to find the toilet seat left up in the middle of the night. Two words: movie talkers. Yeah. I’m pretty sure that even the most tolerant of individuals has SOMEthing that is akin to fingernails on a chalkboard for them. Anyhow, I was reminded of one of my personal pet peeves recently. That being, people who believe that when somebody changes so much that they become the opposite of what they were, they are “doing a 360”.

Pie charts are funny. Mmm, pie.

Think about that for a minute, won’t you? If a circle’s full circumference is 360 degrees, then “doing a 360” would mean arriving right back where you started from – i.e not changing at all (or changing, but then changing right back, which would essentially nullify the first change). Yes, I know I’m being knitpicky, but seriously. If you mean to say that somebody has totally changed, they’ve done an “about face” or a “180”, got it? Okay. Good. Whew. Well, I for one know that I’m going to sleep better tonight. So. Why all this talking about degrees anyhow?

Well, this whole 360 thing got me thinking about how life is FULL of complete circles and cycles (and spirals, but that’ll have to wait for another day) – temporal, biological, atmospheric, geographical, physical, ecological, vehicular… And I am beginning to realize that trying to come up with a new post idea or a new creative project every day is highly stressful. This is supposed to be my “fun” time! So, rather than forcing myself to be eternally novel, I am giving myself permission to go back to things I’ve already done and explore them a little further. There is no way I could have possibly learned everything I needed to learn about things in just one project, right?

And so. With that in mind, I circled back to my quilty bird idea and thought about ways to expand it further. Is there something I would like to try differently – materials, size, subject matter? How could I fix the little glitches I encountered? Could I somehow make it more “marketable” or “functional”? And after a few days of mulling over these thoughts, this is what happened.

A Bluebird of Happiness, for you.

I really, really like it and can finally see the potential for it and others like it at craft fairs and such. Woo-hoo! And whew. But…being who I am and living the life that I lead, I think I’ll leave it at that for now and revisit it again sometime down the road. Perhaps when a little bird tells me so. 😉