Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Left Overs - Some Thoughts

Left overs. It is a common term in the US for extra food left over from a meal that will be eaten at another time. It comes to mind this morning as I munch on left over fruit salad from Sunday's dinner party. But it strikes me as an unusual term. Why left overs? Why not extras? And if left overs has such a negative connotation (which in some cases it does), why not portion better so that there are no left overs?

This comes to mind because in crafting there are also many times that there are left overs. There are projects that simply don't work where the materials are left overs. There are left overs from forming and refining the projects. Depending on the materials, these may be re-useable, incorporated into another project, or sent to the refiner when enough has been gathered to make a reasonable shipment. There are also left overs in ideas. An angle there, a stitch there, a focus over yonder. And these idea left overs can be left to percolate on back burners in the mind indefinitely, to come up, bubbling with new possibilities when a new project is being refined. Sometimes the very best projects are percolated left overs from much earlier projects. Maybe it is time for you to look at those left overs of your own project ideas and see if any of them can be re-heated and re-incorporated into current ideas and projects. Made anew, so to speak. Have a creatively exciting Tuesday!

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