Happy Accidents

So, despite your best intentions the night before you wake up and walk into your Studio or Craft Room or Kitchen table and find a DISASTER. This. This is NOT how it looked when you went to bed. Is it?

Maybe the colors aren’t right in the light of day. Maybe your perfectly glued components slid when you weren’t looking. Maybe, you made a big fat gluey MESS.  Doesn’t matter. That’s right. Don’t despair. Whatever you do, DO NOT toss it aside like the piece of trash you think it is. Resolve to fix it, today or chances are it will never get fixed. It will sit, forlorn and forgotten at the back of your table. Forever the ugly duckling that “didn’t turn out”.

This recently happened to me. I’m new to blogging so unfortunately this idea didn’t come to me until afterwards. So, I will apologize or the lack of “Before” pictures. That won’t happen again!!  Below are the “after” shots. 

I had an idea for a spoon pendant. I gathered all my supplies together and began gluing my components to the bowl of the spoon. I first glued a button to raise my floral arrangement. Then glued the leaf circle and finally the Swarovski flower.  The first thing that went wrong was I used entirely too much glue and it had squirted all into the spoon bowl. I quickly resolved that with Microbeads. Problem solved. Or so I thought. When I went to bed that night the pendant looked GREAT!  I was pleased.

Fast forward to the next day and the pleasure turned to Horror.  While the purple Microbeads were a good idea, I hadn’t taken into account that the edges of the button would show. Also, completely unexpected was that the flower ,which was supposed to be in the center had slid upwards at least 3 mm and the whole thing now looked off centered and unbalanced. In disgust I pushed it aside. Well, this didn’t turn out the way I envisioned at all!!  All was lost. Or was it?

A few days later I pulled it back out and took a look with fresh eyes. I realized the button issue could be corrected with mini leaves. Tried it. It worked. But it was still off center. How could I fix that? Bottom line?  I couldn’t. When you use E6000 it’s pretty much stuck. So, if I couldn’t make it look like my original plan, what were my options?  Well, I could throw it away or I could drop my original idea and refocus. What could I do to fix this?

The answer suddenly struck me as I was poking through my tiny flowers and bead caps. Wait. That’s it!  I will put down some tiny flowers and it will re-center the piece.

It worked!  The pendant was salvaged and nobody was the wiser. Nobody knew that I almost threw it away at least 7 times. No one knew what a colossal disappointment it originally was. Nope. It looked like I had made it this way on purpose.

Another example occurred just last night. I put a pair of brass stampings in the oven to heat them up for coloring. I got busy with children  and forgot them. When I pulled them out of the oven I was shocked to see two beautiful copper and blue stampings  instead of the raw brass. Well of course!  I overheated them and now they had a stunning oven patina. I stood there, stunned in my kitchen for a few heartbeats and then let out a loud WOOP!  Technically, what I had achieved by accident was far better than what I had originally planned. You see?  Happy accidents.

Life is what you make it, I’ve learned. I’m  learning that Art follows the same rules. Sometimes, you throw everything together but you get a mess. It’s all about how you react to that mess. So, never give up on a piece just because your original vision disintegrated. Sometimes, the best things come from Happy Accidents. And no one will ever know but you. Unless you choose to tell them.