Ode to winging it

I don't consider myself a creative person (which is why this isn't really an ode but just a bunch of regular prose). I can craft a bit--and I'm not entirely terrible at it.  But my "creative" process is something like:  follow a pattern/instructions, gather a bunch of different skills along the way, modify aforementioned patterns using aforementioned skills...and this is where I am now.  Hopefully soon I'll have the moxie to design my own bags and then sell the patterns and then they'll be a big hit and then I'll get rich from selling them and then I'll conquer the world and then I can take a class in not writing run-on sentences.

But some people are the crafty opposite.  As my cousin (Hi, Mollie!) told me the other day "I don't plan anything and I just kind of "wing it" through the whole thing...which is why approximately 50% of my projects go horribly, terribly, wrong (but the other 50% go quite swimmingly, and are a pleasant surprise!)."   This is the kind of creativity I envy--to just go for it without worrying if it's going to be perfect or not.

In this category you will also find my sister.  She gets a vision in her head of what she wants to create, and her hands actually make that a reality.  She's the one who makes handmade cards that look better than store-bought.   She decided a few weeks ago that she wanted to make jewelry, but not your typical sparkley-beads-and-wire variety.  She came home with a bag of wooden shapes, different cords, and the necessary clasps.  I went out to buy some fusible fleece, and when I came home she said "Do you like it? This one's for you!"

It's a double-sided wooden necklace that she hand-painted. 

The bright flowers and the colors are totally me.  I feel it should be noted here that when I draw flowers it's essentially a colored circle with a smaller, different colored circle in the center. She needed to figure out how to get the disk to hang straight (hence the pink bead), and how to attach the clasps.  Copycat big sister kept saying "Look on YouTube. Seriously, look on YouTube" and she kept ignoring me saying "I want to figure it out myself" so she went ahead and did just that:

Look at those lovely crimpy smashy things that make it a real necklace!

I love it and can't wait to wear it. Of course the weather turned chilly again and it doesn't seem right to wear this when there's a frost warning (80 inches of snow this winter and a frost warning was newsworthy...how quickly we forget).  I've checked Etsy and Artfire and haven't seen anything quite like this.  Most of the wooden jewelry is beaded, or those Scrabble tile necklaces that have a small image on them decoupage-style.  So she may be onto something here.

She better not get rich first. I'm the big sister! I'm supposed to go first!