Debi van Zyl

One of the great things about having a blog is that it actually forces me to make stuff. It's like a little match lighting my butt on fire... I want to make so many things and the list would be endlessly long had I not started a blog. Because I have a relatively short attention span and skip between ideas fairly frequently, I can pretty much be satisfied with having tried something at least once and move on. The wonderful thing is that if something really grabs me, I'll stick to it... like knitting the beasts.

Sometimes I know exactly what I want to make. Other times I don't and I just end up fiddling about with a material or idea until it becomes something.

And today I fiddled around. Well, to be honest, I was cleaning up my living room and got sick and tired of a small strip of cherry veneer that keeps unraveling and falling out of my "materials closet" and I decided that I had to either make something right then and there out of it or I had to get rid of it. I gave myself 5 minutes.

At first I was going to make some kind of bent-wood mobile, then it was going to try to make a lampshade, but lo and behold it turned out to be a plant cocoon-basket!

Actually I have no idea what it is. But I kind of sort of really like it :) I can imagine a whole wall of these little cocoon-baskets filled with little plants. This exercise of "make-something-out-of-it-or-get-rid-of-it" was fun... when I make another one I'll try to spend more than five minutes on it. Maybe the idea will stick.