Needlepoint's Creative Process

I swear, the traffic on Saturdays is getting worse than on the weekdays.

I thought this yesterday as I was on a simple drive home and was stalled in traffic.  A trip that should have taken 20 minutes took me well over an hour, but it turns out it wasn't time ill-spent and it adds an odd but all too common small twist on Needlepoint's Creative Process.

The reason for my errand where I got caught in a traffic snare was a trip to Michael's. I had had an idea how to solve a problem for one of my E-Week offerings and I went to Michael's looking for a ring or a belt buckle or something that would act like a hanger. I wanted a simple way to hang a long length of ribbon on a wall, something like a bell-pull hanger.

E-Week, my big big sale of the year, starts on October 17,  just a little over a month away and given where I am in the process (not far enough along), it is nearing time for a bit of panic.

At Michael's I surfed through the store and gathered up a small cache of paraphernalia that I thought might work for my chore: some silver rings that looked like wedding rings, a small square plaque with my initial 'G' (I usually prefer an 'R' but they were out of 'R's), some slightly larger decorative rings and a  couple of extra lengths of ribbon. I paid for my small cache and headed home.

That's when I got caught in the  traffic snare. So there I sat, creep, crawl, creep, stall, creep crawl, creep stall, with nothing to do other than watch the road ahead and either panic about wasting-time-in-traffic-which-I-can-ill-afford-because-I-have-way-too-much-to-do or reflecting on what I'd just bought. More productive to think of what I'd just bought.

 My mind drifted over my small cache and I tried to figure out how I might put it together . I was thinking up all the alternative mixes, as in 'I could use this with that, I could attach it in this or that way' and so forth. This went on for at least a dozen cycles of trying to get through the stoplight at the bottom of the hill.

And then it came to me, a great idea how to do just what I wanted. I mentally clicked my heels together and thought, yessss!!

Of course, my idea involved none of what I'd just bought.

But this I have learned: if I hadn't bought my cache, likely I wouldn't have thought up my idea. Maybe if I hadn't been caught in traffic on the way home from buying that which I will now likely never use, I never would have thought up my idea.

So one of my important remaining tasks for E-Week got solved by buying a bag full of odds and ends that I will likely never use and getting caught in traffic long enough to figure out that I would never use what I just bought.

Go figure. But that's the way it often works.