What’s Your Word?

Over the years, I’ve tried to come up with a “word of the year” to keep me moving forward in a New Year. Each year it’s been a different word. Some past words that I’ve used are:

Hope

Focus

Organize

Positive

Love

And a few more that if I really think back, they’ll come to me. These words have helped me grasp a “theme” that I want to continue during the 12 months of the year.

My word for 2024 is:

Share

I’d like to spend more time this year “sharing” with others. And I’m really going to focus on sharing my art with others, through happy mail, random acts of kindness, mail art, leave behind pieces and cards. I think it’s a good way to bring positivity to my surroundings and people in my life, as well as those who I have never met.

It used to drive my father nuts when I would make things for people for special occasions, like birthdays, anniversaries or just to be nice. I loved sewing cross stitch patterns, making quilts, drawings and handmade pieces of art in my 20s and would spend hours creating special gifts. Most of these handmade gifts were for close friends and family and since I was in college and my early 20s, I didn’t have a endless amount of cash to blow on gifts for people.

He used to get so irritated because he’d tell me that I should just make things for myself because the people that I was making gifts for and spending all this time on really wouldn’t appreciate the effort and love that was put into something handmade. Yet, I trudged on, continuing to make things for others since that was really all I could afford after paying for college and working as many hours as I could get at my jobs.

And that started to ring true after a while. I started to realize that the handmade pieces that I would spend hours and hours working on, were often just cast aside and that made me feel really unappreciated and shitty. In fact, I can remember back when I worked at JoAnn Fabrics in my early college days, making about $8 an hour. My brother and his girlfriend had just gotten a little black Lab puppy, that I adored and couldn’t get enough of. On one of the delivery trucks, a new supply of fabrics arrived and, wouldn’t you know it, there was a few bolts of cotton fabric that had black Lab puppies on it! So I used a good portion of my paycheck the following week to purchase the fabric to make a “quillow,” which was all the rage back in the 90s. It was a quilt, that folded up into a pillow so you could use it for either purpose. And nice Sandy the fabric lady would stay late at work after we’d close to show me how to make my projects and help me with questions. It took me weeks to work on it! But I was sooo excited to give it to my brother and his chick for Christmas.

Fast forward to after Christmas, after I had painstakingly spent hours and a good amount of money on this project. I’m over at his house and I go to bring the trash outside, and what’s in the trash bin? My beloved “quillow.” Thrown away, like it was a piece of shit. All rumpled up and stuffed into the trash can. I was heartbroken. Sad. Angry.

And that’s when things started to shift for me… slowly. After several other creative projects that I handmade for said brother and now what was his second wife, all ended much with the same demise: The cross stitch that I made with his wedding song and had framed had a photo swapped out, to keep using the frame but the hell with the lyrical cross stitch (which, by the way, was done old school with a recording from the radio and me stopping, starting and pausing as I had to write down the lyrics to that shitty Bryan Adams song). And let’s also not forget the times that I’d be asked to hand make their kids Halloween costumes, fly them down to them in Alabama, only to have the kids decide they changed their minds and didn’t want to wear the costumes that I spent hours and hours on. Yeah, I got burnt out from being shit on by them.

Now that my parents are both gone and I’ve pulled the plug on the sibling relationship (which was the BEST decision I’ve ever made), I’ve gotten back into making things for people that I love and care about, and am pleased to say they appreciate. It’s nice seeing and hearing appreciative comments from the recipients, and makes me realize that I was simply focusing my maker energy on the wrong goddamn people!

So now, with it being a new year, my word is SHARE. And I am excited to start sharing more of my art with those around me!

What’s your word for 2024?