Extreme Creativity

As I seem to do all to often lately, I’ve let my diary get so behind that the thought of catching up is totally intimidating, so I’ve been putting it off, which makes it even harder to catch up. So, new year, new start, and permission to myself to let all those missing entries go, and instead concentrate on this year, which is going to be an exciting one, what with the London trip, and building up to our own convention, which instead of being in that vague and far off “2009”, is now (as MrPloppy kindly reminded me at about one minute past midnight yesterday morning) in the very real and immediate “next year” – eeeek!!!

And the planning got off with a bang yesterday, with a day of extreme creativity on promotional goodies to take to London and send to other conventions. We’ve had all sorts of ideas floating around, but while cool, few of them lent themselves to the advertising that should have been their main role. But then when I was down in Alex last week, Mum gave me a brilliant idea: create NZ-themed gift tags that could be attached to whatever goodies we came up with (or even to a variety of different goodies, to avoid the “argghh, we have to make 200 of these” panic that was attaching itself to every idea we came up with). And best of all, among her vast supplies of card-making stuff (Mum and I definitely share the obsessive approach to hobbies!) were cuttlebug templates for cutting out the gift tag shapes, stamps and punches of kiwis and fern leaves, and card in every conceivable shade and texture. So I spent a couple of very constructive days cutting out hundreds of tags, and experimenting with different ways of decorating them with the stamps and punches.

All those blank tags (plus the few I’d already decorated) came back to Christchurch with me, and yesterday awhina and lytteltonwitch came round and we spent the afternoon getting creative, and nearly completely covered the table with finished tags. Final total: 676 tags.

Now all we have to do is put little stickers on the back with the convention info, and add strings/ribbons/whatever. Oh, and create 676 goodies to attach them to! 🙂

Lytteltonwitch and I did make a start on that last night, making about 20 bookstrings. There’s no way we’ll manage another 656 of them (we didn’t realise how slow they’d be to make, with all those fiddly knots, and trying to find matching beads (why was there only one blue fish and hundreds of orange ones???)), but hopefully if all the NZ bookcrossers of the creative type get to work as well, we’ll accumulate enough goodies of one sort or another for London at least, and then can start working on getting things for Brisbane, and any other conventions we hear about during the year. (And if all else fails, we can just add a strip of ribbon to the gift tags to make quick and easy bookmarks.)

In the “you saw it here first” category, another bit of creativity I got up to down in Alexandra was finally finishing off the official logo for 2009. My sketched design had been approved by the committee months ago, but I hadn’t had any time during the year to turn a sketch into a proper image suitable for t-shirts, programmes, web-sites, labels… (actually, this version isn’t very label-friendly – I’m working on a condensed portrait format version that will be better for labels. So be patient, label designers!). The official launch won’t be until London, but here’s a sneak peek:

The full-size .gif version will be available through the BCNZ Yahoo group soon, for people to start getting creative with.

Currently reading: Politics 101 by Anna Smith
Currently listening to: The Rotters’ Club by Jonathan Coe