Artist Jen Hewett's Pudding

At the start of every new project, I have to remind myself that I probably won't like anything I do for the first few hours or days of it, and that this is all just part of the process. My sketchbooks are filled with ugly, not-good work, but often the important thing is to get the ick out of my system so I can move on.
~Jen Hewett

Jen Hewett

Jen Hewett was always creative, but it wasn't until she was an adult that she felt free to explore her creativity, because that involved trying things, making mistakes, and failing. She shared a family story about learning from mistakes:

[Auntie Maude] told me about her mother, my Great Grandmother Elma...my favorite story was about my great grandmother’s attitude towards cooking mishaps. She was a talented cook, but sometimes her cakes didn’t rise properly. “My mother never called those failures,” Auntie Maude said. “She’d slice that cake, pour some cream on top, and call it a ‘pudding.’ And we loved those puddings.”

...at the end of that year... the cake I’d made for my parents’ church’s Christmas brunch didn’t quite turn out the way I’d planned. So I channeled my great grandmother, and salvaged it as she would have. I sliced that cake into tiny bits, then added some frosting, a pint of cream, and a handful of frozen raspberries scavenged from the back of the freezer. While serving the cake, I recounted my Auntie Maude’s story, and my mom declared it the best dessert she’d ever had.

Cakes, life, work – none of these things have ever turned out quite as planned, but out of it all has come quite a bit of pudding, and immense gratitude for the lessons of failure.

Sometimes we have to just leave the ick in our notebooks, but sometimes we can turn our mistakes into pudding. Are you ready to do both?