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?

Embroider Your Mistakes

Austin Kleon has a fun post (that mentions kintsugi!) about how his wife took his son's mistake -- drawing on the sofa -- and embroidered it:

Just in case you want to try to embroider something, here's a "how to" video.

Giveaway

Kintsugi Heart Enamel Pin by Pteroble

Congratulations to our kintsugi pin giveaway winners:

Wendy McGrath and Brenda Davis Harsham!

Found!

Are you familiar with found poems? To make a found poem, you "find" a poem within some other text. Blackout poems, like what Austin Kleon does, are found poems. IMPERFECT poet Robyn Hood Black talks about found poems on her blog.

Here's one that IMPERFECT poet Kat Apel created from our cover reveal:

Kintsugi

Precious scars
filling cracks
with liquid gold,
mended
more beautiful;
broken history
displayed with pride;

imperfection golden.

Cover reveal!

THE STORY BEHIND THE COVER

When we make mistakes, show our imperfections, or wind up feeling broken in some way, we have to patch ourselves back together. The Japanese art of kintsugi is the art of creating “precious scars” or “golden repair” by filling cracks in pottery with precious metals such as liquid gold or silver.

Kintsugi is said to have begun hundreds of years ago when a Japanese military commander broke his favorite tea bowl and sent it to be repaired. When it returned, it had been patched together unattractively with metal staples. Seeing the well-loved but sloppily-mended bowl inspired Japanese craftsmen to develop kintsugi as a better, more beautiful way to fix something broken.

The breaks in kintsugi pottery are considered to be part of the object’s history, and are displayed with pride. An imperfection isn’t the end. It’s a chance for a “golden repair”!

Cover design by Vivien R. Zhu