Failures, typos and discovering I may have a few too many pencil cases.

During the week I failed to type "Thursday" correctly. Instead Thursday became "Thrudsay" and hilarity ensued. Resulting in an illustration of Queen Thrud and her Caveman love - and yes that is a 'turd' on her head serving as her crown due to a friend misreading my typo.

Queen Thrud

Prior to completing Queen Thrud I spent the week cleaning my studio - thanks to the ever inspiring Tania McCartney who posted a lovely blog about her studio spring clean. Mine was more like a spring overhaul. You know. . . turning a small mess into a bigger mess in order to achieve some semblance of order (in the process I discovered I may have an unhealthy obsession with pencil cases).

I also bravely shared a photo to my Facebook page of my mess during the tidy up. Truth be told, it was not a photo of the true mess but a partway-through-said-overhaul-photo that I was a little more comfortable sharing. Which made me question why am I embarrassed by my failure to maintain a perfectly clean studio 100% of the time? Why do I feel the need to live up to some unspoken rule about the way I should maintain my work space? Is it because I have been conditioned by society to expect nothing less than perfection from myself and those around me? So I am declaring I will allow myself to relish my failures. I will allow myself to fail and fail happily. To shrug my shoulders, admit it's not working, dust myself off and try again. So what if I make a mistake. We are taught to feel guilt, and shame, and remorse (which is fair enough if what you've done has a direct negative repercussion of huge proportions on other members of society) but what if you made a mistake that effects only you? Why is it not okay to say 'I failed, this obviously wasn't the best idea - lets try it another way and see if that succeeds'. If the saying goes 'we learn from our mistakes' why do we not celebrate these lessons learnt in moments of failure. As I tell my art students: There is no FAIL - only a First Attempt In Learning. And if I hadn't failed to type Thursday correctly Queen Thrud would not exist and the world would be a sadder place because of perfection.

I wonder what you call a collection of pencil cases?