I journaled my private thoughts about a lover in middle school in a spiral notebook that I decorated with construction paper daisies. I then destroyed it after an embarrassing discovery by a friend that opened it up and laughed at my woes of unrequited flirtation with a boy I adored. I vowed to avoid that feeling ever happening again by never writing in a journal again that documented my teenage angst at its finest.

But journaling has been a struggle, and it’s real.

Fast forward to my late twenties, I decided to revisit the idea of tracking my time in a calendar book to reach my goals and pay better attention to how I was spending my downtime. More and more experience led me wanting to expand out from the cages of lines on a pre-made agenda format.

What the hell did I do again last year?

I found myself hearing about the bullet journal craze and began to investigate this freeform way of creating my own formatting systems. It was a fight to follow the rules and then to break them up all over again. More importantly, I wanted to make it worthy of flipping through them again, even if it was briefly. That meant exposing myself by writing down more of my thoughts, slowly but surely.

One of the worst feelings I had one time was recounting all the interesting things I did whenever I met someone new during a networking thing, dating or meeting friends of friends. It suddenly became important that I reflected on what I did instead of leaving it to pull out my photos app on the iPhone. Because sure the picture has a thousand words, but then also it was important that those words were fresh to refer to on a page.

Take smaller steps first and find a habit to attach it to. 

I wanted to fill up a whole journal and be able to flip through it like a personal time capsule, but one year into it, and I realized that I only filled up half of it. I was letting gaps in my life go undocumented and wasn’t building a great habit of visiting it daily.

I had to scrap a lot of original concepts that I borrowed from others, kept what worked, and experiment with changing out systems to make sure I kept writing in it all the time, even if it was just a small notation somewhere. 

I had to resort to tactics that would help automate my sense of reaching for the journal on a regular basis because it at first was a drag to remember to write in it all the time. What helped was that I made sure it was always within reach and in my peripheral, and that it was a nice quality, and that I started off my mornings writing in it.

Asking the right questions will help you write more.

Before I found meditation to help me with intrusive thoughts, I found it cathartic to dump out everything on a page as a series of intense lists of things to do in one day. It was helpful to a degree because I would walk away a little lighter, but then when I saw a bulging piece of writing, it felt very unorganized and chaotic when I would look at it again. 

So there was an idea I came across that helped me systemize what I wanted to document about my day that made it easy to understand when I referred back to it, and also gave me the flex to journal my hardest thoughts. I’m proud of the blended system I came up with that I have stuck by for the longest, but not so married that I wouldn’t be up for trying something new to improve it and help me reach things faster. My asks: 

What are the 3 things you took care of as a maker? As a manager? 

Did you perform self-care today to the fullest? 

What does your task list for the week look like? 

How to show off what you accomplished and what there is left to do? 

How do you break down your personal, professional, and creative to-dos for the week? 

During this 2020 pandemic, we attempt to save the USPS from shutting down across the country. Even with the luxury of our inboxes stuffed with marketing promos, bills, and non-sensical meetings, we hold dear our national treasure of the slowly forgotten snail mail. Especially when the threat of voting is for the sake of keeping a lunatic at the helm of his presidency.

I never thought I’d have a pen pal past 3rd grade.

When we had to start passing comprehension tests for reading short stories and learn all about homophones, our teachers thought it would be great us as students across classrooms in another school.

I got matched with Choi, who was a singular Chinese student in her class much like me. We wrote in pencil on lined, loose-leaf paper, talked about our families and what our favorite subjects were in school, and exchanged our school portraits once! I could remember the excitement of the days when the mail arrived and we cracked open our decorated letters. 

Writing is cathartic, especially by hand.

As an adult, the only time I really get to showcase my handwriting is on special holiday cards given to friends and family. It’s often an unrequited gesture that gets me excited about the end-of-year season and gives me to chance to reflect on my relationship with each person. It made distance connections with others come a little closer together again.

I scrolled through Instagram one day and when a long-time colleague from undergrad campaigned to start a pen-pal exchange to help support the USPS, I jumped at the chance to do it. I was excited by the old rush of letter exchange.

Decorating letters is even more fun.

Let me say that when my first letter arrived from Bo, she set the bar high. Colored envelope, specialty pen ink, bubble letter typography, custom stationery, and a note written from front to back got me super excited. It was going to bring out the best in our graphic design and creative efforts.

A competitive touch came out of me. I came back with Hello Kitty stationery, a kraft envelope with Japanese characters, and sealed it off with washi tape of all the animals in the Chinese zodiac. It was a blast spending the whole two hours deciding what to put together.

It was my turn to volley again and wanted to turn it up a notch. In the earlier weeks of the pandemic, I cleaned out my craft supplies and hesitated to toss out my heat embossing supplies. I hadn’t used them in forever for a senior year project, so it was time to make use of it.

I picked up these rubber stamps with basic geometric shapes at the Paper Source, nicer stationery paper, and envelopes, a wet ink pad, and still had plenty of embossing powder to go around. Within minutes, I had a special item worthy of imparting my handwriting on as my wow factor for this round. I’m so stoked to feel the reaction from afar.

The results are worth the powder mess everywhere.

When the transition to remote work from home happened at the start of the pandemic, I was unprepared for what it meant that I would be adjusting to a new environment of spending more time in front of a screen and becoming constantly distracted by my own mess and surroundings.

I took fewer breaks because I didn’t have the natural disruption of teammates, meetings, and casual conversation. My posture slumped forward as I didn’t have the same office “luxuries” of cushioned padded seating and tables with the perfect height. My research led me to a conclusion of investing in a Herman Miller chair with all the bells and whistles that I was not quite ready to make the leap for just yet.

I should have known that folding chairs are the worst.

Instead, I had access to a lightly padded folding chair that belonged to a mahjong table set that my family no longer really used, so it was quickly employed as the next best thing other than nothing. But after an hour of sitting in it, I felt my butt cheeks go numb with tenderness and found more excuses to do other small things around the home until the blood flowed back through my body properly before sitting down again.

The next move in the interim of making a deep dive Herman Miller investment was to get a padded cushion to place on top of the folding chair. Social media gods must have read my mind (or used an algorithm to hear me complain) that I needed help and placed an ad for the best thing to save my tail at the perfect time. A Casper seat cushion for the win! I found the best option which seems to have been made for long-haul truck drivers and gamers (to which I’m not either of type) and figured if it was good enough for them, it’s good enough for me.

After a long two-week wait for the cushion to arrive in the mail, I was thrilled to give myself the gift of an improved seating condition. I lasted for at least 4 hours (though not extremely healthy anyway) and didn’t feel as much of a tingle in the back from constantly having to shift my weight back and forth. But! There still was a problem. Anytime I had to get up from the chair and the cushion, it slipped further forward or backward, which meant that I constantly had to re-adjust it before sitting back down again.

The hunt was serious for the elusive mid-century modern piece.

The battle for a clean and organized workspace has been one I’ve waged day after day. I wanted to find more ways to make my workspace more sophisticated in a way that made me more excited about showing up to work every day. Making small tweaks like donating old supplies, tossing out papers, consolidating art bins, and improving my system of accessing things became an obsession. The biggest thing that really kept avoiding was really improving this seating situation. 

I had fallen in love with mid-century modern design and often ogled over the beautiful pieces that my local vintage stores were offering up. I recently go upset one day when I couldn’t close my IKEA dresser and ended up breaking one of the boards. It was then that I decided to make future investments in furniture that would last over time in style and materials. So maybe, I would start small. 

I could start with a chair.

I opened up my Craigslist app for days and weeks at a time, on a bloodhound hunt for a simple chair that I could elevate my workspace with. There were so many beautiful options to choose from but also knew that if there was a need to reupholster it, I’d have to be able to handle the project on my own. My lucky day arrived when I found a single chair owned by an elderly couple that was moving out of their home, and for only $20.

Though she was not branded as a beauty from Denmark, I thought this chair stood out for its back shape and smooth hole punch in the middle. It was made of solid wood, had a simple construction, and would be perfect to try out some self-taught upholstery skills as a fun project.

The task was an investment in the beauty of simplicity.

Materials: high-density foam, serrated knife, upholstery fabric, staple gun, staple puller, cotton batting, screwdriver/flathead, scissors 

I walked away from my undergrad program in Graphic Design unsure if I mastered anything other than passing grades for all my classes in design. Though I did feel like I got the gist of the lessons learned from nearly all my classes in proportion to my personal interest, I felt some angst knowing that there was still so much left unanswered from this one course that I struggled most, OIL PAINTING.

Of all things, I was not a natural at painting.

I remembered how a classmate showed off his beautiful self-portrait project and this amazing assignment of painting a white sheet in class one day. And all I could recall is the struggle staring at my own blank canvas wondering why the nose was not matching the rest of my face, and spending hours trying to get the right shades of magenta, cyan, and yellow just right before deciding to start over because my vision kept shifting under the fluorescent lamps above.

Just blur your eyes, he said. How does crossing my eyes help me with anything? My painting instructor was rather younger and new to the art faculty. He taught mostly by waving his palette knife over my subtle imperfections saying few words beyond: “try this”, and “do you see that?” I got a passing grade from that class and was so happy to retire my baby food jar full of gamsol, and hauling my bulky supplies up and down the 3rd-floor stairs. 

I was so displeased with all of my work from that class that I stowed it away in a dark closet only to toss it out after paring down my closets. But something about not doing so well in my weakest class still fired me up inside years later to make attempts at trying my hand at it again. 

The search for the perfect journal.

I wanted to step into the baby pool and ease my way back into trying to paint. There was no way I’d feel super motivated to go hard and buy oil paints, an easel, and fit my own canvas frames. So I watered down my needs and decided to go simple, and start with watercolor and acrylic paints and a journal that I could travel easily with. Hours of searching led me to figure out what my own preferences were for the right kind of journal I wanted. 

I imagined being able to take it out quickly from my bag if I was out sitting in public whether I was eating or relaxing, or had a flash of imagination and needed to get my thoughts downs without being overwhelmed by the idea of filling a big white blank page. I narrowed down my requirements to something specific: a black, hardcover, square journal with high-quality watercolor paper. 

I wanted something small, portable, and inexpensive.

One of my favorite projects in my undergrad senior portfolio class was to make and bind our own books as a way to present our work. It was a pleasing assignment for me because it allowed me a break from staring into our computer screens for constant design projects. Any chance to work with my hands was a chance to slow down myself and my racing thoughts. 

 I hadn’t assembled a book in years, but I knew the next best place to relearn anything was on YouTube. I found a few new favorite videos with the keyword search “make and bind my own book”, and was easily down a rabbit hole of As a (creative) packrat, I hunted through bins of my supplies and discovered that I still had plenty of leftover materials that I’ve hung on to that could prove to create something new that would meet my own specs.

The steps to assemble the book. 

Materials: acid-free matboard, bookbinding glue, needle and thread, bookbinding tape, Xacto knife, self-healing cutting mat, watercolor paper

Tips: Consider the current size of your watercolor paper pad to help make the most out of your cuts and folds.

My favorite class by far coming out of Parsons was my millinery class. It was the most unique opportunity to learn how to construct hats by hand. I fought to get into the fall section after it was declared to be filled up online. I took a chance and emailed the teacher to see she could just let one more person in, and to my luck, it worked. A special part about taking this class in NYC was a field trip to go visit the Albrizio Millinery shop to go get a hat made with professional machinery. 

I picked out a deep-blue, wool felt with a fedora style block with a wide brim. It was a magical process to watch the steam hit the felt into shape, tied off to keep it in place, and the brim is trimmed into the perfect curve. I was going to wear the most badass hat on the city sidewalk. Except it sat in a box for years waiting for the right time to wear it, which never came.  

My wool hat needs a new look.

Fast forward to 2020, in a pandemic summer where I’m faced with a closet to clean out amongst many other fashion-based projects left behind over the years. My hat was up on the list and needed a new trim instead of the grosgrain ribbon that simply just blended into the body with the same color. I found inspiration from a magazine where I saw that someone decorate their hat with a matching blue bandana. How simple and practical! 

By this time, I was also using bandanas as face coverings for my more active outings going to the gym and riding my bike. Earlier in the spring I collected a pinkish silk scarf and wanted to repurpose it into a new design. Maybe it would be something to try adding to my hat. 

A scarf = face cover and hatband. 

I dyed the scarf using a shibori technique. Last winter I took a class to learn how to dye fabric in a traditional Japanese method of using string to manipulate and bind the item to create a resistance style pattern. I combined some remaining black and blue Rit dye to get a deep blue color that would contrast and compliment the pink background.

The result is a more interesting hat. 

 Now I have a multi-functional band that operates as a stylish tool to compliment my hat and can become a face covering if I needed it in a pinch.