Discussion Post: What Have You Made? Brag Here! Anything You are Proud of Creating!

Posted on by

Not masks! Let’s take it as a given that those of us who sew have made dozens of boring repetitive masks. But what fun stuff have we done? Knitting, cross-stitch, watercolor, or just sidewalk chalk and signs for windows? I want to know about any of it!

I got a coloring book! My first one since I was 6. It is sooooooooooooooooooo much fun. And every time I finish a page, I tape it up on the wall above my bed at my parent’s. Next to the framed painting I made at age 4 which is one of my mother’s favorite works of art.

How do you know you have high self-esteem? When you stick coloring book pages over your bed to admire at age 34.

Where do you get high self-esteem? When your mother has your pre-school art work framed and puts it in the guestroom for everyone to admire.

Okay, your turn! Tell me about your cross-stitch, or finger painting, or sidewalk art, or posters for windows. Anything you have done that made you feel a proud glow of satisfaction and achievement, magnify that glow by bragging about it here. Heck, tell me about the really amazing grilled cheese sandwich you made

And if you email pictures to dontcallitbollywood@gmail.com, I’ll add them to this post! Or, if you have already put photos up somewhere on The Internet, you can embed the link in your comment.

39 thoughts on “Discussion Post: What Have You Made? Brag Here! Anything You are Proud of Creating!”

  1. For many years I had an online retail business and community called Scrapbooking from the Inside Out/Inside Out Visual Journaling and sold emotion-based scrapbook kits and taught classes. I would provide prompts each month and people would share their artwork and discuss. It was very fun but I grew tired of the retail thing.

    So I have always been a scrapbooker and focus on telling my stories and processing feelings. One of my friends is hosting a FB group with artsy challenges while we are home. Here’s what I made last Friday after our watchalong.

    Now let’s see if I can post this via Instagram!

    https://www.instagram.com/p/B_0LFBsgniO/?igshid=akks32ybvyzd

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply ↓

  3. Food, lots and lots of delicious food of all kinds every day! I find cooking to be ridiculously therapeutic. I am especially proud of the homemade Americanized-Chinese food I made last week: potstickers, General Tso’s chicken, chicken with ginger and scallions, and fried rice.

    I have also been researching the history behind various Indian dishes and trying to make them as authentically and from scratch, as possible.

    Like

    Reply ↓

    • You should be proud! That is amazing. I can’t even imagine making Chinese food from scratch.

      For the Indian food, two questions. 1. are you grinding your own spices? 2. Are you excluding outside influence ingredients (like potatoes) or including them?

      On Tue, May 5, 2020 at 2:14 PM dontcallitbollywood wrote:

      >

      Like

      Reply ↓

      • I never thought I could make Chinese food from stratch either, so it was really fun to do it. Similarly, my husband’s ancestors at one point came to the U.S. from Ukraine but they still celebrate Ukranian Christmas/epiphany. So this year, we had a small gathering and I made all Ukranian food from stratch including golubtsy; vegetarian and non-vegetarian varenyky; uzvar; and sausage slow cooked in sautkraut, honey, and beer (my only not traditional item but one my husband loves a lot and associates with this holiday) and it was so much fun!

        With regards to the Indian food, (1) yes I am roasting and grinding my own spices, and (2) yes excluding “non-traditional” items from dishes like (i.e., no potatoes in Vindaloo, no onions and tomatoes in Kashmiri-pandit style RoganJosh, no tomatoes in Laal Maas etc).

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply ↓

        • Well dang! you are upping the cooking game!!!! Most people I know (white people to be fair) brag if they can manage any old basic Indian dish, with potatoes, and processed spices. And here you are doing it seriously old school!

          On Tue, May 5, 2020 at 2:59 PM dontcallitbollywood wrote:

          >

          Like

          Reply ↓

  4. I made the best cake out of what-do-we-have-in-the-house last week! White cake with chocolate cherry filling and whipped chocolate frosting. I think I might make peach crisp next…

    Like

    Reply ↓

  5. I’ve been writing my book series, a series I’ve been working on for 8-9 years now and finally it seems I have a structure for it all set down (the what goes where kind). It is about Greek Mythology from the perspective of the lesser gods and goddesses who don’t get as much show as The Twelve Olympians among other things. Yes, there is South Asian representation in it among others. I wish I could tell more, but it is still on the working stages of the first draft being done and if it ever gets published I don’t want to spoil it. Though I hope it will be published, I have a story worth up to 9 books if anyone will be interested in at least taking the first 3.

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply ↓

    • I like it! And congrats to Oscar.

      Projects are great. I write on the blog soooooooooooooooooooo much, so in theory I am being creative and all that, but I don’t get nearly the mental health benefits from writing that I do from coloring in a picture. It’s a lot less creative, but having a tactile physical result is an amazing uplift.

      On Tue, May 5, 2020 at 4:11 PM dontcallitbollywood wrote:

      >

      Like

      Reply ↓

      • Some people have a need to create. I might be one of them, my 8-year-old is definitely one of them. The problem is, what do you do with all the stuff you create? As my husband has pointed out, I only have one neck, how many necklaces can I make? People are tired of getting knit hats from me. I went through a phase in February where I really wanted to make collages, so I made a bunch of bookmarks. No one really wants a bookmark. And I feel guilty whenever I throw away one of my children’s creations but, well, there isn’t enough room in the house for everything. Coloring is good. When I knit I basically feel like I’m playing with tactile colors. I’m prone to Carpal Tunnel though, so I can’t do it too much. My husband can scale mountain cliffs, and I get injured while sitting down and knitting.

        Like

        Reply ↓

    • Oh man, crocheting is the best! Fast enough that you feel like you are moving forward, but slow enough that you don’t finish in minutes. If I hadn’t just given away all my yarn, I’d be starting it up.

      On Tue, May 5, 2020 at 9:08 PM dontcallitbollywood wrote:

      >

      Like

      Reply ↓

  8. Sister and filmikudhi are making me hungry. Can we make next DCIB event a potluck/feast? A girl can dream…

    I’m more in causing projects to happen mode right now. I caused my younger kid to make a happy rainbow sign for the window. I caused my husband to make a patio :). BUT the thing I wanted to share was the May Day baskets, inspired by your mother. We have combined forces with the family next door for the duration, which has been a nice pressure valve for adults and kids on both sides. There is a family across the street, though, who we usually also hang out with all the time, but we’ve all been keeping our distance because they have an elder in the household, the grandma. This grandma is a very crafty lady, and so is her daughter, and so is my neighbor next door. So I got the idea (again, from your mom, because you wrote about her) to collaborate on making May Day baskets for all the houses on our block. The family across the street made the “baskets”, my next door neighbor and her kids made tissue paper flowers, and we bought candy to stuff them with and I wrote the tags. So tell your mom that she caused a whole block full of people (we made 52!) to get a cheerful surprise (on Saturday, it was raining Friday, but the spirit was still there), and our three families the joy of giving it to them.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply ↓

    • That is so wonderful! My mother is going to be so touched. Thank you for telling me.

      And a patio! That makes my “I stuck pictures up on the wall” idea not nearly as good.

      On Tue, May 5, 2020 at 11:19 PM dontcallitbollywood wrote:

      >

      Like

      Reply ↓

  9. Well, about my most creative outlet right now is singing and dancing with our toddler, so nobody else has to hide in shame. Still, I think his “E I E I O” might be recognizable even by strangers by now, so I am legitimately proud of him.

    Like

    Reply ↓

    • That is insanely creative! You should be very proud.

      On Wed, May 6, 2020 at 1:34 PM dontcallitbollywood wrote:

      >

      Like

      Reply ↓

  10. I (finally) learnt to cook caponata, traditional sicilian dish with fried aubergines, pepers and other stuff. It’s not hard, but I was never happy with my caponatas, and stopped making them for years. Now durning the lockdown I couldn’t ask my mother-in-law to make one for me, or go to restaurant and I had to learn. I’m proud to say that I’m quite good now.

    Like

    Reply ↓

    • Ooo, that sounds really good! Especially because we have been getting a lot of eggplants in our produce boxes. I might try to persuade my mother to attempt it.

      On Wed, May 6, 2020 at 3:15 PM dontcallitbollywood wrote:

      >

      Like

      Reply ↓

      • It’s very good. The secret is to fry the vegetables separately. I used to fry it together and that’s why the taste was different.

        Like

        Reply ↓

  11. What a nice idea to talk about creativity…and I liked to read all the ideas realised 🙂

    As for me, I’m a provider more than a doer (only regarding creative work…at the moment)…I just let do the kids with everthing my appartment gives them to be creative…I admit that this is my greatest joy…and gosh! the little ones amaze me 🙂

    Like

    Reply ↓

  12. I feel like everything I post in the comments further proves how young I am, but I spent the last two months writing fanfiction “fixing” Kalank.

    Aside from this blog community, I only have one friend who I regular talk about Bollywood with (who I also met online). We bonded over our love for Varun and Alia, but had the same gripes with Kalank that pretty much the entire world did. I don’t remember how, but we came up with a plot idea that’s very stereotypically fanfiction (albeit a bit fantasy), and I expanded it a lot to cover almost the entirety of the plot of Kalank, with the main, heavy focus being the relationship between Varun and Alia. I posted it over the weekend, and my friend loved it so much she said she’s not acknowledging the actual events of the movie as canon anymore. So I figured I’d post it here.

    https://archiveofourown.org/works/24223780

    The other 4 characters are almost nonexistent, so if anyone was a fan, sorry.

    Like

    Reply ↓

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.