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Monday, July 25, 2011

Handwerk?

It's a Monday and I have a WHOLE week of vacation (in a heat wave) to look forward to. Of course, since I'm b-r-o-k-e it's really a stay-cation; so I'm staying at home. Luckily I planned ahead and I have lots of projects to work on... Maybe too many?

But I love arts and crafts, so I decided to go for it. I started making a nice mental list of all the things I wanted to do — the handbag made from IKEA bags, the collage and marker wall art, the knit and braided area rug. All them were going to get done this week. Case closed.

Here's the thing. I'm also a terrible procrastinator. And I have a hard time finishing the projects I start (my awesome portrait of Elvis Presley? Didn't finish for over a year.) Yeah, I have all of these awesome project ideas, I thought to myself not twenty-four hours ago, but do I have the follow through?

This question was still bugging me for most of the day today, too, as I sat on the couch, watching Netflix on our flat-screen tv, enjoying the air conditioning. Yes, I was knitting the I-cord for the braided rug most of the afternoon, but that was only after brunch. Before brunch I was watching Netflix and playing 'The Lost Kingdom Prophecy' on my laptop. Not the most ambitious start for a week of cool, Brooklyn-style crafting.

Then the idea came to me: Start a blog!

But you're terrible at keeping blogs, too, Brain Me said. Remember your tv blog? Or the political blog? For crying out loud, you even have a knitting blog! And you want to start one on crafting?

Yes. Yes, I do.

Who knows where this blog will go? Maybe it'll go on to be a great creative outlet and lead to an awesome book deal that will inspire women and men across the country to be as crafty as they want to be! Or maybe it won't last beyond next week when I go back to work. But it'll be something fun to do in the meantime.

Oh, and the title of this blog. Quite funny really. I originally wanted to call it Kratwerk and maybe get some people to the blog because they were looking for information on the band. No, really I just thought it sounded cool (especially with a German accent) and it seemed like a natural fit since the blog would be about all different kinds of crafts and crafting.

Oh, the blessing that is Google search. I wanted to double check the meaning, so I searched for 'kraftwerk translation in English'. Turns out kraftwerk means power plant in German (which totally makes me understand the band sound on a MUCH higher level, fyi), so that title was not going to work.

The website I was on had an English to German function so I start typed in 'craft' and came back with lots of choices. The website said that craft could be translated to 'kunst', but who the heck would want to go to a website called 'Kunst'? You have to admit, it sounds a little dirty. That's why I decided to use the next best word for what I was looking to do: handwerk.

Again, according to the translation website, 'handwerk' is German for crafts, manual crafts, craftsmanship, craft [trade], and handicraft. And because I live in Brooklyn (not Germany) I added the common shortening of Brooklyn — BKLYN.

I've got lots of projects this week and I'm not quite sure what the structure of this blog will look like, yet. I might just do updates on project processes, or I might wait until a whole project is done before posting anything about it. I'll just figure it out as I go along.

Cheers, for now. I'm off to kraft!

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