What to do when you’ve lost your mojo!
I don’t know about you, but this happens to me more often than I would like. I go into my craft room with the intention of making some (hopefully amazing) cards, and end up staring at my card stock! Do I hear you say the same? Well, at times like these you can still be productive, if not necessarily creative. Here are some things I do to get over my non-creative hump.
Tidy a part (or all) of my craft room! This may sound like a big job but, as I said, it can just be a part of the craft room. For example, I might tidy up my desk, which is my main work area, by getting rid of things I don’t need or moving items to different locations. I may decide to decant glue into fine-tip bottles, or sharpen my colour pencils. I put away product that has been used but still lying around, and dust my desk! It’s amazing how much dust accumulates on a crafting surface. It’s also amazing what I find when I’m tidying!
Take new product out of its packaging and put into storage pockets, label and put into the ‘new product’ basket. (Just as an aside, whenever I buy a new product I make sure I use it at least once before I move it to its normal storage location.) I also go through my storage system to check that everything is labelled and in the right place.
Stamp and die cut sentiments. This is one of the biggies and I know that a lot of crafters already do this. It’s a great way to utilise time that’s not creative. I really like having a variety of sentiments on hand to just add to a card when needed, especially when I want to make a card quickly. I get quite frustrated sometimes, when I’ve made a card fairly quickly and then it takes me more time to think of the sentiment I want to convey as well as then stamping and/or die cutting it. To have some ready-made on hand is good.
Play! This is a great tip for getting your creative mojo back. I use products that I haven’t used in a while and just play with them. I usually end up making backgrounds without the pressure of coming up with a card idea. Some work, some don’t, but the experimentation is quite freeing. I then have the added benefit of having a lot of backgrounds that I can use for cards when I’ve feeling creative. Remember, there aren’t a lot of new techniques out there for cardmaking. A lot has already been done so, if through your play time you’ve found a different way of using a product, then that can only be a good thing.
Another thing I do when I’ve lost my mojo is to grab a cuppa, get settled into a comfy chair and watch some YouTube videos from some of my favourite crafty content creators. This makes me want to get back to my crafting desk pretty quickly!