Fast and Sloppy

In Pursuit of Little Bean's Craftism

I’m watching her craft a bird costume and can’t help wondering if she's brilliant or just sloppy.

It’s like an ostrich head and she’s fashioned it out of cutting cardboard and gluing it all together. She was going to glue on a series of felt pieces to the head so she could color and decorate the felt when it’s dry. But she’s out of glue so now she’s cutting thick chunks of paper towels, wetting them and securing them on the cardboard head.

“When they dry, they’ll stick and dry and I can paint them,” she says.

I leave her to her masterpiece. When it comes to something she really, really likes doing, she moves both fast and relentlessly to do that thing. Sometimes so fast, that she get sloppy.

I remember back when I was building those plastic model kits of hot rods and fire trucks. You’d unsnap the pieces, read the manual and build the car. I loved doing them, but I was often too impatient to let the proverbial, and literal, glue dry. Or sometimes the paint. I didn’t care much, really, I’d just slap that sideways built, glue covered wreck right up on my shelf.

For the life of me I can’t remember if I ever actually finished one of those models. Or, you know, made one that looked good.

I see a lot of that in her. She’s less interested in the actual finished product than she is in the act of building it.

“Uh daddy!” she calling from her crafting table. I walk in to discover her paper towel scheme has failed with the wet towels dropping off and even worse soaking the cardboard head. The whole head project is ruined.

“Oh well,” she shrugs, entirely not disappointed. “Here, I have an idea!”

She rolls up the wet, gross towels into a ball, squeezes them dry and wraps them in saran wrap, creating a giant super ball.

“What you going to do with that?” I ask.

“I’ll think of something," she says.

Never finished, never bored, never perfect. But definitely brilliant.