Daily Project

Lately, I have been reading quite a bit on other people's blogs about a daily project.  Since it is the start of the new year, this makes sense.  Some people do a daily project for an entire year.  That seems like too much of a big commitment to me.

Some people do a daily project for a month.  This seems reasonable enough for me. It's a long enough time to explore something and create a routine, but not so long that you get tired or overwhelmed by it.

I've really only done one daily project before.  In Feb. 2011, I decided to practice drawing with my sewing machine everyday.  I chose plants as my subject and stitched with black thread, one a day.  This was just an exercise and was not meant to result in finished pieces.

After all of them were done, I did go back and finish a few of them by doing more stitching in the background and then putting on a binding.  Here is one of the finished ones:

Plant-a-day #4

commercial fabric, free motion machine stitching

approx. 6" x 6"

$35

©2011 Lisa Flowers Ross

I even went back to a few later and tried adding some color.  Like this one:

Plant-a-day #1

commercial fabric, free motion machine stitching, colored pencil

approx. 5-1/2" x 5-1/2"

$40

©2012 Lisa Flowers Ross

I have been thinking about doing another daily project for the month of February (I like choosing the shortest month of the year).   I'm trying to decide what to do.  

Some of my thoughts about how the project needs to be to make it successful for me to keep doing.

1)  It has to be something fairly small.

2)  It has to be something I could do fairly quickly.  I would say that the plant-a-day project took me around 1/2 hour a day (I already had the squares, batting and backing cut for all the days before starting the project).

3) It needs to not have the pressure of having to be a finished piece.

4) It has to hold my interest for the entire month.  

So, what should I do?  I was thinking I could do some more drawing with the sewing machine. But what to draw?  I would want it to be something different than the plant-a-day.  Or I thought I could put together a fused piece a day (without having to finish it with stitching).  Or combine them and fuse something and then go in and draw over it. 

I tried this method on one of my older artworks.  And although I don't really like the artwork (it was part of a group challenge with rules and all), I did like the effect I got doing that.  Here is a small example from that quilt.  These are some totem sculptures in Boise (the floating fish is part of a different  artwork downtown).

Or I could just do a daily drawing in my sketchbook.  Any other ideas?