The Comfort of Assembly

Tonight was Invitation Completion night. 4 of us made an amazing assembly line. Gluing all the invitations to the folder, then assembling the pieces, folding, stickering, and sealing the envelope. It took a few hours, but it was good company and much fun. The end result is really great and came together well. They should be in the invitees hands this week. I love the process of seeing an idea from creation to end. It was really fun brainstorming with one of my closest friends about her wedding invitations and making it happen.

I think I take solitude in assembly lines. The steady rhythm that your body and mind fall into when doing the same thing over and over again in strangely comforting. I'm very familiar with assembly lines. I worked at Honda in the motorcycle and car plant in Marysville, Ohio for 2 summers during college. I now work on a different kind of line. I retouch photos, mostly vintage photos where we clean the dirt and stains away. It's very meticulous work, but repetitive like many factories. I can see the ups and down of this kind of work. In one way, you don't have to spend much brain power during the actual tasks, so you can dream up and process creative ideas or evening plans. While retouching, I can listen to pod casts, talk to coworkers or chat on the phone while working. The negatives are you have to actively try to keep your brain active or you can easily become a lump in a chair on auto pilot. It's difficult to find a balance.

I enjoy the repetitiveness of printing. Most of the brain activity and creativity is in the beginning steps; drawing the designs, getting plates made, or putting together vintage blocks and type. After all the parts are locked up and everything on the press is set correctly, it's smooth, steady sailing from there on out. I've been talking about getting a clothesline with a pulley, so I can sit on a stool and just pump the press without moving to hang the pieces. This shows my laziness and also the results of thinking a lot while doing the monotonous printing.

It's all very rewarding though. As I print, I count how many I've made. It's awesome to see the number grow. When I'm really excited about a piece, I want to print a ton. When printing cards, I have to decide how many I should print before I start, depending on how many I think will sell. When I worked on cars and motorcycles, I walked by the finished product every day that I had a part in creating. While retouching photos, I constantly flip from the background layer to the working layer, seeing the progress I've made. Instant gratification in all cases. I love the "I made this" feeling. If I have a message to you as a reader, it's Go create something today. Whether it's baking cookies or a whipping up a great piece of art. The high of creating is awesome.