diamond painting and audiobooks
This last week has been pretty busy. But in a completely different way than expected.
Long story short: I decided to gift a friend an A3ish-sized diamond painting. Completely made and framed. Approx. 20k tiny plastic stones („diamonds“) stuck to a surface manually. Each stone has approx. 2.8mm diameter. When I bought this on Monday afternoon I didn´t know what I would get myself into.
I took advantage of the fact of being still unemployed and dedicated the majority of the next 6 days to completing this project on time. On average, I spend 8h per day just sticking these tiny stones to the surface. Including reorganizing the stones, putting back unused stones, and organizing them. I guess I have spend approx. 45h in total with completing this project.
For someone with glasses and beeing short-eyesighted, this wasn´t the greatest idea. My posture during this diamond painting was the worst possible and starting on day 3 I had to deal with back pain and used my foam roller every day to make it through the week.
On the side, I decided to run another experiment. I wanted to try out audiobooks for a long time and was late with starting to read the book for the next club meeting: Moby Dick. I found an audiobook of this on Spotify and listened to it during diamond painting for almost 3 days.
Experiencing this kind of „reading“ was pretty new to me. Because of the nature of the book, it isn´t always easy to follow, because there are several list-like chapters in this book. As a person who journals for years straight I can´t get rid of the impression that it was some kind of commonplace book or personal journal mixed in one.
I noticed that I ignored whole passages when I was sunken into the monotonous, tedious work of sticking the stones to the canvas. I didn´t take notes because there was no space for a journal on my desk. I regret this a bit half-hearted and consider skimming an unshortened version of the book just to get my favorite quotes out of it. We´ll see…
Despite the long hours and the painful back, I have to admit that I am a bit proud of myself. During the last weeks, my discipline has been only existing as a theoretical concept in my mind, but I made it in time. On some days I „painted“ almost all day. On other days it has been 4h „only“. Most evenings stick these stones to the canvas until 9:30 or 10 pm. I glued the canvas to glass, fixated and framed everything on Sunday afternoon, the day before the gift should find its way to her new owner.
What are the lessons from this week?
- I am capable of more than I thought.
- I still have some self-discipline left.
- Audiobooks for fiction are fine.
- I am in a deep slump when it comes to job-hunt stuff and will take a few days off from that shortly.
- If I ever gift such a large diamond painting to somebody else again, I´ll buy it at least 1 month ahead.
- I am more patient than I expected.
- The friendship with the person who will receive this gift means more to me than I thought.
- I should create a collection in my (bullet) journal for a project like this. My planning system for this was not existing, except for a few lines on the cover foil to see how much I have to get done each day.
- I enjoyed my 1–2h visits for lunch or dinner to my boyfriend‘s place a lot. I have been an ambitious cook in the past, but now I am glad when I just have to drive 10ish mins to his place to get a nice meal.
