I spent most of Saturday staring blankly at my workspace, absolutely empty of ideas to apply to the prompts. I was already four prompts behind as of yesterday morning, the 25th. I think I was preparing to abandon the month again.
I counted what remained… A hard eight.
Still too dumb to get anything done, I had the ludicrous idea to lay out eight pieces of cardstock and do them all at once, similarly to how a chess master might play one-v-many opponents at the same time.
I mentioned the thought to my partner with a chuckle. She knows I don’t work that way. She also knows I wouldn’t say something like that out loud if I didn’t secretly want her to dare me to do it.
“What are you waiting for?” she asked.
Two hours later, a pile of work sat on the corner of the table waiting to be scanned.
One or two might be stretching to fit the prompt, but going from four-prompts-down back to three-prompts-up to get a mark in every frame for the month feels like a big win. Especially since I haven’t managed to complete the whole of a Februllage since I started collaging again in 2020.
I left social media in 2023 just before Februllage started that year. My partner and I moved from Virginia to Kentucky in January of 2024, and I was still building the studio workspace. I don’t think I even made my first collage here until March sometime. All that said, it feels good to finally have cleared the board.
Also of note for this group of work is that all the pieces came from one of my partner’s cut boxes. Proof again, that materials really are secondary to making successful collage. It’s how the pieces are placed in combination with each other that generates meaning.
This is my own personal reminder to change up the way I work every now and then.
Another fun development is I’ve found some lightly colored cello tape on Amazon.
The available colors aren’t the most obvious, but the layering they allow for shows some promise. I have 1/4-inch-wide rolls in hand, with 3/4-inch-wide rolls on the way. The tape doesn’t cut very well when used with a typical scotch tape dispenser, so I snip it from the roll with scissors. I’m not sure how well the tape will hold yet, though.
