I actually finished The 100 Day Project on the 100th day! I actually made 100 paper mobiles! I didn't know if that was going to happen, but I wasn't going to be hard on myself it didn't. The 100 Day Project is FOR YOURSELF. So, it makes no sense to be on schedule if YOUR LIFE doesn't allow it. It was a bit of luck and happenstance for me to finish on "the day".
It was bittersweet to finish. With a project like this, you have a daily sense of purpose. You gotta get that one thing done! I rarely did one paper mobile a day, though! It got so I was furiously making papers one day and then cutting multiple mobiles another day, and then gluing them all together on a different day. As of about the third week, I never posted a mobile daily that corresponded to the day. But it all worked out. I let the project take me on a little journey.
It transformed early on into a lyrical paper mobile project. For the month of February, I decided to add the lyrics of love songs to heart shapes on the mobiles. A friend pointed out that this made the video reveals on Instagram into multi-sensory experiences. The video showed my art paper mobile shapes with a word or two of lyric, slowly panning down for the viewer to read the lyric and possibly guess the song. If you guessed the song, you had an audial and visual experience...and sometimes that song would get stuck in your head...until the next day when a different song would get stuck there!
Once I put lyrics on them, there was no going back to plain mobiles. So after love songs, it was "rock stars" and "pop divas" and "pop stars". There are so many songs in the world that I love, that I wanted to put onto a mobile. It was hard to choose the 93 songs that were featured. Again, I decided not to be hard on myself. I went with my intuition, and often it was the lyric that spoke to me, versus the song, my memories of it, or the artist. I realized, I didn't really know the lyrics to many of these songs to begin with!
As I cut the star shapes out, I was always left with some pretty big, oddly shaped scraps. And this paper being such a labor of love, I couldn't throw those scraps away. Nor could I stick them in a box to be forgotten. I decided to start punching the scraps into circles to use for other projects. And, of course, other projects were right there waiting for me while I was doing the 100 Day Project. Like ATC's and art journal prompts:
My 100th lyrical paper mobile was created around the time I was due to post my first Creative Team contribution on the StencilGirl® blog, StencilGirl ® Talk. It's a step-by-step tutorial on how I made the 100th mobile.
I created a playlist on Spotify of all the songs that appeared on my mobiles, so take an actual listen if you like!
And you can see all of the videos on my Instagram account @juicy.s.art.
Thank you for reading this post! Thank you for following along on my 100-day art paper mobile journey!
XOXOXO,
Sarah