So I made something
Soothing restless energy
On Monday, I opened a fresh Substack draft and typed, for the first time, a diary-style entry:
Monday 10:17am
My heart is pounding. I feel like a hummingbird, flitting about, projecting a type of nervous electricity. I’m waiting to hear life-changing news.
I don’t know what to do to calm down.
I know, it sounds dramatic. Ben and I had applied to a startup accelerator, and after a final interview last week, we were waiting to hear whether or not we’d been accepted. I was obsessively refreshing my email, and found myself just standing in my office, looking around.
So I decided to make something.
Making peace
My first move was rifling through a pouch of craft supplies, only to get poked by an unsheathed x-acto blade. As I tried to stop the bleeding from the small but surprisingly enthusiastic cut, I thought: this isn’t helping my nerves.
But with a fresh bandaid on, I sat down at my craft mat and started experimenting with some materials I recently got from my friend, Tom.1
Tom is preparing to sell his parent’s house (his childhood home) and the last thing he had to tackle was his dad’s bookbinding studio. His dad had been a bookbinder for over 50 years, and had a backyard garage-turned-studio that was filled from floor to ceiling with paper, book presses, foil stamping machines, drawers of movable type…you name it.
Tom had already sold some of the equipment and donated truckloads of material, but with the house about to go on the market, he was desperate to get the space cleaned out—hoping the materials would go to someone who would appreciate them as much as his dad had. He invited me over to “take anything I want.”
Each drawer I opened, I gasped. There were beautiful hand-marbled papers, book cloth in every color, and “scraps” that were perfect for miniatures.
One drawer was filled with perfect-bound spines that were less than an inch wide. I’m still not entirely sure what they were initially intended for, but as soon as I saw them, my eyes lit up.
They’d make the perfect guts of a mini book.
Making a tiny book
With my brain still running a million miles an hour, I grabbed one of the fans of paper and started playing. I peeled off a 1/4 inch thick chunk, trimmed it down to a 1:12 scale book block, and wrapped it in some thin book cloth. I painted tiny gold stripes and numbers on the spines. I glued in marbled endpapers.
Nothing was cut straight, but it didn’t matter.
As I clumsily painted “ATLAS” on the spine of one of the books, I noticed something shift. I was still a bit anxious and eager to hear news, but my once-scrambled, hummingbird-esque brain felt focused.
I was immersed in my project, but also thinking about Tom’s dad and his wonderful collection. How he must have loved making things. How much time he must have spent in that studio. And how lucky it felt to be sitting where I was, using the amazing materials I had inherited from him.
When I finished painting a tiny globe on the Atlas cover, I rinsed my brush. My impatience had evaporated, and I was ready to continue my day.
Persevering
One of the questions in the accelerator application was about perseverance. Among other things, we said:
We have the benefit of knowing what we should do when things get hard: we go to our craft mats and make something. It not only replenishes us, but it reminds us of the insane opportunity we have to spread this joy with others.
We heard back this morning that we didn’t get in. It’s honestly a bit disappointing.
But I know what I’ll do next.
His name isn’t Tom, but the rest of the story is true.