Confucius says “choose a job that you love and you'll never work a day in your life”. part I

This little saying popped into my head as I was doing carrot face painting at Harlow Carr Gardens this year. To cut a long story short, click here and you’ll get the idea of what we do every summer hehe! My dad’s Carrot Museum goes on tour and gets shown to the public, and because I’m arty farty I come along with my craft supplies and make various carroty things and this year I also painted at least 300 carrots on people's faces or arms!

We went for three days, and on the second day (the best one because everything is already set up, there’s no putting things out or tidying them away, so you can get straight into it) at the end of the day I felt very contented with my days work. I’d literally painted people’s faces every 5 minutes, only stopping for sips of coffee or bites of sandwich, to change the water pot, obvious other essentials tee hee, and when there were lulls in people coming in, usually because they were at lunch themselves.

So what I’m saying is doing something all day non-stop with no breaks is the definition of hard work, and yet I didn’t feel like I’d done any ‘work’ at all. I came away from that three days thinking, I wish I could do this every day.

I have since bought some face paints (all I had for that was orange, green, brown and a light blue for a background colour), now I have lotssss of colours! I have been doing some painting on Bri to practice, and on my arm too. I love it, it’s a creative thing and could lead to me painting for a living – score!

Obviously I know that it’ll probably just be kids parties and maybe special fêtes and things which isn’t a full time career, there are only so many Saturdays in a year hehe. But it’s something that I love, and it’s lead to me thinking about other things too.

What I want is to have my finger in lots of pies. I couldn’t imagine a worse fate than to be stuck in the same job day in day out forever and ever.....living to work, earning to pay bills, getting money but with no time or inclination to spend it.

What I would love is to do many things all at once. All things that give a little bit of money each, but as a whole give me enough to live on. I also have another idea, but later in part III ;)

So here are some of my other ideas:

Nails – there’s a course on nail art starting in January, which could be fun – I’ve always loved doing my own and my mum’s, might be fun to learn more and do it professionally.

Floristry – there’s a course starting next September. Again it’s creative and colourful, I think it’d be fun and I’d be good at it.

Jewellery making – I could make jewellery to sell, at craft fairs, internet, or do jewellery parties.

Sculpture – keeping on with the learning and making fairies to sell every now and again, and exhibit.

Most of these things I could do at the same time, face painting at weekends, floristry and nails during the week, jewellery making and sculpture in my spare time or whenever the mood takes me. I can also tag along with Sally’s shop (our hairdresser), having jewellery displays there, and maybe doing nails too!