Creative Expansion - From Baking to Ideating
A group of adults, a sticker pack and more than a few laughs.
Welcome to Creative Gym!
Week two came by quickly! I’ve been thinking a lot about ideas for future Creative Gyms and have felt inspired by this project. This week was fun, check it out below.
Project Name: Birthday Week
The story:
Baking is likely my biggest creative hack. In the kitchen Im able to fully explore creatively without feeling the need to prove anything or present a good outcome - it feels like the place where I get to try new things and fail.
I bake during the month of December, I bake when I’m stressed, I bake when I want time for myself but mostly, I bake to share with others. There is something so deeply gratifying about baking something and giving it away to someone who will truly enjoy it - it lights a spark in their eyes, it makes them feel cared for and that feeling, is one I absolutely love.
For my birthday - I often bake my own cake. It allows me to explore new flavors, techniques and I get to share it with the people who celebrate with me.
Now, there’s a second story to this week’s post and it goes around the lines of having a few years where I wasn’t particularly excited to celebrate my birthday. This year I invited people I love to spend a Saturday with me and in a few conversations I had during that week, I decided to create some sort of a game for everyone attending the party.
The process:
Baking
I wanted to create a table with sweets for people to enjoy and decided to include a few of my staple comfort foods - cornflake squares and brownies. These two are nothing wild, I just really appreciate a standard recipe that is very well made.
For the cake, I had a lot of oranges at home and my mom always makes this orange cake that I love. The batter is just a vanilla cake with orange zest and juice, I split it in half so I could fill it with condensed milk and then added an orange and lime buttercream over the top.
I spent Friday night with 2 friends and my cousin baking the night away which honestly, was a perfect Friday night for me.
All bakes were delicious - we got really good reviews from all of my party guests.
The game
My friend is a creative director and for this task I called him up to brainstorm a few ideas. We decided to create a passport with challenges that people had to check off by asking another party guest for a sticker (that proved they had completed the task).
Things from “turn your shirt inside out” to “guess someone else’s biggest fear” where all part of the challenges.
I have a lot of friends from different areas in my life and in an attempt to get them to mingle, I thought this would be a create way for all of them to get to know each other. By the end of the night, we had people with sharpie tattoos of other people’s dogs and new nicknames going around the table.
It’s crazy to see that by giving a group of adults a sticker pack - they are able to connect instantly with their childhood.
The last fun thing I have to add was the prize for the person who had the least amount of stickers on their passport. This person would receive a set of tools as a way to encourage them to “fix their bad attitude.”
Creative gym week 2 was absolute fun to create and watch it unfold.
So i’ll leave you with a scale to measure all these projects equally. I created different sections to rate the overall experience of each project and to keep track of a few relevant metrics.
This is it for now, I’ll see you at another session of my creative gym! If this is your first time here, find an explanation below and the link to the intro post here.
An experiment where I don't modify my creative career but add some weekly workouts to move away from the dryness. A public practice - for my own accountability, a place to explore and share what comes out of simply trying.
This is a playground, a place where there’s no wrong and in which showing up is good enough. A place where creativity is not defined by a single activity but by the expansion created by variety and dynamism.
- exposé