Day 71! Is it just me or is this year flying by?

This is my 11th year doing the project, and every year continues to amaze and delight (and challenge!) me in different ways. I’m a lot nicer to myself than I was in Year 1, which is a relief.

Heather Champ, our interview guest today, is on her fourth project… she thinks. Another sign of doing this more than once: you stop keeping perfect track. It becomes less about being “on schedule” and more about finding a way in to your creative practice, again and again (and again!).

When I saw Heather’s project—a mobile made of stained glass pieces—it felt like such a perfect visual metaphor for this stage of the project. All those individual, daily efforts starting to connect and to become something larger.

She’s been building it piece by piece, figuring out the structure as she goes. And now, 70+ days in, you can start to see the whole taking shape.

What made you start this project, and why a mobile?

I’d been hemming and hawing about participating this year. A few of my favorite creators on Instagram were sharing their plans, and I felt a sense of FOMO. I was worried about committing to something that I wouldn’t be able to sustain across the 100 days. For the last couple of years, I’ve been trying to focus on no more than two crafts at a time. I’m easily distractible and a terrible collector of hobbies. You name it, I probably have all the tools needed to make it. When my mind wanders, I often think of the “stay on target” scene in Star Wars. Crochet and stained glass are my focus.

My initial thought was to crochet 100 telephone pole hearts, but I’ve been working through some repetitive stress pain in my arm with physical therapy. 100 filet crochet hearts would not be a kind gift to myself.

A friend and I took a stained Glass mobile class with Kristin Culotta at Wildcraft Studio School here in Portland a couple of months ago. Grinding sharp edges off and drilling a hole in the scrap stained glass I’ve been collecting seemed doable. I love color, and the idea of a hundred different danglers (I’m not sure what the actual name is for the dangly part of a mobile) would be a wonderful way to use the myriad leftover pieces. Hanging art glass in a sunny place is a great way to appreciate how beautiful it is.

You’ve said you didn’t really think it through—how are you making decisions as it grows?

It wasn’t until a few days in that I started to sketch out what the armature might look like. The complexity of what a full 100 days quickly became apparent. In my mind, the branches would all eventually connect to a single point. The initial sketch for the first 32 days looked unwieldy.

At what point did it start to feel bigger or different than you expected?

It was day 31 when it was time to connect two branches, days 1 - 15 and 16 - 31. The tinned copper wire that I’ve been using (16 and 14-gauge) wasn’t strong enough, and even 12-gauge tinned copper wire drooped. It was a very “sad trombone” moment.

I’ve since spent some time at a hardware store and garden center looking for wire elements that will have the strength to support the weight of smaller branches. My daily progress is hanging from part of a tomato cage and a plant hangar hook. It’s not the most elegant solution, but it’s working.

What are you noticing now, this far in—about the work or about how you’re working?

I look forward to sifting through my bins of scrap glass to find something that will complement the previous days. When working with wire to create the loops and arms, I still find myself having to rotate the bail pliers and flush-cutting shears to the correct orientation. Picking the glass is easy. Turning it into the dangly bit is a bit more complicated.

This is my first 100 Day Project, where the individual days are part of a greater whole. I don’t have a plan, and that’s not the way I usually work. Progress over perfection.

Anything else you’d like to share?

I really want to thank everyone who is sharing their daily progress. It’s so inspirational to see the breadth of what people are creating. It’s very hopeful.

Thank you for inviting me to write about my project.

Thank you, Heather, for sharing! You can follow Heather on Instagram @haitchchamp to see her mobile continue to grow.

FOR YOUR PROJECT TODAY

Think about how your work is holding together. Is there a structure emerging—visually, conceptually, or in how you’re working? Make something that supports or acknowledges that.

FOR INSPIRATION

Heather’s mobile grows one piece at a time. Figuring out how it all connects is the fun part!

SHARE IN THE CHAT

What’s something you didn’t realize you were doing until you saw your work all together?

JOIN THE CHAT

XO,
Lindsay

Over the last 10 days, we’ve been practicing the art of the second look. You revised. You repeated yourself. You returned to things you’d already made and found them changed—or found y…

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My sister and I adored sleepovers at our great grandmother’s house as kids. Big Mom-mom (or Bigsy, as we affectionately called her) would let us eat all the sugary treats and joyfully clapp…

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When I was a junior in high school, I spent the year in Washington, D.C. as a Page. Pages were basically 16-year-old interns, except we had our own school (in the Library of Congress) …

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We’ve been talking about repetition this week, but what we’re really talking about is returning.

Coming back to something you’ve already touched—something that now meets you differently…

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By now, you’ve probably made more than you can hold in your hands and more than you can hold in your head.

You’ve also probably discarded things along the way: the page you tore out, th…

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Over the last few days, you’ve been looking again. You’ve spent time with a piece. You’ve revised (or chosen not to). You’ve repeated yourself and noticed what repetition reveals.

At th…

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Do I repeat myself?
Very well then. I repeat myself.

(This project is large. It contains multitudes.)

(Yes, this is a Walt Whitman joke).

Conceptual artist On Kawara painted the date every…

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By now, you’ve probably had a thought like:

Haven’t I already done this?
Isn’t this kind of the same as yesterday?
Shouldn’t it be more… original by now?

I have to push against this instin…

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Writer Allan Gurganus said:

Revision isn’t just about fixing mistakes or making it something better—it’s abou…

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I also just want to say thank you for the outpouring of kind words, encouragement, and enthusiasm around the book (ICYMI: I’m writing a book!). It’s meant more than I can say. I’ll be reading through submissions and doing interviews over the next few months, so if this is your first time doing the project and you’re still finding your way through it, you have time to share. Keep going. There are many more days ahead!

More about the book

→ Are you making plant or nature-themed art for your 100-day project?

There’s an opportunity for you at the bottom of today’s newsletter. Your work could become part of an international science-art intervention happening on May 18th for the Fascination of Plants Day.

For today’s post, I’m passing the baton to . I’m especially grateful to Trish for taking the lead on this conversation—her questions get right to the heart of what it means to stay with a project over time. Here’s Trish!

Dear Ones,

What if the thing standing between you and your creative practice isn’t discipline—but curiosity? What if it were less about trying harder and more about getting genuinely interested in what the struggle is trying to teach you?

Showing up every day might sound simple, even routine. Showing up imperfectly, persistently, and with compassion for yourself, however? That’s the harder, more honest version.

Jyotsna Ramesh has been there too, and she’s learned to stop seeing any creative project as failure. Now deep into her first graphic novel and navigating a fresh ADHD diagnosis, the Bangalore-based multimedia artist has built something rarer than consistency: a practice with room to breathe. She explores themes of intersectional feminism, queerness, and mental health, weaving personal experience with design thinking to create work that is carefully considered.

She opens up here about failure, flexibility, and what it really means to show up for your work—imperfectly, consistently and with curiosity.

This is your fourth try at The 100 Day Project, and you describe previous ones as “failures,” but you also seem to be reframing what failure even means. How has your relationship with that word changed over the course of these attempts? What’s helped you reframe it?

Yes, this is my fourth attempt at a 100-day project and I cannot count how many attempts in general I have made at daily/weekly scheduled creative projects such as Inktober, Childhood Illustration Week or simply a daily studying/making hour over the last 10+ years. I have rarely finished them, if at all, and until very recently I saw them as “failures.” It’s honestly only now in hindsight that I can view them for what they are: crucial attempts that have taught me so much more about myself and the need for flexibility within structure that my creative practice requires. They’re more valuable in what I learnt of myself than simply what I produced or failed to produce. (And they certainly felt like failures at the time. There was so much shame, disappointment and frustration associated with it—which made me feel worse about how I struggled to follow-through with my creative goals and building the body of work I aspired to make).

I think about this image by Hannah Wilson a LOT—it fundamentally changed how I see consistency, discipline and what showing up means.

I think it’s only now that I’ve realised what it truly means for me to be “consistent” in my practice of any kind and it’s taken years of (ongoing) work in therapy to dismantle the perfectionist’s voice. Start small, continue imperfectly and build resilience for getting back to it when you stop (alternatively redefined as Pause).

Your professor in your Sequential Artists Workshop scholarship course framed an early assignment as gathering data about your process rather than making something “good.” Has that reframe—treating the work as information rather than output—carried into The 100 Day Project itself?

Yes and no. I think for those of us that work in a creative field in any professional capacity or care deeply about the work we make, not just in terms of process and the joy of it but also about what it leads to and how it stands on its own, it’s actually impossible to entirely separate ourselves from the need to make “something good.” I spent a few years struggling with this—where a lot of advice I’d see online was about “stop caring what the outcome looks like,” only care “if you’re having fun and it’s fulfilling.” But for a lot of us, satisfaction comes from making something we’re proud of. I eventually figured it’s counter-intuitive to expect one to separate one’s tastes and training (that pushes us to recognise GOOD work), from the work we produce. I found it futile to fight the need for that end goal. Instead, I’ve tried embracing that I will always strive to produce “good” work by my tastes.

With that discernment, if you keep showing up, you’re bound to hit gold at some point and produce work that is worthy in your own eyes. The biggest challenge then is to ensure you show up resiliently, and the best way to guarantee that is to enjoy the process, approaching all parts of it with compassion and curiosity - - which can help dampen the frustration of the bits you don’t like. Embracing that there’s no wrong or right way to approach the work helps. Reframing with curiosity has been great to discover and gain new information about myself, so that I can have more grace around those parts of the process. I believe curiosity is the antidote to feelings of shame and frustration.

You’ve landed on a process-based project rather than an output-based one, and you credit that partly to your ADHD. Can you walk us through what a typical project day actually looks like for you in this mindset?

Yes, for a couple of reasons all linked to my ADHD traits, I find that daily output-based projects are not for me, and even if I’m working towards a final output, reframing my practice as a process-based project is a key ingredient. Perfectionism, time blindness and the need for novelty make daily fixed output production tricky (all hallmark challenges for people with ADHD).

I see a lot of people in the online The 100 Day Project community who make a drawing/collage/ painting/poem a day. It makes for a beautiful visual marker of a project when they put those works together and photograph them, but I learnt long ago that telling myself to finish a piece in a day or even a week is a LOT of pressure. It’s a sure shot way for me to feel extremely anxious about making. I find that “play” in my creative process is something that comes about most often when I lose track of time; when I start a task and cannot tell if I’ve been working on it for a half hour or two hours. I also need regular breaks from each part of the process to ensure I have fresh eyes, a fresh mind and motivation to follow through—so having a bigger container with range helps.

For this year of the project I’m working on my Graphic Novel and each day can look wildly different from the next. Since it’s such a big project, there’s generally multiple things that need to get done simultaneously. I can wake up and ask myself what I’m feeling more inclined to do on a given day. If I don’t have it in me to draw on a particular day, I can write. On days when I don’t feel like making at all, my bare minimum task is researching comics tools (something I keep returning to every couple of weeks). I quite cherish having these choices.

Having a nebulous process with multiple options and “open tabs”, however, can make you feel a little lost, overwhelmed or scattered. Using my course as a blueprint for my project this year has worked as a GREAT external scaffolding. There’s structure, but it isn’t prescriptive and we have the freedom to jump back and forth between assignments from different weeks.

You took a suggestion from a The 100 Day Project interview about anchoring to a smaller creative community and ran with it by inviting friends to join you. What has that intimate group helped to change so far versus participating solo or alongside a large online community?

It was really exhilarating to bring so many people aboard and remains very gratifying when they tell me how it’s going for them. It has given me the opportunity to reflect and check in on myself and my own practice so much more as I try to keep up engagement amongst us.

It’s great to hear what other people are up to, where they’re struggling or what’s bringing them joy through this! It’s also been nice to have a space to throw out that I’m struggling when my motivation runs low and know there are people attempting the project that hear me. It’s not just into the void! I also find that in constantly re-iterating empathy, understanding and encouraging others in the group with their projects, be that to unpause, be kinder to themselves, keep going, I have to channel the kindest version of myself. Accessing that for others enables me to access it for myself a little easier as well.

For someone at Day 61 who’s still showing up but feels like they’ve lost the thread—what would you tell them, from where you’re sitting?

I’m sitting at Day 40 as I answer this, so I suppose this is advice I’m trying to give to myself in the near future! Day 30-38 I really struggled with showing up for my project, just as I did between Day 5-10. I KNOW at some point in the next 60 days, I’ll grapple with it again. Losing the thread is part of the process in life. I think it demands more of us—to keep returning and find new aspects that are interesting OR it presents us with opportunities to do something else that is better aligned.

I think this is where having a manifesto for your project can help—something to return to about why you began this, what it means to you and why it matters. If you don’t have one yet, just sitting with those questions can help you make one now! It’s also worth examining why you feel you’ve lost the thread. What is making you feel this way about your project? Is it boredom? Overwhelm? Are you saturated? Intimidated about a certain part of the project? (Been there!) Hopefully this gives you information on how to pivot your approach and feel connected to your project once again.

I’ll leave you with this: If the thread is truly lost, what’s the closest thread you can find to tug at, that will maybe lead you back again, or to a whole new spool of yarn that it’s time to play with?

FOR YOUR PROJECT TODAY

Jyotsna mentions returning to a project manifesto when she loses the thread. If you don’t have one, take 10 minutes today to write yours. Why did you begin? What does this project mean to you? Keep it somewhere you’ll actually see it.

FOR INSPIRATION

Jyotsna’s work returns to the same scene again and again—a moment evolving across iterations. Can you see the threads?

SHARE IN THE CHAT

If your project had a manifesto, what would the first line be?

JOIN THE CHAT

In Gratitude,
Trish

🌱 ATTENTION nature artists!

Community member reached out with an opportunity to have your art featured for the Fascination of Plants Day. Here’s the details from Anabella:

Are you participating in #The100DayProject and creating plant or nature-themed art? Your work could become part of an international science-art intervention happening on 18 May for the Fascination of Plants Day.
More than 38 cities across 20 counties and 4 continents have already joined!

What is Green (un)seen?
It is an international collaborative science-art intervention around plant awareness.
The intervention invites participants around the world to prepare small letters with a message, a reflective question about the plants present in our daily lives, and a small piece of art. These letters are then shared with people from everyday places, or passersby, or left in public spaces.

The ones coming across these letters are invited to pause and reflect on their relationship with the plant world. They will also be invited to share their thoughts on a website.

How to participate:

1. Sign up here to receive the letter text.

2. Prepare 5–10 envelopes, or more if you wish, depending on your capacity.

3. Choose 5–10 plant-themed artworks you’ve created during #The100DayProject.

4. Place one artwork and one letter inside each envelope.

5. On 18 May, hand the letters to people you know, or passersby, or leave them in public spaces such as libraries, bus stops, coffee places, and train stations.

6. You are welcome to share your experience of taking part in Green (un)seen on social media with the hashtag #GreenUnSeen.

That’s it—your plant-theme art becomes part of a global plant awareness action!

Green (un)seen is coordinated by Anabella Aguilera Scientific Coordinator, founder of The SciArt Curator & Sylwia Orczykowska Systemic Transformation Designer, Transformative Art Curator, Art Now Founder. Further information is on the project’s website. If you have questions, feel free to email us (green.unseen2026@gmail.com).

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I have the most exciting news: I’m writing a book!

The idea for this book has been living in the back of my mind, in my journals, and in the notes app on my phone for many years. I started working on it more seriously at the beginning of last year—interviewing artists from this community and looking for the patterns that would help me form the structure.

In the fall, I wrote a first draft of the proposal, signed with an agent, and spent the holidays revising. Last month, several publishers made offers—I would have been lucky to land with any of them, but I feel especially grateful to be working with a wonderful editor at Andrews McMeel, “where creativity and connection meet,” which feels apt for us, no?

The book is called MAKE MORE ART: 100 WAYS IN 100 DAYS. My hope is that it supports people who want to do the project—on their own or with friends—at any time. It’s also a celebration of this community, and will feature as many of your stories and your art as we can possibly fit.

I’ve learned that no matter how many times I say the rules are made up, it’s more helpful to see how someone else actually made up their own. There’s something about a real story that makes it feel possible.

I’ll be continuing to do interviews for many months to come, and I’d love to hear from you.

The book follows the arc of a project—from the first spark, to the oh-god-why-did-I-sign-up-for-this middle, to what comes after. In other words: I don’t just want to hear what went right. It’s important to me to feature a wide range of experiences—across mediums, identities, geographies, and ways of making. When a reader sees themselves in your story, it gives them the permission to start and the encouragement to keep going.

Did you almost quit on Day 42, but find a way to keep going? Or get to Day 67 and think, this is complete—that was all this project needed from me? Or make it all the way to 100 for the first time?

Here are a few of the kinds of stories I’m looking for (though this just scratches the surface):

• Trying something new, different, or unexpected
• Changing your relationship to discipline, or building trust in yourself
• Making sense of your work (or your life) through doing the project
• Noticing patterns over time that revealed something important
• Aha moments that opened something up for you
• Collaborating—with friends, family, or strangers
• Finding connection through sharing your work
• Moving through the hard parts—or choosing to stop or change course
• Doing something interesting with your project after Day 100

If you had a meaningful experience, in any way, I’d love to hear about it.

Tell me about your projects

Thank you to everyone who has already shared their story with me. Getting to know you and hear about your experiences has been the best part of this process. People are always the best part of anything. This project exists because year after year, so many of you show up—despite everything else going on in your busy and full lives—to make and share your art.

I don’t know how to describe both how surreal it feels to reach a long-wanted moment but also how real and tangible it already feels. Can you see the book? I can see it. Join me in imagining it on the shelves at your favorite bookstore or your local library…in 2028! ✨

XO,
Lindsay