Today is the 100th day of my unofficial 100 Day Project. I did it! And I think I will keep doing it! Let’s talk about it.

Back in July, I shared a primer on this project and some of the technical aspects of it (you can read that post here). But what about the heart of the project? Where did that come from?

It came from a hummingbird!

Late last summer, I was crouched in the garden, taking a video of my zinnia flowers from below with the sky as the background. As I filmed, I noticed a hummingbird, beating her wings in the middle of the frame. I stood up to capture her better just as she hovered over a flower and then out of frame.

What luck! I thought as I watched the few seconds of footage back. I can’t believe I caught that.

And then I thought more about it. 

I had spent the last five months out in the garden. Multiple times a day I was there, picking weeds, cutting flowers, tying back plants, pulling what was spent. I tidied and fussed and marveled and enjoyed. Throughout, I took photos and snippets of video to try to capture a fraction of the abundance that grows from spring through fall. It was wonderful, but not necessarily lucky, that I caught the hummingbird on camera. 

If you spend enough time in the right place, you’ll inevitably be there at the right time.

I spent 100 days in the right place this summer. My 100 collages capture what it looked like. (For the record, I saw dozens of hummingbirds, but I only got a photo once.)

Above are the 100 completed collages. (I took 10 photos this morning to create the final one.) I realize they are tiny but I think it’s fun to see the whole project as one body of work. My “collage style” didn’t change much from day 1 to day 100. The crafts I made changed, but it even that feels so subtle when I see everything together here. I made my first ever ruffle bowl on day 2 of the project! Ruffle bowls then appeared in over half of the daily collages.

There is no question that doing this project pushed me to make more art. My goal was to use photos taken each day which meant I had to 1. take photos (easy) and 2. have stuff to take photos of (harder). There were a few nights after dinner where I knew I needed “more” to finish my collage and so I went out to the garden or the art house to capture “something.” I wouldn’t have done that without the quiet, constant nudge from this project.

One thing I noticed early on was that sometimes a daily collage just didn’t click. When I found myself moving the same images and doodles around and around feeling totally unsatisfied, the best thing I could do was delete everything and start again with a blank canvas. It was too easy to get stuck in the same patterns. Clearing the slate always helped and a “final” collage would then come together in minutes.