We all have what I am calling here “signature projects”–the self-directed work we choose to pursue over months or years, and projects that require learning new skills, sustained effort, and creative or editorial judgment, even when no one is paying us to do them. This post is a tribute to those projects we do in the background but rarely get credit for.
When you have a creative personality, it sometimes seems as though the work never stops! My husband observed recently that I dive in and dedicate myself to so many big projects that can’t really go on a résumé and that often very few people see, but that I deserve some kind of credit for completing. At first I scoffed at this, because I’ve had so much fun with every one of these, I didn’t know how they could possibly count as work. But then I realized he was right: every single one of them required a lot of hard work (sometimes years’ worth!), learning new things, and either developing new skills or enriching existing ones. And there were moments when some of these even became so painful/mentally taxing that I wanted to cry and call it quits. But quitting is not something I take lightly, so I took a breather and then pushed through each barricade until I was satisfied with the results.
Cordially, Carrington
This very website we’re on has been an ongoing labor of love. I’ve built every piece of this myself, starting from zero knowledge about how to build a website, and at no point have I had any help putting it all together. I missed the days before social media, when everyone was on LiveJournal talking about their day with maybe a few photos, or Angelfire message boards, and thought the world would be a much better place if we just ran our own websites and followed each other there instead. (I do still keep a mostly private DreamWidth journal–an updated and modernized LiveJournal codebase–as well.) There have been times that trying to understand how to put and keep all this together have been incredibly painful, but I keep it going.
Recently, based on my experiences at work with website refreshes (and in one case leading one myself), I gave it a whole new look. I had already learned how to go look at the features on other similar sites and pick and choose what you liked best about them, so I chose what worked for me and redid the whole thing!
Not only has the overall project been a great deal of work, but there are times when individual posts can take an entire day or more of staring at my screen to complete. (I’m never quite sure how this happens or what the most time-consuming portion is, either–I just know that I will roll out of bed one morning with a goal of completing a post, and then it will be dark and I’m finally hitting that “Publish” button after not having moved the entire day.) And sometimes gathering material for posts takes various amounts of research or trial and error before even beginning to write, too, like finding a new sunscreen or mascara, or learning about and testing the most popular style analyses you can do for free.
So a lot of my heart and soul goes into this. But I couldn’t imagine stopping!
Large-Scale Event Design & Execution
If you’ve been around this site lately, you’ve definitely heard about this one! In a previous role, I lived almost entirely within the world of tradeshow and event management. So it wasn’t a huge stretch to take my custom-built tradeshow planner and transform it into a wedding planner. This one, planned over the course of 11 months, required end-to-end design and project management, concept development, logistics, vendor coordination, budgeting, and execution, all under a fixed and non-negotiable deadline. Multiple guests even remarked independently that it was the nicest wedding they had ever attended, which was deeply rewarding. I love getting to see a vision come so thoroughly to life!
Editing & Historical Preservation
Another favorite project was for a local historical society. The Murray Hill Preservation Association produces a publication called The History of Murray Hill, and sought me out to do a revision for a new third edition. The previous editions had essentially been a list of bullet points. Together with the then-president of the MHPA, who compiled tons of photos, gathered loads of new information, and designed the layout, I revised the book into what it is now: a bound publication with a magazine-style layout. This involved months of researching and fact-checking to group related points into new paragraphs, plus rewriting, proofreading, and writing new information that had never been recorded before. This project might be what made me realize my passion for historical preservation, which is a throughline in much of what I do for fun. I don’t know if this is still in print, but if you’re interested in the history of one of the oldest parts of Jacksonville, it’s possible you could get a copy by reaching out to them.
I took on a very similar project for the family archives. My great-great-grandfather was a governor of Kansas, and his daughter wrote a history of him and their family. Since she never published it and it had never been digitized, I transcribed it, proofreading as I went along, initially just so it would be preserved and so I would have an easier way to read what was a fairly bulky document. But as I was doing so, I got the itch to research it, as well. I wanted pictures of the people she talked about, of which there were many because these were famous people in their day and age, involved in government and journalism. I wanted to see the places she mentioned, and to solve the mysteries of people she left unnamed. I wanted to verify information. So I went on newspapers.com and various historical society pages, and I searched and I read. Then I decided not only to digitize the book, but to print a new version that included the photos I’d found and included all the corrections I’d made. I wrote footnotes, an introduction, and an index of names and places. Then I learned how to design a book in Adobe InDesign, and created a cover, as well. And I printed it. It took three years. But it was so exciting to hold the final product in my hands! I would love to do more projects like this! But we only have one such trove in our family. Perhaps I’ll uncover a similar project for someone else someday.
Continuing the theme of historical preservation, I made a big contribution to the DAR’s Patriot Records Project! This involved sitting with scanned historical documents pertaining to the American Revolution, interpreting what was often archaic and fading script, and transcribing the names I found there. This allows us to preserve records of American Patriots and their actions during the war. I’m a very speedy typist and not bad at interpreting that old way of writing, so the project appealed to me. Alone, I indexed 70,000+ names!
After serving two years as historian for my DAR chapter, I just completed my Historian Book! Every outgoing historian creates this for her outgoing regent. It’s a record of all the photos she (and other members) have taken of events during that regent’s term. I made mine in Shutterfly, because I’ve used it before and was familiar with how it worked. Rather than just throwing photos at the book, I spent two years breaking all the photos down into folders on my computer, organized by date and name of the event, and created layouts for each one with the date and a description of what the event was. This was a much longer and more painstaking process than I had envisioned and less my speed than I expected, so I would probably not take on this particular role again. (I’ve since moved on to corresponding secretary and am finding that more within my wheelhouse!) However, I enjoyed my time as historian and am very proud of the book and that the past regent loved it! I had fun selecting the perfect design elements for each layout, with an overall patriotic theme.
Another major personal archival project I completed was the digitization of all our old home videos from VHS and 8mm. While the actual digitizing was completed by someone else with the proper equipment, I learned Adobe Premiere Pro from scratch and took to editing the hours and hours of footage. I cut and pasted everything into roughly 45-minute chunks, all rearranged in chronological order. I created a title sequence based on the Full House intro, which involved sitting with the actual title sequence from the show, playing it over and over while I notated what was happening during each second of it so I could recreate it with my own footage, and getting the correct song and font to go with it. I also created intro slides for each scene from Adobe Stock footage, and edited in old commercials and sequences from TV that we would have seen a lot of in the eras from the footage. This project took two years and a lot of education and skill-building!
This year I had fun creating some of my own graphics, and have plans to do more! I just thought how much fun it would be to make my own t-shirts, magnets, stickers, etc. with my own designs on them. So I opened my own little print-on-demand Etsy shop.
In Progress
I have a first novel planned for the end of this year. I won’t say too much about that yet, other than that it is romantic and holiday-themed and I am researching agents and how to submit to Netflix and Hallmark. It’s partially written already, but I still have a lot of work to do if I truly want to have it ready by Christmas. (With the other projects popping up around me, it may turn out to be a mid-2027 completion instead. But it is finally on its way!)
After discovering some allergies last year, I realized I had to get creative if I wanted to keep my love of herbal teas! That meant buying a mortar and pestle and literally getting into the grit, experimenting with all kinds of new ingredients I’d never tasted, and making dozens of my own concoctions! I have lots more new recipes to try this year, and I’m recording them all as I go, with the ultimate goal (besides always having my own favorite flavors in stock) being to release an accompanying book full of my own recipes.
Everyone is different, and we all have varying interests and things that keep us occupied when we’re not at work. What are some of your own signature projects?
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