🎨✂️ Get Creative Day – September 24 ✂️🎨
There is a drawer in nearly every house that believes in your artistic potential.
Inside:
Three markers that still work.
Four that absolutely do not.
A glue stick with the texture of beef jerky.
Ribbon saved from a Christmas present in 2019.
Two googly eyes.
Paint nobody remembers buying.
And a piece of patterned paper that is too pretty to use.
September 24 is Get Creative Day, and today we're opening the drawer.
Yes.
Even the good paper.
Especially the good paper.
🎨 Affiliate Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links. If you purchase through them, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. It supports Celebrate Quirky and may be invested in craft supplies for a project I haven't thought of yet but will apparently need 47 tiny wooden mushrooms to complete.
✏️ First, We Need to Stop Calling Some People “Creative”
You know the sentence.
“Oh, I'm not creative.”
Usually said while someone is decorating a birthday cake, rearranging furniture, solving a problem at work, planning a garden, making up bedtime stories, repairing something with materials that were definitely not designed for the job, or figuring out how to feed five people with three chicken breasts.
Creativity isn't limited to painting.
It's making something that wasn't there before.
An idea.
A solution.
A meal.
A song.
A flower bed.
A spreadsheet that finally makes sense.
A ridiculous Halloween costume.
Human beings are astonishingly creative.
We just don't always recognize it when we're doing it.
🎨 So Where Did Get Creative Day Come From?
Unlike holidays with proclamations, ancient traditions, or dramatic origin stories, Get Creative Day has a fuzzy history.
Its creator and exact beginning aren't well documented.
And perhaps that's fitting.
Nobody needs official permission to make something.
The purpose of the day is wonderfully uncomplicated:
Use your imagination.
Try something.
Make something.
Experiment.
It does not have to be good.
That last part is important.
🖍️ Adults Become Weird About Being Beginners
Give a five-year-old crayons and paper.
They draw a purple giraffe driving a school bus through outer space.
Nobody asks:
“But are you trained?”
Adults are different.
We decide we'd like to paint and immediately worry whether we'll be good at painting.
We buy a sketchbook and become terrified of ruining it.
We attempt pottery once and expect the bowl to look like it came from an expensive home store.
Today, make something badly.
A crooked cake.
A questionable watercolor.
A poem with an alarming rhyme scheme.
A birdhouse no architect would certify.
Being bad at something is often the entrance fee for eventually becoming better.
💡 A Few Creative Things to Know
🧠 Creativity isn't confined to the arts. Scientists, engineers, cooks, teachers, entrepreneurs, gardeners, mechanics, and parents use creative thinking constantly.
✏️ Constraints can actually encourage ideas. Having fewer materials, less time, or a specific challenge forces us to think differently.
🚶 A change of environment can shake loose ideas. A walk, museum visit, bookstore wander, or even working somewhere different can interrupt familiar patterns.
🎵 Creativity can be collaborative. Many great ideas become better when people build on one another's thinking.
🗑️ Not every idea needs to be good. Generating imperfect ideas can help lead to the useful one.
🧶 Creative hobbies don't have to become side hustles. You are allowed to knit something without opening an online store.
🎨 You don't have to show anyone what you make.
An audience is optional.
✂️ Use the Supplies You've Been Saving
This is your intervention.
The beautiful notebook.
The expensive candle.
The fabric.
The watercolor paper.
The stickers.
The fancy colored pencils.
The beads.
The yarn.
The scrapbook paper.
You bought these things because you liked them.
They are not gaining value by living untouched in a drawer.
Use them.
Life does not award points for leaving the good supplies pristine.
🎲 Try the 20-Minute Rule
Set a timer.
Twenty minutes.
Pick something creative.
Draw.
Write.
Cook.
Photograph.
Build.
Sew.
Play music.
Arrange flowers.
Work on the thing you've been saying you don't have time to do.
Twenty minutes is small enough that your brain has fewer excuses.
And if you stop after twenty minutes?
You still made something.
🎨 Make Something With the Wrong Materials
This is where things get interesting.
Make a sculpture from kitchen utensils.
Create a picture using leaves.
Build something from cardboard.
Write a poem using words cut from magazines.
Make animals from vegetables.
Create a tiny room inside a shoebox.
Draw using only one color.
Invent a recipe from five ingredients already in the refrigerator.
Creativity loves the sentence:
“Well, what could we do with this?”
✂️ More Ways to Get Creative
Take photographs of ordinary objects from strange angles.
Write a six-sentence story.
Paint a thrift-store picture frame.
Make homemade cards.
Try hand lettering.
Create a new playlist.
Rearrange a bookshelf by color.
Invent a family pizza.
Make sidewalk-chalk art.
Learn one origami fold.
Decorate cookies without looking at examples online.
Visit an art museum.
Take a different route home.
Make something from the recycling bin.
Finish one abandoned craft project.
And spend one hour creating without posting the result anywhere.
It still happened.
🍽️ Dinner Is an Art Project Tonight
No tiny tweezers.
No foam.
No sauce dramatically smeared across a plate with the back of a spoon.
We're creative, not exhausted.
🍕 Make-It-Your-Way Flatbread Pizzas
Set out:
Flatbreads or naan
Pizza sauce
Mozzarella
Pepperoni
Mushrooms
Peppers
Olives
Spinach
Pineapple
Pesto
Feta
Whatever else needs rescuing from the refrigerator
Everyone creates their own.
Bake at 425°F until crisp and bubbly.
No criticizing pineapple choices.
Today is about artistic freedom.
🌈 Color-Wheel Salad
Arrange greens with tomatoes, carrots, yellow peppers, cucumber, blueberries or purple cabbage, and feta.
Add your favorite vinaigrette.
Yes, we're playing with food.
🖌️ Painted Garlic Bread
Brush sliced bread with garlic butter.
Let everyone add Parmesan, herbs, mozzarella, or paprika.
Bake until golden.
Edible craft project.
🌈 Blank Canvas Fizz – Mocktail
Fill a glass with ice.
Add lemonade and a splash of white grape juice.
Top with sparkling water.
Set out berries, citrus, mint, and edible flowers so everyone can create their own garnish.
🍸 The Muse – Cocktail
Shake 1½ ounces gin, ¾ ounce elderflower liqueur, ½ ounce lemon juice, and a splash of cranberry juice with ice.
Strain into a chilled glass.
Garnish creatively.
Enjoy responsibly.
No one becomes Hemingway because they added a second one.
🎨 Paint-Palette Cookies
Bake or buy large sugar cookies.
Set out bowls of colorful icing and sprinkles.
Decorate freely.
No examples.
No Pinterest.
No expectation that the cookie resemble anything recognizable.
Eat the evidence.
🎒 Creativity Belongs in Every Classroom
Elementary: The Mystery Supply Bag
Give small groups identical bags containing random materials:
Paper.
String.
Tape.
Straws.
Craft sticks.
Foil.
Paper cups.
Then give them a challenge:
Build the tallest tower.
Create an animal.
Design a vehicle.
Make something that can hold ten pennies.
Same materials.
Completely different solutions.
That's the lesson.
Secondary: Solve the Annoying Thing
Ask students to identify one small frustration in everyday life.
Backpacks that tip over.
Cords that tangle.
School desks with nowhere for water bottles.
Lunch containers that leak.
Then have them sketch several possible solutions before choosing one.
Creativity isn't just self-expression.
It's also problem-solving.
💼 Around the Office
Hold a Worst Idea First session.
Choose one harmless workplace problem.
Before suggesting sensible solutions, everyone must contribute the worst, weirdest, most impractical idea possible.
Meetings too long?
Hold them underwater.
Printer always broken?
Replace it with a medieval scribe.
Too many emails?
Carrier pigeons.
Once everyone stops worrying about sounding foolish, move toward real ideas.
Sometimes removing the pressure to be clever is exactly what makes people creative.
🎬 Movie Pick - The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013)
Walter spends much of his life imagining extraordinary possibilities while living cautiously inside his ordinary routine.
Then eventually he steps into the picture.
It's beautiful, funny, visually inventive, and perfectly suited to a day about following curiosity instead of waiting until you feel qualified.
Creativity often starts in imagination.
But eventually you have to make the thing—or take the trip.
📺 TV Pick - Bluey – “Rain”
Very little dialogue.
A rainy afternoon.
A child determined to redirect water down a sidewalk.
And an ordinary moment transformed through persistence, curiosity, and play.
“Rain” is a tiny masterclass in what creativity actually looks like before adults start making it complicated.
See something.
Wonder what will happen.
Try something.
Adjust.
Try again.
Play.
🎨 The Blank Page Isn't Judging You
That's the trouble with beautiful blank notebooks.
Fresh canvases.
New sketchbooks.
Empty gardens.
Unstarted projects.
They're full of possibility.
Which also means they haven't gone wrong yet.
The first mark changes that.
Suddenly the page isn't perfect anymore.
Good.
Perfect blank pages don't contain anything.
Neither do untouched canvases.
Or unopened boxes of colored pencils.
Or ideas you keep waiting to try until you're “better.”
Creativity isn't producing something flawless.
It's being curious enough to make the first mark.
Use the paint.
Cut the fabric.
Write the terrible first sentence.
Bake the strange cake.
Plant the garden.
Take the photograph.
Make the thing.
The good supplies were never meant to survive you.
September 24 seems like an excellent day to finally ruin something beautifully.
📱 Hashtags
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