We all have roles within our families; something we’re known for. Time and time again, something will befall upon my sister that will leave us saying: “What is your problem?” It’s not always an accident, and it’s not even always bad, but somehow, somewhere, there is always something happening to Shannon.

She’d been travelling around Asia for a few months and was due home in mid-January. With less than a week left, she gets bitten by a dog in Bali. Cue a scurry of phone calls and hospital visits trying to wrangle vaccinations and insurance claims. She broke the news by saying to me: “You know how’s it’s always me? Well...” Yes Shannon - we do know. Anyhow, her birthday is at the end of January, and what more can I do to rub salt in the would than give her something to commemorate the fact that yes, it’s always her?

Unusually for me, this was mostly designed on the fly. I had a general sense of what I wanted to do - plank of wood with warning stripes painted on it and number cards hanging from nails - but everything was sort of just designed one step at a time. The main piece of wood was just leftover scrap, and it was better quality than I was expecting to find, which deterred me from painting the stripes directly onto it. Instead I painted them on a separate piece of scrap which was then glued. I initially wanted the stripes to go edge to edge, but this bit of scrap was about 10mm too short, so decided to make do with there being a 5mm gap surrounding it on all sides.

When adding the back support, I cut it so that it had a triangular shape and looked a bit softer. The off-cut then became a spontaneous bottom ledge, which I think helps frame the whole thing.

Up until the end, I wasn’t sure how I was going to write “Days since last incident”. I was oscillating between painting the letters in black (but again - I was now deterred from painting directly on the wood) or printing it off and gluing down a big rectangle of text (again, deterred from covering up too much of the wood since I liked it more than anticipated). It was only after having walked away that I remembered I had these filing cabinet label holders, and opted to use one of those. Very happy with this choice.

Whilst the initial vision I set out with was something quite boring and factory-esque, making this on the fly turned it into something a lot more artisan and “nice looking”. Probably a lesson in there for me somewhere about being more loose and improvisational. Huh.