Finding Creativity & Discovering Your Voice

  I love the term UFO, and it so neatly described the unfinished projects flying around my quilting studio. I took a workshop with Audrey Esarey a while back where we did these amazing radial designs that were paper pieced - it was such a learning curve (pardon the pun) for me. I managed to finish one of four units and have a nice 30" square to which I have added borders and hung unfinished on the wall. I look at it daily. Someday it will be finished, it just has to decide what it wants to be.  And I will wait patiently! These vintage blocks were a UFO project from 1947and only joined the ranks of a finished quilt in 2024.  It took 77 years for them to find their place! Now it looks like they look so perfect in this quilt, as if they were made for it!  And maybe they were!  What UFO projects do you have flying circles in your sewing studio?  Do they make you happy or drive you mad?   

Having just finished the Cat Claus quilt, I am at a crossroads with what to start next. December gives me room to work on new ideas.  I am definitely going to create more of my cat quilts, I even coined a phrase for them - Quilted Fiction. Some themes that are dancing in my brain include: Kitty Cat Cafe, Cat-a-comb, Catnap, Catfish, and more. Words are my springboard that launch me into creating.  Take for instance the word 'ring', is it a sound or something you wear on your finger, or maybe just a circular shaped - like ring of fire? Or the words knight and night, or bawl and bald and ball... You see what I mean? Word confusion is like a beehive of fun! And my second treasure chest of joy are phrases like, "You are what you eat", or "a bee in your bonnet", "true blue", or one I heard in England- "Mind the crack"!!!  Quilted fiction comes alive when everyone gets it and smiles, so cheers to filling 2025 with art quilts filled with miles o...

I taught middle school art for 18 years. That was chaos. It was one pubescent drama after another accentuated by administrative directives that set a new standard for crazy.  I danced that jig daily and loved it! Curiously, in the midst of this chaos, creativity flourished.  The years proved that creativity needs the unexpected, the uncontrollable, the spontaneous. I found that a controlled and linear life puts us in a coma of complacency where routine and  systemactic procedures sterilize our minds turning us into beige mush. So cross the line, there's nothing fine about it and discover your creativity among the mess!                                                                                       .

Do dogs bark at you or wag their tails when you're around?  What images popped into your head when you read that question?  Weird question, I know, but bear with me...  Words  describe what's in our head.  Seeing is how we understand the world. When we learn language, we give each thing a word. But words are not always specific enough,  that's why a picture is worth a thousand words! Playing with words is a fun way to explore your creativity.    See what I mean?  This is "Hoppy Christmas", a holiday quilt I designed while I was playing with words.  When you suspend reality and play with ideas you will discover a world of possibilities.

  Making a t-shirt quilt can be a pretty boring task,  the word 'creativity' doesn't figure into it.   The expectation is to cut up shirts and sew them together with borders and quilt it all down nicely.  That's really hard for me to do because I am looking for the story in each shirt. If it's worn out  that tells me it was an important shirt or if it's like new I know that shirt lived in a drawer.  The tees for this quilt came from a father who wanted a 'surprise quilt' for his son, and the shirts were all over the place: nylon jerseys, heavy and light-weight tees, and collared shirts. It was a total jumble of fabrics and weights. There was no way on earth those random-sized and shaped pieces would make a normal block-type quilt. Lucky for me, I taught middle school for years and know for a fact that there is NOTHING organized about young teens! So I deliberately skewed the tee shirts to resemble an explosion...  It was expressive after all even ...

  Creativity is one of those loaded topics that make people insecure.  "I'm not creative", "I can't even draw a stick figure.", " I wasn't born with it!", "I didn't go to art school." Most people don't understand creativity, they wouldn't recognize it if it stared them in the face. But it does stare them in the face every time they look in the mirror. Look at your hair or make-up, your jewelry, clothes, shoes, piercings or tattoos.  Your creativity expresses itself in the choices you make. The point is, creativity is not scarce thing, or a learned thing, or a unique thing.  Creativity is more like a language than a sparkly part of the brain.  Creativity is how you arrange your furniture, it's the car you drive, the food you cook, the way you organize your drawers or desk. Creativity isn't good or bad it's just unique to the creator.  Learning to appreciate your preferences and 'style' - the things that ...