Finding Creativity & Discovering Your Voice

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 ...