Recently I was reading some old blog posts and I saw one on four questions someone might ask you about your creative process....
1. What are you working on?
2. How is it different from other people's work
3. Why do you create?
4. What is your creative process?
So here are my answers:
1. Right now I'm in the beginning process of the Cherrywood Fabric Graffiti Challenge. Since I was sick it stalled a bit but this week, I've been back at it. I do have the pattern worked out taking inspiration from a graffiti eye and adding my own lettering to it. I have a goal to finally get this pattern done so I put my fingers on that luscious fabric.
I'm also in the middle of a deep clean of my loft dressing room which houses my fabric collection and clothes. My husband is putting in new flooring and shelving. We both decided to make a system where my stash is housed in bins. This project I suspect will take most of the summer but I have a good beginning!
2. Honestly, I think the biggest difference between my work and most of my fellow artists is that I tend to take a very methodical approach to how I create. I'm most comfortable taking a long time designing
a pattern and critiquing the composition. Once that is complete I like to audition values and finally color. Really after all that the construction goes quickly. Also, I am a true Gemini. I love, love traditional quilting complete with hand piecing and hand quilting. I also love, love more contemporary art quilting, and am happy to try all sorts of new methods. One thing I don't like - which most people do - is fusing. HATE IT and will only do it when it's truly called for.
3. For most of my life, I've created because I had to. There was nothing more fun. Originally when I was a child I stitched, played flute, and wrote poetry. All of them started with the basics but I was coming up with original compositions for each endeavor. I grew up in the country so there was plenty of time to explore all of them. That continued through college until the day I got a quilt book by mistake in the mail. It was a hard stop to everything else and I just pursued that. It was never a chore and always a passion...until now. This season of menopause, empty nesting, and covid has hit this girl hard and I'm just treading water to get through. BUT it's only a season. I'm old enough to know that no season lasts forever.
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that pull at the time of a full-time mother who works 40 hrs a week or just that I seem to have a short attention span. Projects work much better though if I conceive the idea, work out the composition and pattern, do the sewing and finally quilt it. I have never worked well on several projects at once. They all start to get muddled and nothing gets done (which is where I'm at). Also, even though I have tried and tried I'm pathetic trying to work in a series. Too many ideas with whatever is shiniest capturing my attention.
These are 4 great questions. Self-examination and self-reflection are never bad ideas.
So What Have You Been Up to Creatively?
5 comments:
1. I'm working on new ways to use trapunto.
2. I guess I use line more than color. I love wholecloth which is about line and shadow.
3. I create because I must! That became so evident during Covid. How could I possibly have made it through without a mental breakdown if I did not have fabric/quilting that I loved to do?
3. (Did you mean 4, lol?) I don't have a real process, it varies with the project. Some I actually sketch out, some I work out on the fabric, some I stumble and end up in an entirely different place than I started.
Great questions! I'm looking forward to reading the answers of others. I hope you are feeling better. I feel your pain in regards to the deep clean. I am jealous of your methodical approach - if only I could be so focused.
Awesome, reading through your processes. I grew up in the country, too, where we had to create to find something to do. I really relate to that!!! Love your inspiration for the graffiti challenge.
I thoroughly enjoyed this post, reading the questions and your answers. I will keep the questions in front of me and think about how I would answer. Good food for thought! I'm with you on fusing - definitely not my favorite thing.
Well now...
1. I'm working mainly on charity quilts -- comfort quilts for mental health patients (Blankets of Love here in Canada) and for Ukrainian refugees (there's a large Ukrainian-Canadian population in Western Canada so quilters are gearing up to help with quilts for new arrivals). But...I'm also playing with different stitched substrates and materials, including canvas, tea-bag paper, painted quilted surfaces...
2. It's not different from the work of some of my colleagues -- at least, as far as materials go -- but it's very different from what most quilters in my neck of the woods are doing!
3. Why do I create? Because I can't not do it. If I'm not working with my hands I'd live too much in my head (which I already do more than is healthy), and would have gone mad long ago.
4. My creating starts with an idea inspired by music, text, news, my environment, a photo (usually by a friend or my daughter), or a 'picture' holus-bolus that's 'given' to me in my mind. It percolates for a good long while. Sometimes I make notes or sketches or both, or stack up photos/fabric etc. Then comes the day when it has to "come out of me" -- and I start. Sometimes it will percolate again for a while; sometimes it's start to finishe with little or no stopping (except to eat/sleep). :-)
Thanks for this. I know what I will be doing as I go through my day (in the times when I am not working on the current project).
1. What are you working on? I am working on quilt top #2 for Indian Residential School survivors.
2. How is it different from other people's work: My last 2 projects (see #1) are being done for two people who are very special to me. I have never worked well from a pattern, more of a 'wing it' type so even the vision I had before starting is seldom reflected in the finished project...because...well, that is just how I roll I guess.
3. Why do you create? I create because it is like breathing. My mom's hands were never still and it seems mine aren't either. Sadly Mom (who just turned 98) has had to stop sewing and knitting in the past year as a result of macular degeneration. My heart aches for her. I am treasuring my creative time as I am 'full time not working due to injury' although a brain injury (2 1/2 yr old concussion) is not my idea of a good time. If I didn't create I would probably be in jail for murdering someone....
4. What is your creative process? It is like listening to me tell a story. All over the place. My current project was going to be 'easy': started with a panel and all the coordinating prints that I love (Healing Waters by Northcott - the first one, a second one is coming out later this year). It has now morphed into something else. The coordinating prints are too busy and take away from the panel pieces so I made a switch. Worked that way for a couple of weeks but had to take time out to sketch out what it is I think I want before I went off on another tangent....
Hoping to have this top finished by this time next week. Provided I don't make any more 'changes' LOL.
I am going to use these questions to journal about later today, after sewing time and knitting time have been done. Priorities ;-)
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