The Energy of Creativity

Creativity can be hard work.

Moving is hard. Packing up 25 years of your life (and your children's lives) is difficult. Deciding what to keep, what to sell or give away, and what to throw away is really challenging. It all takes energy—physical, mental, and emotional. Sometimes, it feels like there is just no energy left to be creative. 

My husband and I (Teri) have just moved into a furnished rental home while we await the completion our new home's construction. Our last few weeks have been fraught with sorting and filling boxes, including the overwhelming task of determining what of my studio can go into storage for three months, and what I might need. A daunting assignment! 

After packing nine huge bins, it looks like nothing had been accomplished in my studio.
How did I determine what of my stash to store and what to keep? My first thought was to keep it all with me,
but common sense prevailed, (for which my husband is grateful!) and ultimately,
I pulled what I thought I'd need for my Academy project and stored the rest.

The added fact that Kara is moving to Germany in a month fills us with an urgency to plan, design, and gather materials for future classes, such as the Academy of Appliqué, where we will again be teaching in 2018. We are cherishing our face-to-face work time while we have it! And of course, there are the emotions we feel each time we are together, thinking about the future with a mixture of excitement and melancholy; as we plan and chat and laugh, the sense that tears are brimming just beneath the surface is felt by us both. Venturing toward an unknown adventure can be downright exhausting, even if it is exciting!

Choosing furniture, granite, cabinets, flooring, and paint colors
 consume my creativity energy.

Not always a neat, tidy area, but this chair logged
many words and stitches over the years.

It would seem logical that my passion, needlework, would be a respite from the frenzy of moving activity. Alas, I often find myself thinking about the flowers I want to stitch and how I want to create them, but I've found it an effort to go beyond the thoughts. I miss my writing and stitching chair, that place where I am most comfortable creating. I feel an enormous sense of inertia, wanting desperately to get my mind and fingers moving, (not just our household goods!) but struggling to start actively creating. Why is it so hard?!

  

This smaller version of my great-grandparents' home
fills me with nostalgia.

We've been in our charming 1920 temporary home for about a week now, and I finally am feeling settled enough to realize that all the thinking I've been doing is a critical part of the creative process. Creativity is not just the act of cranking out work; the reflection and planning that goes on long before the activity of creating is just as important. Sometimes more. So as I walk through our garden—the flowers above were the first blooms—or the park, I'm looking for inspiration everywhere, using the energy I have left to THINK creatively. I know that eventually, creation will follow.

Even the backyard garden is reminiscent of my great-grandparents' garden,
except that I miss the portulaca lining the walk.  (See A Walk in the Garden.)

A walk through Baker Park in Frederick, Maryland: creative inspiration abounds!

              

This past week, I finally had a chance to sit down and read my new issue of Quiltfolk, the quarterly publication that I wrote about in December. (Click here to read that post.) I eagerly anticipated its arrival for weeks, but when it was finally delivered, packing duties took precedence. At last, I had time to relax and peruse this issue, sitting in our lovely backyard garden. It did not disappoint. But more about that tomorrow, when I'll tell you about about my "trip" to Iowa. For now, I will just say that perhaps my garden reading chair might become my new temporary writing and stitching chair!

What about you? Have you ever faced a slump or period of creative inertia? How did you recover?

A possible candidate for my new writing and stitching chair 😀

Creative Minds: Can They Work Together?

"Just wondering if you had any creative differences and if so, how did you overcome them?"

This was a question asked by one of our readers, and although I answered it, there was so much more I (Kara) could have said about our two-year creative journey, which included our quilt inspiration and a business start-up, so I thought I would tell the rest of the story in a blog post.

Teri and I have been friends for over 20 years and have quilted together for many of those. Our quilting adventures have included navigating Pennsylvania back roads together, sleeping many nights over the years on her parents' pull-out couch, and a cheap motel incident (you can read about that here), just to name a few. Our husbands are good friends as well, and they patiently put up with our quilting shenanigans. Given our long and not-so-illustrious history together, we know and understand each other pretty well. We sometimes speak solely in sarcasm, thus Teri's gift of this mug to me for my birthday one year. 

 

Our primary form of communication

While we can be very opinionated, especially when talking about color, we are both willing to compromise and pick our battles. During the creation of our Fairy Tale quilt, we had just a few differences of opinion, starting with the selection of which fairy tales would make it into the quilt. My favorite fairy tale was the Snow Queen by Hans Christian Anderson, but Teri was not familiar with that particular story and thought it was too close to the movie "Frozen," so it didn't make the cut. Although the story hardly resembles the movie, I gave up on that battle with the hope to someday make an entire quilt based on The Snow Queen and its seven stories. Not too long after our Snow Queen discussion, we got together for a trivia competition, and the answer to the final question was "The Snow Queen." I thought it was a sign, but Teri thought otherwise, so we had a glass of this particular vintage and moved on.

A quite decent fairy tale pinot

Both Teri and I are very particular about color, but we each gravitate toward different colorways.  I tend to like brighter colors, and Teri prefers more tonal variations. Our original plan for this quilt was to do two quilts; one in bright, pure colors with just fabric appliqué and another in more muted colors with lots of embellishment. We decided to start with the brighter quilt, and it quickly became obvious that only one quilt was going to get finished. Teri still has hopes for a more tonal version of this quilt, but for now, we are happy that we were able to finish this one.

A representation of the colorway we used.

During one of our Pennsylvania fabric adventures, Teri happened on a bolt of striped fabric on sale. I didn't see a good use for it, but Teri, being the greater visionary, bought the whole bolt for someday. Well, it turned out that "someday" came as we were figuring out the borders for our quilt top. One of the stripes in that fabric was perfect for our inner border, as it looks a lot like book pages.

I saw no future for this striped fabric, but I was wrong.

Throughout the the two years of working on this quilt, we had many instances of one of us saying exactly what the other one had been thinking. This happened so often that it became quite humorous at times. The last instance was after the top was finished and ready to be sent to the quilter. We were going to be taking the top in that day and needed to decide what type of quilting should be done. The quilt was on the design wall, and I began to describe to Teri what I had envisioned. I turned back to look at her; her jaw dropped, because I had said exactly what she was going to say to me. We had never really talked about the actual quilting before, so we took it as a sign that our quilting plan was a good one. 

Both Teri and I envisioned swirls and feathers in the border

There are many other stories that we could tell about how we came to this point, but here is the real reason why we were able to accomplish what we have over the past two years. Both Teri and I share a strong faith, and this journey would not have been possible without that faith. When I answered our reader that it was by the grace of God that we were able to join our creative forces, it was because Teri and I truly believe that. The last two years have involved a lot of give and take and a blending of our creativity in order to make an idea become reality. Not only have we gained a small business, a growing blog, and a beautiful quilt, but our friendship and faith has grown immeasurably along the way. We are so blessed to have you, our readers, willing to travel along with us as we continue on this story-laden path. Thank you!