Small push, giant leap
A little over three months since my last blog post. A lot has happened, some good and some bad. But I’ve been feeling stuck for a while. I didn’t get a lot done and I didn’t feel that creativity came easy. I didn’t write regularly, had more or less abandoned exercising completely, and just pottered around in my studio while making nothing in particular. There was always some distraction, and I ended up prioritizing the distractions. Some good, like making a quilt design for our Guild, for the QuiltCon 2021 Community Outreach Quilt, which I really enjoyed. But I also spent a lot of time pottering around the house and online. Enough red flags for sure, and I knew I had to get myself out of this.
They say a high is often followed by a low, and I think that also played a role. I was exhilarated about the selection of “Pandemonium” for Sandra Sider’s upcoming book Quarantaine Quilts: Creativity in-the-midst-of Chaos. And while the Houston Quilt Festival where it would have been part of a special exhibition was cancelled, Sandra found another venue. Around the time the book comes out next summer the quilts will be exhibited for a month at the National Quilt Museum in Paducah, KY. I’m of course incredibly happy and excited about this. A quilt in a book AND in a museum. Both firsts for me and big accomplishments. But the exhilaration was also quickly followed by anxiety, with fears of not being good enough, or live up to the high bar I’ve set for myself. This is a pattern I consider part of my journey, and so I’m not surprised I had a hard time getting back into a flow.
I knew I needed more structure to my day, and discipline myself to stick to a plan. I had let this slip lately. My first step towards a break through was deciding I would create a mini quilt for the Curated Quilts mini challenge. I was hoping a small project with clear parameters would put me back into a different mindset. And it did. Once I started looking around for inspiration on the theme (Plus sign), scribbling and drawing in my notebook, and over the
course of a few days came up with a draft I quite liked, I started to feel better about myself. And instead of pondering over fabric choices I made it easier to get started by ordering a set of fat quarters from Curated Quilts in the prescribed color palette. The palette is very pastel, a far cry from my usual bright colors, but I actually rather like the blue/green/rose hues it presents. As I was designing, my thoughts still kept wandering to what’s going on in our country; I feel there is literally no escape from that. Pandemic, economic crisis and persistent systemic racism form a toxic cocktail. I’m hopeful that we’re steering towards better times, with more equality and justice, racially and socially, but I also realized that my feelings were of course directly related to everything that’s happening. The concept of shadows was triggered by all of this, and my hope that wherever there is shadow, there is light. I called it “Casting Shadows”. Since there will - as always - be many fabulous entries for the CQ mini challenge, I’d be incredibly honored if my mini gets included in the publication.
This small project motivated me to think deeper about how I can avoid getting stuck, and how I can put more structure into my day. I’ve admired a few artists’ 100 Day Projects on Instagram, and I feel the time is right for me to commit to that. I hope a small project every day will keep me grounded in my creative work, and motivate me to start and finish other projects. I’ve been preparing my 100 Day Project by picking a color palette and writing down thoughts on the type of blocks that will form the quilt. I’m excited to kick it off on Sep 1 and will reveal more of the project in my next blog post.
My conclusion is that it really only needed a small push for me to come out of what I perceived to be a much deeper hole. Isn’t that a wonderful metaphor for so many things in life? I must remember that the next time I feel unproductive and uncreative. Thank you for following my journey here, and I hope you can also find that small push to make a giant leap.