What's Up Doc? What's Cookin'?

Wooo…I have been absent. I have a good reason, though- been busy making stuff!

Guess what I discovered? When the computer is not on, I have more time to create. Really! I know, I know- crazy talk, but really- when I am not distracted, I can get down to the making and the creating! Who knew?

Obviously, not me. ho ho.

Before I go on, let’s give a nod to our sponsor for this week’s postings: the letter C, the makers of Creativity and Curiosity - just what you need when life gives you a flat tire!

So what have you been doing? Any new projects started? Old ones completed? Untangle that wad of embroidery thread?

The last post was me in tender mode. It has, fortunately, passed. The time spent working on the 3 art journals I have for a round-robin helped me work through the funk a bit, although there’s still a small nagging voice questioning where all this will take me.

It’s the Looney Toons angel/devil on the shoulder thing. The devil tells me all this crafting is frivolous and I should be ashamed I’m not spending more time worrying about my mistakes and flaws. The angel whispers calmly, that this is my ticket out of this self-imposed prison; that I need to allow, listen, and trust. Old habits die hard and you know, that voice that tells me to be fearful and full of regret isn’t going to go down without a fight. I’ll fight dirty if I have to, though. I’ll bite and kick it in the balls. I don’t care, I want to win.

Made a pleasant discovery this past weekend- I think I like embroidery. Freeform embroidery, anyway. Mom taught me how to embroider when I was around 6. Dishcloths with Vogart designs ironed on them. Pansies, kittens doing household chores, and I think there were fruits with faces. I liked it for the Little House on the Prairie feeling it gave me, but hated the constriction of having to follow the design. It would become very obvious when I grew bored when the tiny stitches suddenly turned into 1-inch leaps across the tea towel. Never pursued it after that.

But now…

now, I see it differently. Saw blogs where people refer to embroidery as painting with threads and it didn’t really sink in until this weekend. For one of the art journals, the journal’s owner has a Dia de los Muertos/Halloween theme. Decided to embroider a calavera that I could glue to one of the pages. So far, I’ve embroidered flowers in the eye sockets and outlined the calavera in a dark fuschia. I’m going to decorate the inside to look like vines and flowers, probably, and finish it off by stitching seed beads here and there. Each stitch is so much like the stroke of a brush, I was surprised by how relaxing it was. Very different from my previous experience of feeling resentful that I was stuck having to create a stupid smiling bunch of grapes.

In addition to having fun watching the colors appear across the fabric, it was fun to be able to take apart the thread and blend colors. Like mixing paint. This will be a good fiber-based craft to work on in the summertime. There will still probably be knitting since I have projects I want to have completed before winter comes, but if it’s really warm, I’ll probably take the embroidery to craft night.

I’ll take a picture when I’m done- probably this weekend. Sorry for the no-picture blog tonight. I need to go to sleep now, though. Got up crazy early this morning and I’m so tired, I have the queasy shakes.

Oh, and another thing I’ve been doing when I start to have anxious thoughts about the what ifs when I’m trying to go to sleep: I plot and plan a current or upcoming craft project. The embroidered calavera was born from one of these nights and I fell asleep pretty quickly as soon as I began to imagine what I would stitch.

It really is so much healthier to drift into dreaming, thinking about what I can create instead of worrying about what may destroy. Let the inspiration flood in and flush out the debris that has been blocking your path. Let it saturate the ground and see what starts to grow.