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| How it started |
In the first days of empty nesting, having deposited Miss B into university life hundreds of miles away, I decided that it was time to delve into an aspect of my life I felt had been put on the back burner for decades — creative endeavor. My childhood ambition to be an artist had morphed into more adult-sounding and professionally feasible pursuits — architecture, writing and editing, communication and social media. In my off time I channeled my creative energy into cooking and baking (and blogging!). But the urge to create was still there, still poking at me, unsatisfied by any of these. So I picked up The Artist’s Way, which had been waiting on my TBR shelf for at least a year, and dived into its pages. I spent the first semester of Miss B’s first year at university taking myself back to school, following the book’s twelve-week plan as closely as if I were being graded on it. I had expected it and intended it to help me move forward as a writer, but to my surprise it instead unleashed a creative flood of making things with fabric, which has yet to abate.
About six months after finishing my immersion, I came across the newly published Making Things, which was like permission from the universe to channel my fabric frenzy into making useful objects for myself and others. The knowledge that I can identify a need, and then make an object to meet it, has gone to my head somewhat. The combination of creative endeavor and practical application, further enhanced by subverting the dominant push to just buy more cheap plastic, continues to be intoxicating. And it has pushed me to develop what I now realize is an established daily practice of handsewing, and to design projects and set up infrastructure that enable me to work wherever I am.
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| How it's going* |
* You can't tell from this picture, but this pouch contains another pouch-in-progress.
