Creative Inventory Part 5

What activates your creative energy? What deactivates it?

I don't think I can even list all the things that get me in the mood to create!! I am inspired always by beautiful things. Now wait, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so what can I possibly mean by that? I guess it's more complicated than simply "I am inspired by beauty".

Remember how I said I have a natural talent for seeing the possible? It goes along with that. I am inspired by blank canvasses. A raw, uncut piece of fabric. A huge open stretch of land that has nothing growing on it yet. Entire days where I have nothing that has to be done! (I can't wait for Wednesday, my day off this week!) A basket-full of balls and skeins of yarn that haven't been woven into anything yet.

Sunny days inspire my Earthiness and pull me out-of-doors into the sunshine to dig in the dirt, to design gardens of flowers and vegetables and fruits and to adore the beauty of Creation.

Stormy days bring out my 'hand-made' creativity. All things fine arts are produced on stormy days - new dresses, new crochet designs, new tales of haunted house, pirates, and best friends, new drawings and worst of all - encourage me to redecorate a room of the house. (This occasionally gets me into trouble.)

Days that are in between stormy and sunny make me want to play the piano for hours and sing. Cloudy days don't give a lot of leniency for sitting around, nor do they make me want to coax seedlings to grow taller, and so my heart begins to sing the blahs away.

BUT I begin to feel drained when the project has carried on for too long. This is my creative downfall and why I am so terrible at follow-through. I begin projects with gusto, anxious to bring the thoughts in my head into reality. Once they begin to take much longer than I originally planned - especially sewing projects if they must be ripped apart and resewn - I begin to lose my creative spark toward that project and it will become just another statistic in my pile of things unfinished. When something no longer stimulates my eye for the possible, I lose interest, and, often, move on to the next stimulus. This is something that makes me believe that I need a partner to work with - someone to hold my nose to the grindstone.

Deadlines are especially effective for me. If I promised to deliver something the next day, you can bet I will pull an all-niter to finish it!

Off To A Pleasant Start

Not really - I have a strange ailment upon me that could be linked to anything. I had a migraine last night, sinus troubles, stomach-ache and intestinal discomfort this morning. Let's just give it a broad title and say that today I'm not feeling my usual chipper self. This also means the bathroom did not get finished yesterday. (I was also short a helper.) And so I plan to stay home today and crochet a few more pairs of baby Chucks,
try to get a couple more of my famous projects unleashed on the world, and practice my drawing skills.

But to start the day out, I have put together two Etsy Mini-Feeds for my readers to enjoy. One is from the list of things I have marked as favorites from other crafters and artists. The other is the list of things I have for sale in my shop right now. It's all baby Chucks - but hopefully only for the rest of this week. I have big plans in the works that include more baby items, and some wickedly awesome new blankets based off of old-school video game designs. It turns out that pixels really lend themselves well to crochet!

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