Keeping My Hands Busy...

It’s volleyball season.  Today we were up in Richibucto for a tournament just under an hour away from our own city.  Our 15U team entered a 16U tournament for some more experience against older girls and they made the semifinals but lost to the top team at the tournament.  I was really proud that this time they didn’t give up and kept fighting right until the bitter end.

I knit by feel, so it is the perfect way to keep my hands busy on the drive to tournaments and also during the games.  I can watch the action and because the needles are in my hands, I can’t bite my nails.  I’ve even discovered that the needles make great defensive weapons... though I have yet to skewer a volleyball!

Since my youngest, Bethany was also the only grade 5 to make her school team, I will be doing a lot of knitting and driving between now and Christmas.  Today I finished up a lovely moss stitch scarf in a soft shade of green...

worked a bit more on Bethany’s scarf during the drive home since this pattern does require a tiny bit of concentration...

darned in the ends of a scarf made from a wool that creates its own patterns...

and started a new scarf of lovely blues and purples for one of the newest members of the team.

I came home with a full set  of fingernails... but I still need to learn how not to hold my breath for such a long time when the games get tense!  I sometimes forget to INHALE...

INHALE:  Keeping busy with being creative can be very therapeutic.  It can help lower our stress levels, keep our hands out of the snack foods, give us something to show for our time and create things of beauty as well.  This time of year, it never hurts to have extra crafts on hand to give away as hostess gifts, teacher presents, thank you gifts etc.  For most of us, the fun is in first creating something and then watching someone else take pleasure in what our hands and souls brought to life.

EXHALE:  The thing about being Creative is that there are weeks and days when you have to make the opportunities as plentiful as possible.  Though Nick jokes about me being a “bag lady”, I have several bags ready to go with me in the car on any given trip.  I sort knitting projects into clear bags, tuck various sizes of needles and always bring along a few options in case I finish something or get bored with a project. Think about what crafts you do that you could bring with you to doctor’s offices, meetings or on car trips and organize a few into a nice tote or bag so that the next time you race out the door, you have something to help keep your hands busy when the going gets tough or when you need to wait.

Savouring A Couple’s Creativity...

Last spring, our family got a terrifying call.  Our best friends’ barbecue blew up and engulfed their whole house in flames.  In one evening, their lives were turned upside down and their cats perished along with most of their personal belongings... but they had their dog and each other.

Tonight, our family took supper over to their new house, rebuilt on the foundations of their old one.  They moved in this past weekend and are slowly trying to unpack what was restored, put away what people donated and see what is left to buy.  Imagine starting over from scratch for every towel, every sheet... everything!

So we shared a meal in their new house which has echoes of all they loved best about the old one.  Everything is new, everything gleams, but what trials and tribulations they had to go through to get them and get to this point.

The house is a wonderful blend of their unique colour sense and love of textures.  They spent hours and hours pouring over every detail of their plans, took the time to select what they truly wanted and it showed.  From the amazing bar of lights and crystal prisms over the dining room table to the incredible fold out coffee table where we will no doubt spend lots of time gathered to roll 20 sided dice.

I am SO glad to see them back where they belong.

INHALE:  Creativity can sometimes be making something beautiful rise out of the ashes of disaster.  When life throws its very worst at us, there are still moments when we can celebrate what IS going right or just keep putting one foot in front of the other until we move through the dark times and back out into the light.

EXHALE:  Open your book and trace your foot onto the page.  I had to put my foot on the diagonal to get it to fit properly and I decided to leave my socks on to just get a basic foot shape.  Now, fill the shape of your foot with images, words, doodles, colours, scribbles, collage materials or anything that tempts you but move from DARK in the heel of the foot towards LIGHT in the toes.  Our lives are a series of steps from tragedy to triumph, night to day, challenge to victory and darkness into light. Just keep putting one foot in front of the other!

Improvisational Creativity...

I'm home from a wonderful weekend of fellowship and cross stitch, but I did learn that sometimes, you have to improvise your creativity when you don't have all the pieces you need.

I’d fully intended to give away the Perforated Paper Castle ornament that I taught in Toronto, but the more people asked to see it and exclaimed over it, the more I decided it needed to stay on MY tree.  Stitchers will be able to get that pattern after December 1st on PatternsOnline.com , so hang in there!  Luckily, Jeannie had brought along some colours of perforated paper for me to play with.  Unfortunately, after a full day of teaching, picking up Bethany from volleyball practice, Nick from school and then rushing to get to retreat in bad weather, I forgot the sheets of blank graph paper that I usually bring along with me...

So I made my own.

Next year, I will remember to put that on my packing list, slow down and check what I have before I race out the door or end up bringing an entire ream of graph paper along just so I don't have to make grids like this again. At least I know I can make one without a computer!

FIrst, I sketched out the letters for JOY and stitched them in overdyed threads on the white paper.  Then, I flipped the paper over, borrowed a pencil from Mom and began to figure out how to create a geometric snowflake shape around the word.

I am not the most math gifted person.  There was much erasing and slightly colourful language used when I realized that I couldn't get things to work out PERFECTLY... but I took my own posts about perfection to heart.  So what if I had to fudge things a tiny bit near the end... I know where the glitch is, but I'm not going to point it out!   Eventually,  the snowflake shape was ready for me to cut out.  I LOVE perforated paper!!!

When I flipped the design to the right side, I discovered that one section had a bit too much white space for my liking, so I added a holly button from the shop.  I also thought it might be nice to add some braid and beads to catch the lights from the tree.

Then I made my own cording for the top then hung it on the tree for the ornament exchange!!

INHALE:  If we wait for the perfect moment when we have all our supplies around us and everything is just right, then we will have far less moments in which to be creative.  This is what I was trying to find more of during my year long adventure... ways of just jumping into the deep end and mucking about to see what I could come up with.  No, I didn't have everything I needed or hoped to have with me, but the Creativity didn't need them.  It just needed me to be willing to try and work with what I had on hand.  How many missed moments go by because we tell ourselves "Wait, I'm not ready!!" ??

EXHALE: Find another crafter that you trust.  Decide to try this challenge together and see what happens.  Set a date when the two of you can get together for some uninterrupted creativity time.  Mark it on the calendar and then get ready with this homework before hand.  Each of you should choose a variety of interesting craft items or items related to the hobby you both enjoy.  Limit it to less than 10.  Put the items in a bag that you cannot see through.  When you get together, exchange bags, settle down and see what each of you can create with these mystery items within an agreed upon time limit.  It doesn't have to be perfect or beautiful or even something you keep.  You just have to be wiling to try... and laugh... and enjoy each other's company while you see where your Creativity takes you.  I can't wait to see what some of you come up with!

Creative Retreating...

I am getting excited!  Despite the forecast calling for a bit of snow overnight, I am mostly packed for the cross stitch retreat up at Camp Wildwood this weekend.  I can’t wait to sneak off with my Mom for a weekend of roughing it and also getting away from it all.

Don’t worry if you don’t hear from me. My laptop is staying behind but the camera is coming.

You see, for most of my cross stitch designing career, this is the weekend that I get to go away and NOT be a designer.  Ok... you can’t really shut that off, but I get to go stitch OTHER people’s designs, hang with stitchers who really know me or just PLAY to invent a one of a kind ornament for the exchange.  I can nap if I want to, go for a walk if I want to, journal and sketch or just sit and stitch for ages with some of the nicest people on this planet in a beautiful main lodge while someone else cooks all my meals.

Can you see why I am getting excited?

No phone

No kids

No husband

No laundry

No computer

Ahhhhhhh!

I’ve packed WAY more projects than I will have time to get to and I always get a bit cold because I pull my mattress down onto the floor. At 6’5” in my bare feet, WAY too much of me hangs over the edge on their bunk beds!

Wheee! 24 hours from now, I will be away from it all for the weekend.  I can’t wait!

INHALE:  Retreats are great if you can find one to attend.  It can be hard to put yourself first and leave other responsibilities behind, but we usually come back from such a retreat feeling SO recharged and reinspired. Don’t be afraid to be a little selfish now and then.  If you always put yourself last and do for others, you forget to take care of the person in whose skin you actually live!  Love yourself enough to make time for yourself!

EXHALE:  Maybe you can’t take part in a retreat, but you can still block time off for yourself. Open a blank page in your book and write down something you’d love to do if you had each of the following time segments available.  Now pick ONE of them that you would MOST like to do and schedule it into your calendar sometime in the next 2 weeks. Go ahead... you deserve it!

If I had an extra 30 minutes to myself, I would:

If I had an extra hour to myself, I would:

If I had an extra 3 hours to myself, I would:

If I had an extra morning to myself, I would:

If I had an extra day to myself, I would:

If I had an extra weekend to myself, I would:

There’s No Such Thing As TOO MANY Choices...

Bethany’s fever is gone.  Her temperature was normal all day so I made her have a long, steamy bath to help her cough and wash her hair then stripped her bed and washed the sheets along with her jammies.  She was finally allowed out of her room and almost couldn’t decide what to do first.  I made the choice easy... finish up the school work you missed, then you can play now that you’re feeling better.

I may be Creative... but I am still a MOM!

Tonight, I needed a bit of colouring therapy, but the last time I had my poster out, I found myself bothered by the fact that the set only came with these colours.

So... I went on a hunt and found THESE...

There can’t possibly be anything bad about having 50 colours to choose from instead of just 10, can there?  Only that it makes me wonder where to begin!

So I picked out a section of the border that I’d been eyeing for a while and began to colour. I even added some shading detail because flat colour sort of blended together a bit too much.

As that section began to fill in, the colours really started to jump...

and when it was all done, the contrast of the black with the inner colours made it almost SING.

Nope, there’s definitely no such thing as having too many choices!

INHALE:  We all have countless choices to make each and ever day. Eat the apple or the cookie, get out of bed or hide, speed up for the yellow light or slow down, take the stairs or the elevator... the possibilities are almost endless.  Sometimes, the sheer amount of choice we have can seem overwhelming... until we remember that another name for it is FREEDOM!

EXHALE: If you like to draw, go buy yourself a new pencil, crayon or marker set and revel in the amount of colours to choose from.  If you like to cook, go buy a few new spices to play with.  If you like to craft, go explore the aisles and sale bins until you find pieces for your next project.  If you love music, check out a few new tunes outside your usual genre, but be sure to download them legally.  (iTunes Genius feature has let me discover new songs I might otherwise never have heard)  Find a way to add even more choices to your chosen path of Creativity. Your day will be richer for it, even if it takes you a bit longer to make up your mind where to begin!

Tearing Down to Create Again...

Today, one of the Creative women I admire most took the courageous step of announcing that she was closing down her cross stitch design business.   Sometimes you have to end something in order to create something new.

Teresa and I met through cross stitch just over a decade ago, but we quickly formed a friendship that went beyond just working in the same industry.  As cross stitch began to falter, she and I began to act as sounding boards for each other and talk about if and how we could take our Creativity in other directions.

Four years ago, we went to Dragon*Con in Atlanta to see if we wanted to transition into Fantasy artwork on the con circuit.  She also helped paint me green for my She-Hulk adventure as mentioned in yesterday’s post.  Last February, we went to the SCBWI conference in New York together to see if children’s book illustration would offer new possibilities.

The joy of having her as a friend is that we share some of the same hopes and insecurities, interests and insights as well as quests and questions.  While we have very different styles, we both feel called to continue to share our Creativity with the world... we’re just still trying to find the next way to do that!

I do know that the past 5 years would have been a lot more scary and stressful without her encouragement, support and sense of humour.

I stayed home today to take care of Bethany who is still running a fe er.  I also got up the courage to tackle a demolition of my own.  A year ago, I overhauled my Dragon Dreams website to reflect the change my artwork was taking as I honoured the 98 published cross stitch designs that I had created, but also tried to showcase the different directions I was heading in.  Then I created a separate website for illustration once I got feedback that Art Directors don’t have time to sift through intensive sites looking for your artwork.

I’ve limped along since then feeling very fragmented and slightly confused at how to make things better.  Today, I realized that the only way to rework the site was to start over from the very beginning, look at what works, get rid of what doesn’t and focus on what truly needs to be covered by the website while making it an informative place to visit.

I am in the middle of the destruction and rebuilding process, but I am actually pleased at how well it is turning out. I'll post on my blogs as soon as the new site is uploaded.

INHALE: Sometimes we have to rebuild from the ashes as friends of ours have done with their house, shut down a business to start in a new direction, crumple up a drawing that isn’t working or go back to the beginning and start over.  Any Creative person, crafter or artist has experienced this more than once.  I’m not sure it ever gets any easier, but I am finally learning to trust that something even better may come from drastic measures.

EXHALE:  I tried to explore today's topic in a fun way.  Find a few magazines for images or inspirational photos.  Instead of trimming them carefully with scissors, rip and tear them out then glue them into your book so that they overlap and create a collage background (you can leave white spaces).  Next, write some words over the images or around them that add to your Creative inspiration.  If this seems too time-consuming for your hectic day, try a simpler exhale: crumple a plain piece of paper and then smooth it out again then draw or write a message to yourself on the less than perfect paper as a reminder that we often set ridiculous standards for ourselves.

Creativity amid more Chaos...

The thing about knowing I am living this journey is that it sustains me even when life gets so chaotic that I cannot post.  I meant to post about our Hallowe’en creativity on Friday night or Saturday, but the weekend ended up being far different that we expected when Bethany began to run a high fever on Saturday afternoon along with her cough.  We’ve kept her in isolation at home and treated her with medicine to reduce the fever which seems to be working for now as we keep a close eye on her.  GIven all the fear about the H1N1 pandemic, we are being cautious and vigilant, hoping that it is some other germ in our house.

Thursday night, Bethany had  a Hallowe’en dance at her school.  She dressed up as a rock star and spent two hours dancing or talking with her friends.

Friday was a fun but tiring day.  I was teaching at Harrison Trimble for the 4th day that week and everyone was encouraged to dress in costume.  Erin went as a fairy GOTHmother and I dressed up as  a zombie, thinning out the make-up I used for She-Hulk and using the same wig, I ripped up one of Nick’s oldest shirts and made a very scary impression on a lot of the high school kids.  Imagine coming around a corner in a hurry and running into 6’5” of zombie teacher!  For an extrovert who loves playing up on my inches, I was having a blast!

After school, we went to pick up Bethany at her school and watch the last minutes of her volleyball tryouts.  She’d had a sock hop in the afternoon and then the tryouts, so she was feeling a bit tired as we headed home to change both girls into their costumes for working up at Magnetic Hill’s fundraiser that evening.  Boo at the School meant that the entire gym of Nick’s school had been transformed into a spook walk as a fundraiser for the Grade 8 class trip at the end of the year.  There was a bake sale, a BBQ, some other sales and the spook walk.  Erin was dressed up as an old fashioned school teacher in pioneer dress teaching a class of zombie children to repeat words like disembowel.  Bethany dressed up in her Dorothy costume and played hopscotch in the “graveyard”. Nick was the Frankenstein principal asking people for their hall passes and I helped a witch greet people at the door and break them into groups. For the first 2 hours, everyone was fairly enthusiastic, but in the 3rd hour, it got a little harder to stay “fresh” at their roles.  Bethany seemed especially tired, but I chalked it up to her busy day.  I drove the girls home as soon as things were over then came back up to help Nick and the parents take everything down in the gym.  She seemed fine when she posed for this picture after stealing Dad’s headgear...

By 10:30 the next morning, we were back at the school for a volleyball match between Erin’s 15U team and the 16U team in the Roofers club she belongs to.  It was great volleyball and each team won 2 matches, but Bethany seemed really tired and whiny.  We got her some soup for lunch and pot stickers at our favourite restaurant Happy Wok and then headed home.  She fell asleep for 2 hours and when she woke up, she was flushed and burning up with a fever of almost 102! Needless to say, my thoughts of writing everything up as the blog post went out the window...

The fever comes and goes, so she will be home with me tomorrow.  No doubt my creativity will be put towards keeping a sick daughter entertained in her room.

INHALE:  In our busy, modern day world, we sometimes feel as if we are expected to keep going no matter what.  If we are sick, we take a pill or something.  If this flu season is teaching us ANYTHING, it is reminding us of the need to listen to our bodies when they get sick or tired and grant them time to heal, time to get better and time to keep our germs to ourselves.

EXHALE:  One of the ways you can enjoy a bit of tasty Creativity even when you aren’t sick is to find a warm drink that you enjoy.  There are many wonderful herbal tea blends out there to sample, cider to warm with cranberries and cinnamon or a splash of orange juice.  My stepfather, John, has been playing with ways to make his own really chocolaty cocoa drink that has less artificial ingredients than some of the powders out there.  Sniff a few herbal tea boxes in the grocery aisles or delight in the artwork and creativity of the many Celestial Seasonings blends.  Their box artwork and creative copy are almost as lovely as the teas themselves.  Tazo ’s chai flavour has been another favourite of mine for a few years, especially with a splash of skim milk.  Miso soup is another wonderful warm drink.  Some cultures swear by a crushed garlic clove in hot water to fend of germs and there is always the traditional chicken noodle soup.  Whatever you choose as your warm drink, wrap your hands around a great mug and sit quietly for a few minutes to sip some stillness along with your beverage.  The world will still be waiting when your mug is done.