Back to the Beginning

When I first started this column, I wanted to write about creativity, art, and aesthetic in everyday life. I have stayed loosely on that central theme, but have been moving too far away from it in recent months. Now it is time to re-focus, to make this a rifle with a fine-tuned scope instead of a shotgun with no choke.

One of the classes I took at the Houston Quilt Festival was on creativity. It makes perfect sense that anyone interested in fiber crafts would find it appealing to enhance or improve their creativity. What I have found, however, is that to improve your creativity is to improve everything about your life. Lately, I have come to know some folks who are members of twelve-step programs. Being an “inquiring mind,” I have asked lots of questions and even read part of AA’s “big book.” What I have found is that twelve-step programs have a couple of major components: One is getting to a place where you can live in the truth about yourself, your thoughts, the way the world works, and about other people; another is learning that you have to rely on a “higher power” in life as no one person has the wherewithal to manage everything alone. The programs tell you to define the higher power in whatever way is comfortable. I recognize that my higher power is God. The ultimate goal of a twelve-step program is to achieve serenity, which my computer defines as “the state of being calm, peaceful, and untroubled.” That sounds pretty good, does it not?

In the interest of carrying on the creativity enhancement I started in Houston, I pulled out a book I bought several years ago, The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. As I started reading and working through it, I began to realize that it is very similar to a twelve-step program. She even refers to the process of becoming an unblocked creative as “recovery”. Now, do not allow the word “artist” in the title of the book to throw you. I think most of us think of painters and sculptors and such when we hear the word “artist,” but there are many, many other types of artists in the world. Basically, we all have the opportunity and the capability to be artists…to do things in our lives creatively and artfully. Julia Cameron says that we were created by the Creator to create—creativity is God’s gift to us and using that gift to create is our gift back to God.

One of the keys of the creative life is attention. For example, one the of the greatest hurdles on the way to learning to draw is to learn to turn off what your conscious mind tells you and, instead, learn to draw exactly what your eyes perceive. Most of us go through the motions of life every day all caught up in our own minds and fail to pay attention to the reality around us. One creativity exercise I find helpful is to do some ordinary task, but to make a point of doing it with attention. I sometimes hang my laundry out instead of putting it the dryer. Believe me, this task is much more enjoyable when I am attentive to the sights of the trees and the grass, the sounds of the birds singing and the chickens clucking around me, the smell of the clean laundry and the country air, and the bending and stretching and the feel of the clothespins in my hands just like they felt in my grandmother’s hands a hundred years ago.

The more I am attentive to the details of my life, the better it all looks to me. I find myself saying prayers of gratitude throughout the day for when I am attentive, I see the abundance of good in my life and that puts me further down the road to serenity.  Attentiveness and focus on living life fully in the moment instead of constantly living in my head worrying about the future or rehashing the past helps me realize just how generous God has been to me. I hope you will give it a try, and I hope it leads you to a bit of serenity in your life, as well. 

Where Deer and Quilts Collide

This past week is where deer and quilts collide in my life. For almost all of the past ten years, I have been attending the International Quilt Festival in Houston. For all but one of those years, Quilt Festival is during the week preceding and the weekend of Opening Weekend of Deer Season. I capitalize that because it is a holiday at my house that is on par with Thanksgiving. So imagine being gone for a week leading up to Thanksgiving and returning late Wednesday night to find all of your visitors already present at your house. Men, you will not understand, but the mothers will.

Fortunately, the meal preparation for Opening Weekend is not as elaborate as it is for Thanksgiving. For many years we had a fish fry, but the past couple of years we have had a hamburger cookout. Every family or group brings some of the ingredients along with other goodies like dips and chips and desserts. Another advantage over Thanksgiving is that we have this dinner outside around the campfire. One of our hunters is a veteran firefighter with lots of experience working in the firehouse kitchen. Unfortunately, he is off elk hunting in Colorado this year, so I did not have his able assistance. But my friend Earleen Brister was here to help, thank goodness!!

Interspersed with all of this is the excitement of hunters going out and coming back in to report what they saw and/or what they shot. This year, no one on our ranch has shot anything so far, but the neighbors a couple of ranches over came by today with a really nice mature eleven-pointer and an ancient eight-pointer. My daughter and I went out Saturday afternoon and saw lots of deer, but nothing that we needed to shoot just now. I always enjoy just watching the animals and listening to the birds. My daughter and I also enjoyed the requisite nap just after settling in the blind—you know the one where you lean your head back and hang your mouth open?

Now for the Quilt Festival report—Earleen and I both took a week of classes and are back full of ideas for how to put our new information to use. After nearly forty years of wanting to learn shisha embroidery, I finally know how. I will post a picture of my first attempt on my blog, where you will be able to see how I got the hang of it as I went around the circle. Shisha embroidery is from India

My first attempt at shisha embroidery. 

and involves attaching tiny mirrors or reflective metals to cloth. For this class, we used large paillettes, which are similar to sequins. I also took classes in machine applique, a couple of machine quilting classes, one on painting shoes, and one creativity workshop.

As for the quilts on display, there is an obvious trend toward quilts that recreate photographs. The top winner was derived from a photograph of a display at the Dallas Arboretum of a boatful of Chihuly glass balls.  The artist managed to capture the illusion of translucent glass in fabric yielding a beautiful work of art. My favorite among the top winners was by Jane Sassaman, who is known for her stylized natural motifs. This year’s quilt represented plants, lizards, and insects in her back yard and was very colorful. The Houston Chronicle website has a slideshow of the highlights that I will link to on my blog, if you want to see these works of art for yourself.

So off I go, back to clean my rifle then get back to the sewing machine—my favorite time of year!!