Forcing Creativity

When life gets in the way of being creative, sometimes you have to force it. However, this isn’t always the best thing to do.

A typical day for me goes like this: Wake up; feed the dog and cats; make coffee; blog; shower and get dressed; go to work; maybe quilt on my lunch break; come home and cook dinner; sit in front of the television and stare absentmindedly while probably also on the internet doing the same. Boring. My days off I tend to spend cleaning and doing laundry rather than anything fun… most of the time. Lately I’ve been forcing myself to do something creative on my days off by making How To videos. It does take a little bit of planning to put one of these together, something I am admittedly bad at, but I find that if I still keep the project unscripted and spontaneous I don’t lose interest halfway through. Of course, sometimes this can still backfire.

Forcing creativity is at times a double edged sword. On one end is the side that says, “Yay! I’m doing something creative! My mind is happy!” and on the other end, “I frakking hate this project and I just want to burn it.” Okay, so maybe those are a little extreme. However, I will say that when I was working on The Uninspired Quilt this is how I felt. I’m sure a big part of it was the bad memories of buying the fabric from The Most Evil Corporation in the World, but also I spent so long trying to figure out what to do with it I gave up and just started cutting it into large scale squares and triangles.

So now what? I’ve got a finished quilt I hate, or at the very least find extremely unpleasant. Well, I have options. I can sell it to recoup my costs, which was roughly $30 worth of material and cotton batting. I can donate it, but I feel like I’ve made far too many quilts that ended up getting donated in the past year for various fundraisers. Or I can make it better. Methinks that the latter might be the way to go. Perhaps I should take another good look at the quilt and figure out what I could do to improve on it. Or perhaps I should go with my gut and turn this ugly duckling into a funky Tiki Quilt since the fabrics have a Polynesian feel to them already. Now I suppose the big question I need to answer is whether or not I’ll simply go find a coordinating Tiki print to cut out and appliqué the little figures or make my own?

Spoonflower