A Rose by Any Other Name Would Smell Just as Sweet
Words Matter
Have you ever heard someone describing you, and the words they were using didn’t sound quite right? They didn’t quite align with how you thought about yourself, perhaps? Many years ago I did a course in child psychology and how they use schema to build their knowledge of the world. (This article gives more information about this). We all use them constantly - when we turn on a lamp, cook a favorite meal, and in how we think about ourselves.
For the last three years, since becoming self-employed, I’ve been thinking of myself as a Quilter - with a capital Q. It’s been awful. I’m constantly longing to do some quilting, but have to spend my time doing 72 other things. I spent Martin Luther King Day gelli printing with a friend, purely for the joy of it.
“Do you get to do this kind of thing all the time?” they asked, delighted by the opportunity to play and create.
“I hardly get any time to be creative.” I replied, despondently.
But…that’s not exactly true. In the last 27 days I have:
Hand sewn
Hand quilted
Machine sewn (not much, but still…)
Knitted
Collaged with paper
Dyed with indigo
Made skincare products from scratch (lotion, soap, bath bombs, scrubs)
Made a lot of push pins (and other things) with UV Resin
Cooked/baked
Written
For someone who has no time to be creative, that’s quite a lot of creativity. I’ve also taught hemming and mending, knitting, dyeing, UV resin and making skincare products to a couple of hundred delighted students during those 27 days. Like this awesome lady below - look how happy she looks! This was 3 days ago and she’d just made those awesome earrings with purple flowers and green glitter out of UV Resin at one of my classes.
What I really meant when I said I hardly get any time to be creative, is that I hardly get any time to make quilts. Or Art. Or Art Quilts. Because in my head I am a QUILTER. That’s been my goal for the last few years - to “make it” as a Quilter with a capital Q (or an Artist with a capital A, whose art is mainly textile based). While spending those years lamenting not having time to quilt, I have been building a career as what I’ve heard described as a “multi-hyphenate creator”. No time to make? I am crazily creative everyday! Even when I’m doing computer work I’m creating websites and designing events and researching creative, new ways of doing things.
Over the last three years my focus has been on developing an audience of quilters and serving the quilting community. I have developed quilterish things like on-demand courses, and newsletters, and events and products. I’ve spent hours, days, weeks, promoting my lectures and workshops, and I have taught and lectured a lot. I even acquired Global Quilt Connection and became even more immersed in bringing quilters, guilds and teachers like myself together. However, most of my time is spent teaching and doing other things and I have neglected that majority group of creative people who I spend my time with as a potential audience because I was a Quilter, and they mainly weren’t. When you consider that I am trying to make a living out of all this, that’s a really silly mistake!
So here’s the deal. I am a quilter, but I am also much more than that. My schema in the past had QUILTER written in the middle and everything else in a spider diagram around it, and anything non-quilter was neglected. No more. From today I am CREATIVE. I embrace all the crafts, all the making, all the experimenting, making bad art and making the good stuff too. I’ll still “do” quilting and post about it, but it will be among everything else as I blossom into the fully creative person I am, rather than squeeze myself into only the “quilter” category. I hope my current newsletter subscribers will stay with me, but I also hope to bring my creativity to lots of new people and encourage them to join me in fulfilling my purpose. Which is…
I want to make, and I want to help others feel the joy of making.