Rest

Truth be told, I’m not very good at rest. I want to be, I try to be, but it’s hard. I’ve come to realize that this is because I would generally consider rest as sitting on my butt and doing nothing. Stop me if this sounds familiar though, you can’t sit and do nothing until everything is done. Everything is never done, right? Which means you never rest.

We thus need a new definition of rest.

At one time in life (when I was younger) I was a competitive athlete. Back then rest meant two things. One, just like above, rest was simply not doing the training. Two, within a workout there was active rest. So not the hard training pieces, but the easy strokes in between the hard sets. As a professional quilter I see the benefit of the latter. As a parent I realize the former is impossible. So that has led to me understanding that I need two unique forms of rest.

Active Rest

When you are working on deadlines and contracts quilting can feel like a chore, let alone actual work for some. Quite often the quilting becomes hard and full of drudgery. What once gave us joy and energy drags us down. It’s one thing to be pushing to meet a deadline like a wedding or show entry. This is why I am a big fan of Active Rest.

This is about, in many respects, mindless sewing and play. It’s the sewing that doesn’t challenge you or push your creativity. It might be creative action though. So maybe sewing snippets of fabrics in pairs, making HSTs, aligning strips, binding a quilt, stippling a quilt. The kind of sewing that allows you to catch your breath after a hard run. That’s why it is called Active Rest. You are still doing something but giving yourself the opportunity to slow down, gather thoughts, and be mindless for a little while. Because creativity begets creativity your juices will eventually start flowing again and you will be ready for the next challenge.

Escape to Rest

While running away to the beach or the mountains is many, many people’s idea of escape (myself included) we can’t do it that often. That’s why we need to find daily or weekly moments of escape. For me, this often includes long walks in the forests not far from home, a ski trip for the day, or maybe camping in the summer. It might be a hot bath, curling up with a great book, or binging a new show. My best advice when on a physical escape like this is to lean in to it. So no stitching while watching TV, no podcasts on your walk, leaving the sewing at home on a trip out of town. Let escape truly be a mental break.

Don’t want to give up your creative pursuits, even for a moment? Then switch it up! Escape to Rest also means exploring other creative interests. Trying crochet, taking a watercolour class, learning embroidery, even reading a fashion magazine. Your muscles and brain are still working, but in a different way. This alternate firing of brain cells gives your quilting brain a rest, your conscious mind an escape, but you are still pursuing creativity. It can be both relaxing and liberating.

In truth, this is what Morning Make has been for me over the last two years, on the months I am not sewing, that is. Trying weaving and embroidery and painting and poetry is an Escape to Rest for my creative brain.

The last few years have been rough for everyone. Indeed, rough is an understatement. While there were long periods of time where we were home, languishing, we weren’t still resting. Doomscrolling, cleaning, stressing, eating, teaching our kids, working on the dining room table - all of it added up to HARD WORK. Watching Tiger King at the end of the day just didn’t quite give us our energy back.

Resting is not easy.. I don’t want to be roped in to the mess of toxic positivity either when I say rest is important. Rest is a choice. It’s taken me a long, long time to see that and thus make it priority. I thought not having to drive my kids all evening was going to be the rest I needed. Nope, not even close. I puttered and wandered and zoned out but I did not rest. Since choosing to make rest an important part of my life I can feel myself catch my breath a little quicker, like I am getting in shape. The more I rest the better I feel when I am doing the hard stuff.

Full confession: I just spent the weekend in the mountains with my husband, just my husband. I brought crafty things to do and read but, in the end, read a thriller, took 5 baths in 48 hours, ate room service, and walked in a snowy forest. Now that’s an Escape to Rest! Then I came home ready to sew!

October Morning Make 2021

Went back to my childhood here. There were many an evening I spent in my room with a stack of Seventeen magazines and a glue stick making collages. Generally, I was cutting out things I liked and filling the page. Maybe it was a mood board before I knew what a mood board was? In October I made a collage each day for Morning Make.

I still like my magazines and the stack from this year was falling over. Rather than ripping out the recipes or rooms I liked and recycling the rest I decided to bring the glue stick out of retirement. Each morning I did a colour wash with some watercolours then while it dried I found my images.

Some days I had a clear idea and set out to find images that worked. Other days I waited for an image to strike me. Everything was made up each day, no preplanning. Frankly, some days worked better than others. I don’t define success as a beautiful image, rather, it is about the time spent. That being said, I wasn’t always happy with what I produced.

I was game for trying new things within the month, playing with text and images, just text, just images, and always with composition. Indeed, this was an excellent month for exploring composition. As a quilter that is always a useful exercise. It also forced me to reckon with negative space. So while I didn’t love all the literal results, it was a good skill building month.

You’ve heard me say it before: Creativity Begets Creativity. Playing in a different medium with translatable skills can only ever be a good thing. At the end of this month I have a few new ideas I want to explore in fabric, my comfortable medium. I’m not sure they would have emerged without this exploration into collage.

April Morning Make 2021

Blackout Poetry

Take a page from a book, literally, and cross out words so that the ones left are a poem. Made famous by Austin Kleon, blackout poetry is a unique way of creating. Part destruction, part seeking, part rebuilding, all creativity. What you remove is as important as what remains.

To begin I bought myself a hefty Sharpie and perused my bookshelf for a book I was willing to destroy in the process. I chose a self help book on anxiety. Not because I don’t need it anymore (hello third wave of Covid!) but because it was small in stature. My beginner brain assumed that less words on the page would make it easier to construct the poem.

That was a false assumption.

Such a specific topic and small pages meant that each page I ripped from the book was likely to contain one very narrow topic with a lot of repetition of words. This, I think, made it challenging to not only construct a poem I felt was valid and beautiful but also one that wasn’t necessarily about what was already on the page. Some days were better than others. Here are some of my favourites.

At first I felt my heart in my throat as I ripped pages from the book. The destruction! I really do love paper books. Then I started to see the beauty in the craggy edge where the page came away from its confines. I love the back side, where the Sharpie bleeds through. I love the searching for more beyond the content of the page. Finding the poem is almost like resuscitating the words so that they aren’t lost to the ether.

Morning Make - June 2020

When I am teaching certain quilt classes I get students to draw. This is because if you can’t draw the line, you can’t sew the line. Inevitably one or a handful of people complain about their drawing skills. The self deprecation and apologies spread like wildfire. I shut it all down by showing them how I draw!

Spoiler alert: I do not draw well at all!

So for Morning Make in June I decided I would draw an object or scene in my home every morning. You can’t improve on something if you don’t do it with some regularity.

After a month of practice I’ve come to the following conclusions:

• 30 days is nowhere near enough practice to make noticeable improvements.

• Areas of improvement I would like - simpler lines AND shading. I seemed to land somewhere in between in the awkwardness showed in my drawing.

• Perspective is a failing on mine.

• My drawings were definitely sketches and not my best work.

• I definitely do not have a career as an illustrator in my future.

All that being said, I enjoyed the process. Some days I did struggle with the decision on what to draw. I also can’t say that I liked what I did most of the time. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t a worthwhile effort. I learned what I would need to improve on. I learned that I should try and pick one style and work harder on that to see more improvement. I learned that you don’t have to know how to draw in order to draw.