Learning About Creativity

I used to have this love/hate relationship with quilting blogs.  I browsed until my eyeballs felt singed and then I ran away and hid for weeks.  There's this worry some of us more ordinary folks get that too much exposure to brilliance will quite possibly suck all the creativity right out of our brain matter and we'll become sheeples, clones to the industry.  We don't have enough confidence in our own creativity to waste a single drop of it you know.  One amazingly important thing about creativity though:  it doesn't produce so well in a vacuum.  Yay!  Bring on the quilt blogs!

Quilt top sewn together

I can't seem to get a good picture, blah, blah, blah...  You've heard it all before.  I do feel good about this quilt top regardless of the lousy pictures.  When I first gathered the fabric together, I had some misgivings because it's really not my normal color palette.  I'm trying to stretch myself though--even though it's hard and frustrating and yes, even nerve-wracking at times.  And although there are hundreds of beautiful quilt patterns I want to make some day, I just couldn't fit this fabric into any specific pattern I saw.  Maybe because I dug deep into my fabric totes and ignored how ugly the fabric was and tried to focus more on what the color said to me.  Yes, some of the fabrics were rejects from other quilters.  Shhhh...  Don't hurt their feelings.  They feel loved and appreciated now.*wink  You have no idea how much I had to seriously fight off the desire to rush to the quilt store and buy enough fabric from the Sweetwater line for all of my applique backgrounds though.  That just seemed soooo easy.

I couldn't resist this background fabric....

I only had one fat quarter of that particular fabric and let me tell you, I used every bit of it except for one tiny little square!!  Which meant I had to spend an entire afternoon just in the piecing together of seven applique backgrounds so that every single background had a little scrap of that fat quarter in it...  Personally, I think it gave the quilt more character and depth in the end result.  Bingo!  Another lesson learned:  Easy isn't necessarily a building block for growth in creativity.  Huh....

I added the year onto a block that was out of proportion and bugged me.

There is so much I don't understand about creativity.  It doesn't come naturally to me at all.  The thing is, I want to embrace it in my quilting and learn how to put 'my stamp' on what I produce.  How do some people make it look so incredibly simple?