Trying out "The Artists Way"

So I do consider myself to be a "blocked" creative person. Part of my reason for throwing myself wholeheartedly (as much as I can anyway) into my quilting is to recover some of the bit of my lost self when I decided to abandon my pursuit of liberal arts in favor of engineering.

Okay, to be fair, this all started when I was very, very young. I was always a creative child, and always had an entrepreneurial bent. As an only child, I had to learn to entertain myself, and inventing worlds & friends & things was one of my favorite pastimes. When I was in elementary school, I learned to sew, and I started a business selling heart-shaped pillows adorned with lace to anyone who would buy one. I remember vividly sitting with my mother stitching up the lace by hand, surrounded by dozens of pillows people had ordered. I banked $700 making those pillows - not bad for a 9 year-old.

I used to sketch (reasonably well) and paint (badly) and write (so well that one of my teachers accused me of plagiarism because no sophomore in high school writes like *that*.) I dreamed of becoming an opera singer or an award-winning songwriter. I was bursting with creative energy.

But eventually, someone entered the picture & told me to be practical, to be logical, and spare myself the pain of becoming a "starving artist" - said in such a way that it seems like some sort of communicable disease one dare not catch. My teachers said I could go either way - my math skills & my English skills ("English" being that catch-all for all things non-science) were pretty much equal, so a college major was really a toss up. Depended on what I wanted. It is a rare teenager indeed who knows what they want at that age, enough to defend it over all objections. So I decided that it would be equally cool to be famous for designing & launching the first manned space station to orbit the moon, and went into engineering. Lest you think I sold myself down the river for money, I did actively seek out Columbia University in New York, for its shared Bachelor's program with Juilliard, so I could be a famous engineer and opera singer at the same time.

Needless to say, opera didn't work out, but engineering did, and I spent much of my creative energy trying to solve minimax equations.

Fast forward to 2008... where I find myself very much eager to rediscover that child-like wonder at the world, where the world has endless possibilities, and there's no need to color in the lines. That's probably what attracted me to quilting - on one hand, there's this really traditional way where, with straight lines & precise cutting, specialized tools and logical instructions, you can create something that is beautiful in its exactness. On the other, there's a maverick way, where you toss out the patterns & the techniques and the rules and just create. I am stuck somewhere in the middle - but the middle that's closest to the traditional approach. Part of me is just begging me to give myself permission to color outside the lines.

That's where "The Artist's Way" comes in. It's a book that's really set up like a 12-step, ummm, twelve-week course that's designed to help blocked creative people become unblocked and rediscover their creativity.

So I'll take you on this journey with me, week by week, and we'll see what becomes of it.