My Creative Mojo Feels… Precarious

A bad creative day featuring 9,000 emails, Pinterest, and one tiny win.

Hello makers,

It’s a Tuesday morning. I’ve dropped the kids off at school, walked the dog and now I have a glorious six hours to work on creative goodness. Oh where to start! I could start a new quilt design, a new wall hanging, I could write a post, I could stitch something or collage something or try something totally different.

But for some bizarre reason, I open my computer and begin clearing all the emails in my “Promotions” and “Updates” folders. That then becomes weirdly addictive; 9000 emails become 8000, then 7000. Then I think I’ll stop when I get it down to 6000. Before I know it, two hours have passed and I’m down to 2000 emails left. I need to stop!

Looking at my fabric stash will help get the creative juices going, so I go to my wardrobe, where everything is now stored since I had to move my sewing space into our bedroom. But somehow, these plastic drawers filled to the brim with fabric scraps remind me how little sewing I’ve done lately. It’s all felt a bit too hard. I don’t have a cutting table set up anymore, I can’t fit my sewing machine on my desk at the same time as my computer, my quilting rulers keep falling to the floor from their precarious positions leaning against our chest of drawers, and my cottons are in little annoying containers under my desk. I’m very aware these are first world problems, but my creative mojo feels as precarious as my rulers, like it could fall to the floor at any minute as well.

I have to do something (other than more email deleting). I decide to take just one small step in the right direction.

I open Pinterest.

Open Pinterest!?! Are you crazy?!! You’ll never get anything done now, I hear you say! Agreed, it’s a very risky move, but don’t panic, I have a skerrick of a plan. I have a board called “Ideas for things”. I scroll through it and download some images of things I’ve wanted to have a go at over the years. Then I get old school with it. I open a Word document, copy the images onto a single page, and print it out.

Beautiful, inspiring, colourful! But now, I’ve run out of time and need to go and get the kids. It’s not exactly been the epic creative day I had envisioned.

The next time I have a day off my other job, I look at my print out of beautiful creative things, and take another small step: I pick one image that I want to sorta copy (Austin Kleon said it’s ok to Steal Like An Artist 😉) It’s a framed picture of an embroidered message. It’s so small I can’t even read it. But I head to my wardrobe and pick out some scrunched up white linen and my ironing board and get started.

This is what I made for myself…

I love how it turned out. I plan on framing it and putting it on the wall by bed to remind myself to be more hopeful.

Of course the next day off I had, the thing I tried to make turned out totally terrible 🤣 It was a painting that I tried to replicate using fabric scraps. It turns out I don’t like the messy look of raw fabric edges.

My scrappy attempt abandoned halfway through and the lovely dog we are long-term babysitting who keeps me company but takes up so much space!

Sometimes things turn out wonderfully, and sometimes they don’t. What’s important for me right now, is taking small steps. I’m either creatively burnt out, or maybe it’s just a side-effect of all that’s going on in the world right now, but these small steps are all I can manage.

And that’s ok.

Have you been struggling with your creativity? What’s your strategy when you hit the wall? I’d love to hear your story.

Until next time,

---